Wittgenstein, The Self, and Ethics

Wittgenstein, the Self, and Ethics
Author(s): John C. Kelly

Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Mar., 1995), pp. 567-590
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20129720 .
Accessed: 22/05/2014 11:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Review of Metaphysics.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WITTGENSTEIN, THE SELF, AND ETHICS
JOHN C. KELLY
W hen Wittgenstein's Tractatus was published it was generally

identified first with Russell's logical atomism, and later with the logi
cal positivism of the Vienna Circle. However, Wittgenstein himself
claimed the work had an ethical purpose. In what has become a
well-known passage from a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of
Der Brenner, whose help Wittgenstein sought in trying to publish the
Tractatus, he says:
My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I
have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the im
portant one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from
the inside as itwere, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous
way of drawing those limits.1
We also have the

testimony of Paul Engelmann, who was close to
Wittgenstein when the latter was writing the Tractatus, that Witt
genstein regarded the ethical implications of his account of language

as the book's fundamental point.2 Nonetheless, Wittgenstein's very
brief and enigmatic remarks about the ethical dimension of that work
were, for quite some time, largely ignored or dismissed.
On the other hand, after Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge and
to philosophy in 1929 there is, aside from a lecture which he may or
may not have delivered, no systematic, sustained discussion of ethics
in his own writings. However, this has not prevented a number of
Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sci

ence, 1Reno, Nevada 89557-0056.
Georg Henrik von Wright, "The Origin of the Tractatus," in Witt
genstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 83.
2
Paid Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir,
trans. L. Furtmuller (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 97-111.
Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 567-90. Copyright ? 1995 by the Review of

Metaphysics

568 JOHN C. KELLY
philosophers from applying what they take to be the "later" Witt

genstein's techniques and views about language to ethical discourse.
The differential response of the philosophical community to the
"early" and the "later" Wittgenstein, as far as ethics is concerned, is
not hard to understand, given the assumption, commonplace in An
glo-American philosophy for much that ethics

of this century, has to
do with analyzing the meaning, and establishing the conditions for
the proper application, of ethical concepts and forms of judgment.
For within the Tractatus account of language there can be no ethical
propositions, as Wittgenstein himself states.3 Wittgenstein's empha

sis after 1930 on the diversity of linguistic activities and associated
forms of language seemed to many, however, to open up the possibil
ity of a positive account of ethical discourse. This was a common

view of the matter taken by those who read as a posi
the Tractatus
tivist work, and who saw its rejection of ethical propositions as fol
lowing from a rigid and overly narrow theory of meaning. Thus it
certainly seemed possible in principle to appeal to Wittgenstein's no

tions of a language-game and forms of life to create a sphere for
ethics and other values within language.
When Wittgenstein spoke of drawing the limits of the sphere of
the ethical, however, he had something rather different in mind than,
for example, G. E. Moore's endeavor to define the meaning of the
term "good," and to determine what sorts of things are good.
I think
it can be shown that Wittgenstein approached ethics in the Tractatus
with two mayor concerns: On the one hand, he wished to delineate
what it is that gives life meaning and purpose. As we know from
various biographical accounts, the question of the meaning of life
was an intensely personal and troubling one for Wittgenstein at this
time.4 On the other
hand, Wittgenstein was also concerned with the
apparently more theoretical question of how it is possible for there

to be value at all in a world of contingent facts. These two questions
3
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F.
Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974),
6.42. In references to the Tractatus I am following the usual practice of
identifying citations by Wittgenstein's own system of numbered paragraphs.
4
Wittgenstein's personal struggles at the time of the compostion of the
Tractatus are well-chronicled in the recent biographies by Brian McGuin
ness, Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig: 1889-1921 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), and Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty
of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990).

WITTGENSTEIN AND ETHICS 569
were, however, really two sides of the same issue for him, as he in
effect gave the same answer to each.5
Furthermore, there is reason to believe that Wittgenstein never
entirely abandoned the understanding of ethics to be found in the
Tractatus, despite his rejection of the metaphysics of that work,

which would go some way towards explaining why he himself never
attempted to discuss ethics in terms of his later views of language.

But, in orderto properly understand this it is necessary to look at
the philosophical context in terms of which Wittgenstein approached
the topic of ethics in that earlier work.
II
Wittgenstein attempted to delineate the sphere of the ethical
through an analysis of the common structure of language and the

world. A proposition is a picture of reality, and the reality depicted
by meaningful propositions is a realm of contingent facts. The doc
trine that "there is no compulsion making one thing happen because
another has happened" has, for Wittgenstein, important implications
for ethics.6
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world every
thing is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists?and if it did exist, itwould have no value. If there is any
value that does have value, itmust he outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is acciden
tal. What makes it non-accidental cannot he within the world, since if
it did it would itself be accidental. Itmust lie outside the world.7
In other words, it is the very contingency of the facts which

constitute the world that led Wittgenstein to see the realm of fact as
devoid of value. This implies that ethics for Wittgenstein, as for
5
The way in which very personal and theoretical philosophical issues
were systematically intertwined for Wittgenstein is illustrated by Russell's
story of the occasion when he asked Wittgenstein, who was lost in thought,
"Are you thinking about logic or about your sins?" and Wittgenstein replied,
"Both." Bertrand Russell, "Philosophers and Idiots," The Listener (February
1955):6 247.
7Tractatus, 4.021, 5.135, 6.37.
Ibid., 6.41.

