Facts versus values

My last post talked about a distinction that Wittgenstein makes between the scientific, practical attitude and the ethical, wondering attitude. He might value the former, but he certainly values the latter. When he says that human beings have to awaken to wonder, though, it seems clear from the context that he does not mean this as a moral imperative--the point is rather that we don't start out wondering at things like birth, sickness, death, madness, catalepsy, sleep, and dreams because they are such everyday occurrences. Animals don't wonder at these things, and there is no reason to suppose that our primitive ancestors must have either. Wondering or marveling at phenomena like these requires an awakening. But having said this, it is also fairly clear that he regards such an awakening as a good thing. And science, he says, has the opposite effect. I don't think he's anti-science, though, so much as he is against a certain kind of attitude common in contemporary science (according to him). This is a debunking, demystifying, reductive attitude. Not that he supports bunk or mystification. Rather, I think, he opposes the combination of arrogance and disappointment that comes from the project of deflating the universe. The best way to do science is with wonder, not in a spirit of opposition to it. And wonder does not mean superstition or myth-making, of course.

In a way, then, the two attitudes have to be fused. Or Wittgenstein wants them to be fused. But it is less a matter of mixing the two together than of injecting the spirit of wonder into the practical work of science, of discovering facts and exploring the world. Infusing rather than fusing, then. 

He also distinguishes two kinds of language or use of language, the factual and the ethical. But the former is the only one that actually makes sense, he argues, so really we don't have two kinds of language at all. There is only the distinction between sense and nonsense. And of course he is not in favor of talking nonsense. So there is no question of fusion or infusion here. We either talk (sense) or we don't.

The suggestion I wanted to make was that the realization that ethical talk is actually nonsense might lead us to avoid it and stick to factual language, i.e. language that actually makes sense, and that, far from meaning an abandonment of ethics and everything 'higher', this might be the saving of ethics and of us. Because there would be nowhere for all those feelings (attitudes, beliefs, whatever you want to call them) to go except into our practical work and its language. The fact/value distinction takes value out of the world, so it is good to reject it. And by rejecting all talk of value we reject that distinction.

One problem with this suggestion is where to draw the line between facts and values. Anscombe suggests dropping talk of what is morally right and wrong, etc., in favor of talking about virtues such as injustice. But is "Capital punishment is unjust" a statement of fact or of value? It looks like a value judgement. Are we to stop saying things like this? And what about a claim such as "Water-boarding is not torture"? It looks like (a claim to be stating) a fact, but doesn't it contain a value component?

I think any appearance of a problem here is an illusion. Because Wittgenstein's distinction is really between sense and nonsense. The essence of what he calls the ethical is the desire to go beyond significant language. So the question to ask is always simply, "Does this make sense?" If we can say what it means then it is OK. If not, not. Forget about questions of value, explicit or implicit. Look for meaning in concrete, practical terms, i.e. not "cosmic meaning" or "higher meaning" but ordinary, everyday meaning. As long as you have that then, so far as Wittgenstein (or the person I am describing here) has a test, you have passed it. He might look like a naturalist or a realist, and in some ways he is, but he is not looking to reduce anything to anything else, and his spirit or purpose is not one of disenchantment but of a kind of perfectly honest enchantment. He wants, as it were, to get the value back into facts, back into what we acknowledge as the world.