570 JOHN C. KELLY
Kant,8 presupposes the existence of some sort of nonlogical neces

sity, as is suggested by the notion of moral obligation or the idea that
ethics is concerned with what ought to be the case rather than with
what simply is the case. Hence, if the facts in the world could all be
other than they are, then none exists as a matter of moral necessity.
The idea that value cannot lie within the world had two very
important negative implications for Wittgenstein's understanding of
ethics in the Tractatus. First, as Engelmann has pointed out, Witt
genstein held that everything which is most important to human life
lies beyond the reach of science.9 As Wittgenstein himself says in
the Tractatus, "even when all possible scientific questions have been
answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched."10
Wittgenstein's point is not that
empirical facts are irrelevant to our
ethical concerns, which is absurd, but that their relevance is not to
be explained by the
facts themselves. For example, the fact that a
certain medical procedure caused great suffering with few, if any,
compensating benefits for human health would be a reason to oppose

it on ethical grounds. The value we attach to alleviating suffering,
however, is not derived from the facts of medical practice; rather, it
is a value which doctors are supposed to bring to their practice and
use to assess various procedures.
On the other
hand, Wittgenstein's Kantian-like distinction be
tween facts and values is paired with a very un-Kantian understand
ing of the relevance of philosophy to ethics; and this is the second
negative consequence of his analysis of

language and the world. Ac
cording to Wittgenstein, philosophy is a critique of language in that
it is an activity whose aim is the clarification of propositions. How
ever, as there are no ethical propositions, philosophy has nothing to
8
It has oftenbeen asserted that Wittgenstein's views about ethics, and
values generally, in the Tractatus were derived from Schopenhauer; see G.
E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 2d ed. rev.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 12; and Brian Magee, The Philosophy of
Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 286-315. But it is
Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in ethics, whereby the self, rather than, say,
nature or God, is seen as the source of value, which sets the fundamental
problems in ethics for both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. Thus even
though the extent of Wittgenstein's first hand knowledge of Kant's writings
is unclear, I think it is more useful to explicate his views on ethics in terms
of their similarities with, and differences from, those of Kant.
9
Engelmann,
10
Letters, 97.
Tractatus, 6.52.

AND ETHICS
WITTGENSTEIN 571
contribute to ethics.11 Thus Wittgenstein in the Tractatus wholly

rejected, in effect, the philosophical enterprise of attempting to ana
lyze and justify ethical concepts and principles.

While Wittgenstein's views about
language and the world did un
dergo some major shifts after 1929, I believe that these two negative
conclusions continued to dominate his thinking about ethics through
out his life. That
is, Wittgenstein always seems to have believed that
neither science nor philosophy had anything to offer, except perhaps
confusion or moral corruption, to our concerns about such things as
the meaning of life or how to be a decent
being. human
What we
might the call
positive content of Wittgenstein's ac
count of ethics in the Tractatus is more obscure, largely because his
remarks are so brief and enigmatic, and he offers no concrete exam
ples. However, the Notebooks 1914-1916 from which the Tractatus

was developed, do contain longer, though still very abstract, discus
sions of ethics which help to clarify his thought on these matters.
What the Notebooks make clear is that Wittgenstein was primar
ily concerned, in his
understanding of ethics
time, at this with the
question of what gives meaning to life and the world.12 This question
is problematic for Wittgenstein because, as we have seen, what hap
pens in the world is purely contingent and thus does not manifest any
kind of moral necessity. In other words, Wittgenstein is concerned to
understand how there can be meaning and worth in the seemingly
nihilistic world of modern science where the order of nature has
been divorced from any conception of value. In this respect he is
attempting to respond to the same problem, or nexus of problems,

raised by what Nietzsche refers to as "the death of God." Moreover,
I think it is not insignificant that for Wittgenstein, at this time, "the
meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, [we can call] God."13
Like Kant, Wittgenstein locates value within a will which is not itself
a part of the empirical world; hence for Wittgenstein this will cannot
11
12Tractatus, 4.0031, 4.112, 6.42.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, ed. G. H. von Wright
and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979), 72-3. Wittgenstein makes the same point in his
introductory remarks in "A Lecture on Ethics," Philosophical Review, no.
74 (1965): 5, where he is attempting to characterize in general terms the
nature of ethics.
13
Notebooks, 73.

572 JOHN C. KELLY
be the subject of meaningful propositions. The reason that the ethi

cal will is transcendental for Wittgenstein is that the ordinary empiri
cal will is simply another fact in the world, and, as such, can be
neither good nor bad.
However, Wittgenstein's conception of the transcendental ethical
will is very different from Kant's. For Kant, freedom, or spontaneity,
is the essential attribute of the will. This shows itself in the realm
of what Kant calls practical reason in the will's legislating maxims of
conduct for itself; hence, the good will is distinguished from the bad
will by the nature of the maxim under which a person acts. Ac
cording to Wittgenstein, however, the transcendental ethical will is
incapable of effecting changes in the empirical world. Wittgenstein

is led to this view by his commitment to the doctrine that all the
facts in the world are contingent. From this it follows that "there is
no logical connexion between the will and the world."15 Were the
will capable of producing effects in the realm of facts, then those
effects would be necessitated by the will, and some facts would
therefore not be contingent, which is impossible. Thus "the world is
independent of my will."16
The ethical will, according to Wittgenstein, can alter only the
limits of the world, so that "the world of the happy man is a different
one from that of the unhappy man."17 I think Wittgenstein's point
here has to be understood in connection with his so-called solipsism.
The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of
language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits
of my world.18
Wittgenstein is not saying that there is a plurality of worlds or

worldviews corresponding to the plurality of subjects. There is a
single realm of facts, and a single

of logic through
system which
those facts can be
pictured. However, for Wittgenstein the truth
embedded in solipsism and idealism is that the common logical struc
ture of thought, language, and the world requires a subject to consti
tute and provide the principle of unity for that structure. In this
14
6.423.
15Tractatus,
Ibid., 6.374.
16
6.374.
17Ibid., 6.373,
Ibid., 6.43.
18
Ibid., 5.62.

AND ETHICS
WITTGENSTEIN 573
respect, his position is similar to Kant's doctrine of the transcenden

tal unity of apperception. For Kant, we inhabit a common world of
experience because the structure of experience is constituted by cer
tain a priori.necessary forms of intuition and categories of the under
standing. As a result, Kant's critical idealism yields a form of realism

in which objects of experience exist in a common space and time,
and function in accordance with the laws of causality. Similarly,
Wittgenstein thinks that solipsism when properly understood also co
incides with realism, for the metaphysical subject which constitutes
the common logical structure of thought, language, and the world is
not an object within the world; rather, Wittgenstein characterizes it
as an extensionless point that functions as a limit to the world.
Hence, all that exists is the common realm of facts whose boundaries
are fixed by the logical structure of language.19
Wittgenstein's position is that the existence of ethical meaning
and value is also the result of
constituting the
activity of the meta
physical subject. As he says in the Notebooks, "ethics must be a
condition of the world, like logic," so that "good and evil only enter
through the subject. And the subject is not a part of the world, but
a boundary of the world."20 The metaphysical subject can give ethical
meaning to life
through the way in which it views the world as a
whole. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that "to view the world
sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole?a limited whole,"21 and
in the Notebooks this idea is explicitly connected to both ethics and
aesthetics.
The work of art is the object seen sub specie aetemitatis; and the good
life is the world seen sub specie aetemitatis. This is the connexion
between art and ethics.22
For
example, if we look at a physical object such as Frank Lloyd
Wright's Robie House simply as a house among other houses, it is
easy to imagine altering various aspects of it without it ceasing to be
a house in which people could live. Thus the ceilings could be raised
and the overhang of the cantilevered roof reduced. If, however, this
physical object is seen as a work of art, then each of its aspects and
19Tractatus, 5.631-41.
20
Notebooks,
21
77,79.
Tractatus, 6.45.
22
Notebooks, 83.

574 JOHN C. KELLY
elements has a kind of necessity relative to

the whole, in that an
alteration in the roof line, say, would turn it into a different object,
and, in the judgment of most viewers, destroy its aesthetic worth.
Wittgenstein's point would seem to be that viewing the world as

a limited totality is analogous to viewing it as an aesthetic object, in
that contingent facts acquire a meaning, and a kind of necessity, rela
tive to the whole. As Wittgenstein says, when we see the world sub
specie aetemitatis "each thing modifies the whole logical world, the
whole of logical space, so to speak,"23 and in that respect particular
facts, as elements within a given totality, are no longer purely con
tingent.
However, the way in which the elements in an aesthetic
object,
such as a work of architecture, can be seen as necessary to the whole
is rather different from the logical necessity we find in language. For
one can look at Wright's Robie House simply as a house in which to
live, and find the low

ceilings and overhanging roofs not very func
tional; the necessity here is dependent upon our viewing the house
in a certain way. In other words, our sense of the meaningfulness of
an object, or the world, can come and go depending on our perspec
tive on it. I think this is what is behind Wittgenstein's remark in the
Tractatus that the ethical will alters only the limits of the world, so
that "it must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole;"24 for immedi
ately following this same remark in the Notebooks he adds, "As if by

accession or loss of meaning,"25 whereas in the Tractatus there sim
ply is no possibility of even thinking apart from the common logical

structure of language and the world.26
Ill
Wittgenstein did not provide any examples in either the Tracta

tus or the Notebooks of what is involved in viewing the world as an
ethically meaningful totality. However, in a lecture on the topic of

ethics which he wrote, and possibly delivered, sometime within the
first year after his return to Cambridge in 1929, he does throw some
23
83.
24Notebooks,
6.43.
25Tractatus,
Notebooks, 73.
26
Tractatus, 3.03.

For even though this lecture was written sev

light on this subject.27
eral years after the publication of the Tractatus, it still operates
within the philosophical framework of the earlier work, at least as
far as the topic of ethics is concerned. Wittgenstein continues to
insist on a sharp and absolute dichotomy between facts and values,
and to maintain that language can only express facts; furthermore, he
is still wedded to the idea that ethics involves some sort of nonlogical
necessity, and sees ethics as that which gives meaning to life.28 Fi
nally, while the metaphysical will which alters only the limits of the
world seems to have disappeared in favor of ethical subjects who
exist in the world, his understanding of ethics continues to presup
pose the idea of a transcendental ethical subject. Hence, what we in

fact have in "A Lecture on Ethics" is a more concrete discussion of
the overall conception of ethics which informs Wittgenstein's earlier
writings.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that the mystical, which in
cludes ethics, makes itself manifest,29 but he says nothing about how
this might be done, whereas in "A Lecture on Ethics" he attempts to
explicate his notion of absolute, unconditional ethical value by link
ing it to certain personal experiences.30 I think he was led to focus

on what he calls experiences of value because he wanted to empha
size that ethics, and religion as well, for that matter, had their origins
in deeply felt personal responses to life and the world, and were
not simply social or intellectual constructs.31 The experience which
Wittgenstein cites as paradigmatic for him in conveying the sense of
27
This lecture was published as "A Lecture on Ethics" (hereafter "Eth
Philosophical
ics"), 28 Review no. 74 (January 1965): 3-12.
5-7.
29 "Ethics,"
6.522.
30Tractatus,
In the lecture, Wittgenstein contrasts absolute with relative value.
The latter involves a predetermined standard, as when we say that this is a
good chair, and mean by "good" that the chair comes up to a certain stan
dard of excellence for chairs. Thus such judgments are relative to a prede
termined standard and, on Wittgenstein's view, are simply disguised state
ments of fact. As such they do not express what he regards as ethical value.
See "Ethics," 5-6.
31
This is indicated, I think, by his closing remarks in the lecture: "Eth
ics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate
meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.
What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a docu
ment of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help re
specting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it"; "Ethics," 12.

576 JOHN C. KELLY
absolute value is the experience of wonder at the existence of the

world, which, he says, "is the experience of seeing the world as a
miracle."32
Later in the lecture, Wittgenstein identified two other experi

ences which, for him, had an intrinsic, absolute value: On the one
hand, there is "the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the
state of mind in which one is inclined to say T am safe, nothing
"
can injure me whatever happens.' While, on the other hand, there
is the experience of feeling guilty.33 Significantly, Wittgenstein
thinks that all three of these experiences can be interpreted in reli
gious terms.
For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people were referring
to 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. A third experience of the same kind is that of feeling
guilty and again this was described by the phrase that God disapproves
of our conduct.34
Wittgenstein's religious interpretation of these experiences

makes it clear that what he is talking about here is what might be
called a mode of experience in which things are seen from a particu
lar perspective. Thus in discussing what is involved in seeing a fact
in the world as a miracle, he rejects the idea that science has proven
that there are no miracles and says, "The truth is that the scientific
way of
looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle."35
This, of course, implies that there are, or could be, nonscientific ways
of looking at a fact, but Wittgenstein is quick to point out that any
attempt to articulate such an experience in words can only generate
nonsense.36 As he puts it, in the concluding paragraph of the lecture:
I now see 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 Iwanted to do with them
was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant
language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men
32
"Ethics," 11. Similar sentiments are to be found in both the Tracta
tus (6.44) and the Notebooks (86) which is indicative, I believe, of their
continuity with "A Lecture on Ethics."
33
10.
34 "Ethics," 8,
Ibid., 10.
36
11.
36 Ibid.,
Ibid., 11,8.

who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against
the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage
is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.37
The significant phrase here is the one which

Wittgenstein himself,
emphasizes: "to go beyond." For in talking about ethics, or religion,
we attempt to go beyond the ordinary world of facts in two different,
though related, respects: On the one hand, ethics and religion, as

understood by Wittgenstein, involve the attempt to characterize the
world and our relationship to it as a whole. This is evident in the
assertion that God created the world and its existence is a miracle.
However, the experience of feeling safe in the hands of God or being

under God's judgment also includes the notion of the world as a
totality; for it involves seeing ourselves as creatures standing in some

sort of relationship to our creator, who is distinct from his creation.
On the other hand, the attempt to view the world as a limited totality
with a determinate ethical or religious character presupposes a sub
ject that is capable of constituting that vision. But as we have seen,

such a subject must itself be "beyond" the world of facts.
Thus the problem with talking about ethics, conceived of in
these terms, is the problem of talking about the relationship of a
transcendental subject to the world viewed as a limited whole. For
Wittgenstein this is not an epistemological problem, but one which

has to do with the conditions that must be satisfied if a proposition
is to have a determinate sense. In the Tractatus these conditions are
set by the common a priori logical structure of thought, language,
and the world. Thus any attempt to describe the general character
of the world and one's relationship to it necessarily involves speaking
from within this structure. The sort of problem this creates can be
illustrated by proposition 1.1 of the Tractatus: "The world is the to
tality of facts, not of things." This has the appearance of a factual
proposition, but, it is not; for the structure of the world is not a
"super" fact, as it were, but the a priori condition for the meaning
fulness of any factual proposition. No proposition could have sense
if the world were not a world of facts.
However, if we ask what the a priori conditions are for the

sense of propositions like 1.1, no answer is forthcoming. It was the
recognition of this difficulty which led Wittgenstein to his view that
37
"Ethics," 11-12.

578 JOHN C. KELLY
the logical structure of language and the world cannot be stated,

but only shown and his
apparently paradoxical assertion that the
propositions of the Tractatus are elucidations which one comes to
see are nonsensical.38 Similarly, it will not be possible to describe
how an ethical subject stands to the world, viewed as a totality, be
cause neither is a fact in the world.
In a word, ethics
is transcendental, as Wittgenstein stated in the
Tractatus; and it is transcendental in exactly the same way that logic

is transcendental.39 Both are transcendental not only in the sense
that they are not among the facts in the world, but also in the Kantian
sense of providing the conditions for the possibility of certain experi
ences. Logic constitutes that logical space which makes it possible
for us to picture facts to ourselves in propositions. logical Without
space there would be
facts, no as
is every
simply one
fact logical
possibility.40 In a similar way, viewing the world as a totality, as
when it is experienced as a miracle created by God, constitutes the
"ethical space" in which value and meaning can enter into life. For
without a unifying perspective on life and the world there are only
ethically neutral contingent facts.
However, as has already been noted, there is an important differ

ence between logic and ethics as understood by Wittgenstein: the
idealism, or solipsism, of the metaphysical subject which constitutes

the logical structure of the world yields a kind of realism because
each subject constitutes the same logical space. Or to put it another
way: in the case of logic there is, in effect, only one metaphysical
subject constituting a single common domain of facts. The situation

is otherwise with ethics. Wittgenstein's remark that "the world of
the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man"41
implies that there is not a single "ethical space," and hence, not a
common domain of values. Nor is it simply a matter of there being
a difference between those who do and those who do not view the
world as an ethically meaningful totality. For even among the former,
there are an apparently indefinite number of diverse ethical perspec
tives. To take one example, the view of the world as a miracle ere
^Tractatus, 6.54.
39
6.13.
40 Ibid., 6.421,
Ibid., 2.0121.
41
Ibid., 6.43.

AND ETHICS
WITTGENSTEIN 579
ated by God has generated very different and sometimes conflicting

ethical values, even within the Christian tradition.
the conception of a metaphysical subject constituting an
Hence,
"ethical space" through viewing the world as a unified totality does
not yield a form of ethical realism. Instead we have an apparently
irreducible plurality of ethical worlds corresponding to the plurality
of moral I think Wittgenstein
wills. acknowledges this in his recogni
tion in "A Lecture on Ethics" that the experience of what he refers
to as absolute value is an entirely personal matter which can vary
from person to person.42 Thus the ethical subject of the Tractatus
is analogous to one of Leibniz's windowless which views
monads the
universe from its own unique perspective without, of course, there
being any provision for a preestablished harmony between these vari

ous perspectives. For Wittgenstein's ethical self is disconnected from
the common public world not only in that it cannot produce effects
in that world, but also in that its moral perspective is essentially
private because there is no common concept constituting the ethical
apart from that of unity itself.
IV
After writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about the way

in which the structure of language is constituted altered significantly.
As early as the period of "A Lecture on Ethics," he had come to
think that it is not possible to give a single general account of factual
propositions because there are a number of different systems of such
propositions.43 And within a very short time he also recognized that

certain uses of language do not describe facts at all.44 The Tractatus
view of logic as constituting the structure of language gave way to
the idea of diverse domains of language, which Wittgenstein in the
1930s began to refer to as language-games, each with its own distinct
grammar.
42
8.
43 "Ethics,"
Rush Rhees, "Some Developments inWittgenstein's View of Ethics,"
Philosophical Review no. 74 (January 1965): 19.
44 trans. Max
Friedrich Waismann, "Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,"
Black, Philosophical Review no. 74 (January 1965): 16.

580 JOHN C. KELLY
Now I think it is clear

that in the later writings, the concept of
"grammar" takes overthe constituting function played by the concept
of "logic" in the Tractatus. In the Investigations he says "Grammar
tells what kind of object anything is," and this idea
is obviously re
lated to his view that his investigation is a grammatical one directed
towards the possibilities of phenomena.45 However, unlike the logic
of the Tractatus, the grammar of a language-game is not a priori
necessary. Our concepts could be other than they are, and we could
have very different language-games.46
As a result, the emphasis on grammar is connected with what
Wittgenstein sometimes referred to as the "anthropological method"
in philosophy.47 What this method involved was the examination of
the use of words in concrete situations by real, or imaginary, linguis
tic communities. In particular, Wittgenstein tended to focus on situa
tions where children are learning their native language through being
taught by their elders, because, on his view, the primary use of a
word is clearest in this sort of context.48 Wittgenstein concluded
from examining such situations that we learn and use our language
in conjunction with certain actions and practices: words and activi
ties are systematically intertwined, such that the former cannot be
understood apart from the latter.
One important consequence of Wittgenstein's adoption of the so
called anthropological method was that the concept of a metaphysi
cal subject, which constitutes, a priori, the logical structure of
thought, language, and the world, disappears from his writings. In
its place he introduced the idea of a linguistic community which con
45
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: The McMillan Company, 1958), Part 1, 373,
90. I am following the usual convention of referencing material from Part 1
of the Investigations by paragraph number, and material from Part 2 by
page number.
46
Part 2, 230.
47Investigations,
Rhees, "Developments," 25.
48
"One thing we always do when discussing a word is to ask how we
were taught it. Doing this on the one hand destroys a variety of misconcep
tions, on the other hand gives you a primitive language in which the word
is used. Although this language is not what you talk when you are twenty,
you get a rough approximation of what kind of language game is going to be
played"; (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics,
Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967], 1-2).

stitutes the
grammar of our assertions through common training in
shared activities. Thus the change in rhetoric from the first person
singular of the Tractatus to the first person plural of the later writ
ings marks an important metaphysical shift.
Concurrent with these changes, Wittgenstein began to focus on
what came to be called philosophical psychology. His iragor empha
sis in this area was on the way in which the self expresses itself in
various common linguistic practices. Wittgenstein attempts to con
nect so-called inner states and occurrences with specific language
games in such a way that it is the public grammar
"pain," of, say,
"fear," or "intending" which determines what counts
in pain, as being
or frightened, or having a particular intention. Hence, Wittgenstein
seems to have moved from a conception of the self as a detached
spectator to one in which the self is seen as a participant in the larger
community, such that the self is constituted, at least in part, by its

very participation in that community. Consequently, the entire pic
ture of the relationship of the self to both the natural and the human
world appeared altered, and the door seemed to be open to a new
account of ethics.
However, as I noted at the outset, Wittgenstein himself did not

apply his "anthropological method" to the topic of ethics, and in fact
was virtually silent on this subject in his philosophical writings after
"A Lecture on Ethics." I think a conversation that Wittgenstein had
with Rush Rhees in 1942 about ethics throws some light on his si
lence. This conversation
began with
Wittgenstein's "it remark that
was strange that you could find books on ethics in which there is no
mention of a genuine ethical or moral problem."49 Wittgenstein then
went on to discuss the problem, suggested by Rhees, of the man who
had concluded that he has to choose between leaving his wife or
abandoning his work in cancer research. Rhees' example is under

described, in that we are not told what the man's attitude is towards
his wife or his work,and why he thinks it necessary to choose be
tween them.However, I think Wittgenstein treats it as a genuine
ethical problem because it can be filled in, in various ways, so as to
illustrate how, in ordinary life, people can have conflicting commit
ments and ideals without there being any obvious way to resolve the
conflict. For example, the man may find his work so demanding that
49

582 JOHN C. KELLY
he cannot give his marriage the time and attention it deserves, or his
relationship with his wife may distract him from his commitments to
his research.
According to Wittgenstein,
whatever he finally does, the way things then turn out may affect his
attitude. He may say, "Well, thank God I left her: it was better all
around." Or maybe, "Thank God I stuck to her." Or he may not be
able to say "thank God" at all, but just the opposite. Iwant to say that
this is the solution of an ethical problem.
Wittgenstein then immediately adds:
Or rather; it is so with regard to the man who does not have an ethics.
If he has, say, the Christian ethics, then he may say it is absolutely
clear: he has got to stick to her come what may. And then his problem
is different. It is: how to make the best of this situation, what he
should do in order to be a decent husband in these greatly altered
circumstances, and so forth. The question 'Should I leave her or not?'
is not a problem here.50
One of the more obvious features of this example is that the

facts are not ethically neutral, even for someone who, in Witt
genstein's words, "does not have an ethics." On the one hand, being
married involves certain ethical responsibilities and obligations,
while, on the other, a career in cancer research is directed towards
the good of human health. The responsibilities and obligations of
marriage are connected with the fact that marriage is an institution

whose participants commit themselves to certain norms and goods,
such as faithfulness and mutual well-being. Thus the concept of
"marriage" would appear to be one of those ordinary concepts in

which facts and values are systematically interconnected because of
the existence of a shared practice.51
Health, on the other hand, might be called a natural good, in that

its existence as a good does not depend on the prior existence of
some specific practice or social institution in the way in which, for
example, the value of marital fidelity, as a good, depends on the prior

existence of the institution of marriage. However, the goodness of
50
23.
51Rhees, "Developments,"
Bernard Williams has referred to ethical concepts which "seem to
express a union of fact and value" as "thick ethical concepts"; Bernard Wil
liams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 129.

AND ETHICS
WITTGENSTEIN 583
health becomes apparent,

philosophically, from the perspective
which Wittgenstein began to emphasize after 1930. That is, if we
think of ourselves as simply, or primarily, metaphysical subjects who
constitute the structure of the world of facts, then the health of a
body, including our own, will appear to be just another contingent

fact towards which we can take up various ethical attitudes. To
someone to whom
life, however, is a matter of engagement with the
world, including the human world, the good of health, for himself
and others, is a given, as it is a necessary precondition for successful
participation in most human Thus Wittgenstein's

practices. "anthro
pological method" leads, when consistently applied, to a rejection of

the rigid and absolute dichotomy between facts and values found in
the Tractatus, and to a recognition of how, in a human community,
facts come to be systematically intertwined with values.
On Wittgenstein's view, however, this intertwining of facts and
values underdetermines anything that could be called a "solution" to
the ethical problem in Rhees' example. For the "solution," as he
understands it, lies in a retrospective shift in the man's attitude to
wards his situation, regardless of the choice he has made. Thus the
man may thank God stayed with his wife
that he or left her, or "he
may not be able to say 'thank God' at all, but just the opposite."52
Each of these possible responses can be a "solution" to the ethical
problem in that the conflict has been resolved, for better or worse,
in the man's own mind. For to thank God that one has made a
certain or to bitterly
decision, regret it, is to have moved beyond the
original uncertainty about what to do, and in that respect to no longer

find the situation problematic. As Wittgenstein had said years earlier
in the Tractatus: "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the
vanishing of the problem."53

I think Wittgenstein's conception of what constitutes a solution
for the man who "does not have an ethics" has to be understood in
conjunction with the fact that he never even suggests that this prob
lem arises as a result of a misunderstanding of, or confusion about,
our ordinary ethical concepts. The problem exists because the pur
suit of a good associated with one activity comes into conflict, in the
life of an individual, with the obligations of another practice so that
52
23.
Tractatus, 6.521.

584 JOHN C. KELLY
clarifying the grammar of the relevant ethical concepts will not re

solve or eliminate this problem; it will only heighten it. Because we
are talking about a conflict between the values of disparate practices,
each with its own distinct grammar, there is no common concept or
practice to which the man can appeal to solve, resolve, or dissolve

this problem. Thus we might say that, for Wittgenstein, a part of the
grammar of the concept of "solution" when applied to ethical prob

lems is that it involves a shift in attitude on
the part of the subject,
rather than the realization of some determinate end.
There are obvious affinities between the idea that the solution
to an ethical problem is a matter of a retrospective change in one's
attitude towards that problem, and the idea found in the Tractatus,
and "A Lecture on Ethics," that ethics has to do not with what one
accomplishes in the world, but with one's overall attitude to that

world. However, Wittgenstein's notion of the solution to an ethical
problem is also faithful, I think, to certain phenomena of ordinary

life. The problem confronting the man who believes he has to choose
between his marriage and his career is, in effect, the question of what
sort of life he is to live and what kind of person he is to become. For
many people this question does not have a predetermined answer, as
they discover the sort of

life they wish to live, and the kind of person
they want to become, through living. Thus for such people the ethi
cal meaning and significance of certain decisions and choices in their
lives only becomes clear to them after the fact. In these cases, con
cepts like "the right decision," "the best decision," or "a good deci
sion" can only be applied retrospectively, and different people con
fronted by the same or a similar problem may well resolve it
differently.
On the other hand, as Wittgenstein points out, there are people
who bring an overall ethical perspective to bear on situations of the
sort; described by Rhees. For them the nature of the problem will be
different because
they have already decided, as it were, what sort of
life to live and what kind of person to be. That is, from their perspec
tive, the ethical meaning and
significance of their decision is not
something that may be discovered after the fact; they already know
the nature of the choice confronting them. Thus if the man in Rhees'
example were a Christian, his problem, on Wittgenstein's understand
ing of Christianity, would be one of being a good husband after hav
ing abandoned his career in cancer research, as leaving his wife is
simply not an option.

Hence, when Wittgenstein spoke of an ethics in his conversation

with Rhees, what he appeared to have in mind was not a shared
social practice, but an individual interpretive perspective which is
brought to one's social practices. This interpretation is supported by

the other example of an ethics which he mentions in this conversa
tion. After describing the Christian's response to the problem con
fronting the man who has to choose between his wife and his career,
Wittgenstein says:
Suppose I view his problem with a different ethics?perhaps

Nietzsche's?and I say "No, it is not clear that he must stick to her; on
the . . . and so forth."54
contrary,
I would that what makes Christianity, or the views of a

suggest
Nietzsche, a kind of ethics for Wittgenstein is that each embodies
a particular stance or attitude towards life. For like Kierkegaard,
Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, he saw Christianity as primarily a matter of

inwardness and spirituality, rather than one of doctrine.55 Hence, I
believe that when Wittgenstein juxtaposes the response of a
Nietzschean with that of a Christian to the ethical problem raised in
Rhees' example, he is deliberately contrasting two rather different
personal orientations towards life.56

Itwould seem, then, that by the 1940s Wittgenstein had given up
the idea of ethics as an unutterable attitude towards life and the
world, and had come to

recognize that ethical assertions do play
some sort of role in language. This does not mean that he regarded
such assertions as entirely unproblematic. For example, in his con
versation with Rhees, Wittgenstein claimed that it does not make
sense to ask whether a particular
ethics is right or not, as it is not
clear what sort be relevant
of criteria would to answering this ques
tion.57 Rhees tells us that Wittgenstein came back to the question of
the "right ethics" in 1945, and reports that he, Wittgenstein, had the
following to say.
54
"Developments," 23.
55Rhees,
Wittgenstein's understanding of Christianity in inner spiritual terms
is exemplified in his Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter
Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 31-3.
56
Wittgenstein did read some of Nietzsche's writings, including The
Anti-Christ, during World War I, and did see them as representing a psycho
logical or spiritual alternative to Christianity, which for him at that time was
"the only sure way to happiness"; Monk, The Duty of Genius, 121.
57

586 JOHN C. KELLY
Or suppose someone says "One of the ethical systems must be the right
one?or nearer to the right one." Well, suppose I say Christian ethics
is the right one. Then I am making a judgment of value. It amounts
to adopting Christian ethics. It is not like saying that one of these
physical theories must be the right one. The way in which some reality
corresponds?or conflicts?with a physical theory has no counterpart
here.58
Wittgenstein normally chose his words with care. One does not
adopt a language-game; indeed, it is more accurate to say that one is
adopted into a linguistic practice through something like a process
of initiation. This, and the fact that members of the same linguistic
community can have differing ethics, or none at all, is further evi
dence that Wittgenstein continued to think of ethics as a personal
perspective which exists outside of the shared frameworks of our
ordinary language. What this implies is that the agreement about
ethical matters which one findsamong Christians, for example, is not
based on the necessities of a common
grammar. Rather, it would
seem to be more like an agreement in felt response, such as can be
found among those who share a sense of humor or the same taste in
music, for which words are a very inadequate mode of expression.

A measure of Wittgenstein's perplexity about these matters is
provided by some of his remarks about religious belief recorded in
his Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Reli
gious Belief. In that discussion
Wittgenstein considers
differ the
ences between the person who believes that whatever happens to
him is a divine reward or punishment, and the person who rejects
such a belief. According to Wittgenstein, these are entirely different
ways of thinking with different
pictures, such that the nonbeliever
cannot even contradict the believer; for even though the former may
understand the latter's words, he does not have the thoughts that go
with those words. Thus Wittgenstein concludes "my normal tech
nique of language leaves me. I don't know whether to say they under
stand one another or not."59 In short, the person who believes in
divine judgment sees the world
differently from the person who does
not, such that, even though they speak the same language, it is not
clear whether they share common criteria of meaning for the con
cepts with which they express their differing beliefs.
58
24.
Lectures and Conversations, 55.

The distance between the admonition in the Tractatus that we

pass over religion and other
pertaining matters
to value in silence,60
and the observation "my normal thattechnique of language leaves
me" in discussing religious differences is not very great. For each
involves a recognition of the fact that questions about religious belief
fall outside of the domain of any public realm of discourse. Thus I
think it is clear that even after the adoption of his so-called anthropo
logical method, Wittgenstein continued to regard certain forms of
expression, such as those involving religious and ethical conviction,

as inherently problematic in regard to both their truth and their
meaning.61
Like Kant, Wittgenstein seems always to have held that mutual
intelligibility, and the possibility of agreement in judgment, rests on

a shared framework
through which we constitute the structure of
thought and experience. The primary difference between the Tracta

tus and the writings after 1930, on this issue, is that Wittgenstein
came to see that there can be a plurality of constituting linguistic
structures which can
change over time, and be different for different
peoples. The corollary to this view is that there is no standard of
intelligibility and agreement apart from that which is provided by a

shared linguistic framework. Thus Wittgenstein consistently refused
to attempt to ground meaning in anything external to language, such
as nature or experience.
Seen from this perspective, the fact-value dichotomy of the
Tractatus is simply a special case of what, for Wittgenstein, is the
more fundamental distinction between propositions which have a
clear, determinate, public sense, because they fall within a shared

domain of meaning, on the one hand, and putative propositions
which lie outside such a domain, on the other. The shift from the
60
7.
61Tractatus,
In a conversation with Waismann, Wittgenstein once said: "Obviously
the essence of religion can have nothing to do with the fact that speech
occurs?or rather; if speech does occur this itself is a component of reli
gious behavior and not a theory. Therefore, nothing turns on whether the
words are true, false, or nonsensical"; Waismann, "Notes," 16.

588 JOHN C. KELLY
idea of a single constituting system of logic to multiple language

games, each with its own distinct grammar, does not create a public
space for ethics, because, by its very nature, a language-game cannot

encompass what Wittgenstein understands as ethics. Within a lan
guage-game all meaning is local, in that concepts acquire a sense
through being linked to particular shared activities and situations.

But Wittgenstein, early and late, always seems to have thought of
ethics, not as an assortment of disconnected goods, rights, and obli
gations, but as a global vision which gives meaning to life. Hence,

ethics continued to remain outside of any shared constituting frame
work. This meant that ethics could not be shown either, since show
ing, like saying, requires a common structure.
Wittgenstein's understanding of ethics is not

simply idiosyncratic
or a vestige of the "bad" metaphysics of the Tractatus.
People do
see their lives as having a unity, the most basic form of which is that
of a narrative of the journey from birth to death. And while our
understanding of the structure of this narrative typically changes as

we live our lives, it is nonetheless a narrative with a structure. Fur
thermore, ethical problems such as the one in Rhees' example lead

us naturally, and perhaps inevitably, to think about our lives as a
whole. For as I pointed out earlier, such problems raise the question
of what sort of life to lead and what kind of person to become.
Hence, I think that Wittgenstein's intuition that ethics involves the

attempt to make sense of life as a whole reflects a fundamental truth
about ourselves as ethical
beings.
If we
turn, however, to our ordinary, everyday, ethical concepts
in the attempt to give our lives a structural unity, we face a dilemma:
On the one hand, those concepts, such as "promise," "marriage,"
"courage,"or "treachery," which do have a reasonably clear and de
terminate public meaning, have this characteristic because their use
is limited to specific kinds of activities and situations. A catalog of
the various goods, norms, and ideals found in our common practices
does not in itself, however, constitute a unitary conception of life.
The problem is not that such values can sometimes conflict; for con
flict in ethical values may well be unavoidable no matter what sort
of vision of life one may have. Rather, the problem is that the public
meaning of those ethical concepts which are linked to particular
practices does not determine how their associated values are to be
integrated a particular
into individual's life. For example, there is
nothing in the concept of "marriage" which determines when, if ever,

the goods and ideals of that institution are to be sacrificed to the
values of some other practice.
On the other hand, the more abstract
and generic everyday ethi
cal concepts, such as "good,"
"right," or "moral," which typically are
appealed to in the attempt to develop an integrated ethical perspec

tive, are not linked to particular practices in such a way that the
nature of the practice itself determines how they are to be applied.
Thus the fact that the man in Rhees' example is married does not
determine whether or not it would be right for him to divorce his
wife in order to continue his career in cancer research. In other
words, something like the traditional fact-value dichotomy opens up

between what Bernard Williams has called "thick" ethical concepts,
which are embedded in local
practices, on the one hand, and higher
order global ethical concepts, on the other, when we find ourselves
confronted with what Wittgenstein refers to as an ethical problem.62
The classic Socratic approach to this state of affairs involves the
attempt to develop a unified account of the human good through a
process of dialectic, whereby the ordinary understanding of local eth

ical concepts is analyzed, criticized, modified, and sometimes re
jected altogether. However, as I noted at the outset, Wittgenstein

consistently disavowed this approach, presumably because such a
process necessarily involves moving beyond at least some of the as
pects of our shared linguistic framework, with the consequent danger

of a slide into nonsense and, perhaps, moral corruption.
Wittgenstein's own understanding of ethics as a personal per
spective which one brings to bear on one's practices opens up the
possibility of altering, or discarding, our everyday ethical values in a
way scarcely dreamed of in a Platonic dialogue. In one of his conver

sations with Rhees, for example, when the latter mentioned Goering's
remark "Recht ist das, was uns gef?llt" ("Right is that which is pleas
ing to us"), Wittgenstein replied "even that is a kind of ethics."63 For
given Wittgenstein's understanding of language ethics,andthere re
ally is no way to mediate between the personal vision of a Tolstoy,

a Nietzsche, or a Goering, and those values embedded in our common
62
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 129. One of the major
themes of Williams' work seems to be that we can dispense with what I am
referring to as global ethical concepts altogether, which I think is doubtful
if we are to have a unitary conception of the good Ufe.
63

590 JOHN C. KELLY
practices. In other words, Wittgenstein's own personal belief in the

value of a life of service and simple productive labor was just that: a
personal belief; it is not entailed by his philosophical appeal to the
ordinary and the everyday as a means of clarifying the grammar of
our linguistic practices.
Hence, I think it is clear that Wittgenstein was no more able to
integrate the ethical subject into the common public world after the
development of his later views about language than he had been in

the Tractatus and "A Lecture on Ethics." The reason is the same in
both cases. The ethical subject, as understood by Wittgenstein, is
not constituted by the shared linguistic structure, or structures,
which create the conditions for the possibility of intersubjective
agreement. In this respect, the subject through which ethics enters
the world remained transcendental for Wittgenstein.
University of Nevada, Reno


Wittgenstein, The Self, and Ethics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wittgenstein, The Self, and Ethics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wittgenstein, the Self, and Ethics

Author(s): John C. Kelly

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

W hen Wittgenstein's Tractatus was published it was generally

We also have the

genstein regarded the ethical implications of his account of language

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sci

Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 567-90. Copyright ? 1995 by the Review of

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

philosophers from applying what they take to be the "later" Witt

glo-American philosophy for much that ethics

propositions, as Wittgenstein himself states.3 Wittgenstein's empha

ity of a positive account of ethical discourse. This was a common

lowing from a rigid and overly narrow theory of meaning. Thus it

certainly seemed possible in principle to appeal to Wittgenstein's no

apparently more theoretical question of how it is possible for there

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

Furthermore, there is reason to believe that Wittgenstein never

entirely abandoned the understanding of ethics to be found in the

Tractatus, despite his rejection of the metaphysics of that work,

attempted to discuss ethics in terms of his later views of language.

Wittgenstein attempted to delineate the sphere of the ethical

through an analysis of the common structure of language and the

In other words, it is the very contingency of the facts which

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

Kant,8 presupposes the existence of some sort of nonlogical neces

compensating benefits for human health would be a reason to oppose

negative consequence of his analysis of

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

contribute to ethics.11 Thus Wittgenstein in the Tractatus wholly

lyze and justify ethical concepts and principles.

ples. However, the Notebooks 1914-1916 from which the Tractatus

attempting to respond to the same problem, or nexus of problems,

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

be the subject of meaningful propositions. The reason that the ethi

incapable of effecting changes in the empirical world. Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is not saying that there is a plurality of worlds or

single realm of facts, and a single

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

respect, his position is similar to Kant's doctrine of the transcenden

standing. As a result, Kant's critical idealism yields a form of realism

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

elements has a kind of necessity relative to

Wittgenstein's point would seem to be that viewing the world as

live, and find the low

ately following this same remark in the Notebooks he adds, "As if by

ply is no possibility of even thinking apart from the common logical

Wittgenstein did not provide any examples in either the Tracta

ethically meaningful totality. However, in a lecture on the topic of

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

For even though this lecture was written sev

necessity, and sees ethics as that which gives meaning to life.28 Fi

pose the idea of a transcendental ethical subject. Hence, what we in

explicate his notion of absolute, unconditional ethical value by link

ing it to certain personal experiences.30 I think he was led to focus

Wittgenstein cites as paradigmatic for him in conveying the sense of

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

absolute value is the experience of wonder at the existence of the

Later in the lecture, Wittgenstein identified two other experi

Wittgenstein's religious interpretation of these experiences

I now see that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical

This content downloaded from 178.117.252.199 on Thu, 22 May 2014 11:08:34 AM

The significant phrase here is the one which