Here's what I'm talking about. I mentioned before that Hans Sluga, in his PowerPoint slides on "Wittgenstein's World", includes "A sense of feeling guilty whatever one has done" (slide 24) in his list of key experiences discussed by Wittgenstein in his Lecture on Ethics. In his talk on "Wittgenstein as a Liberatory Thinker" (slide 34, 48 minutes in) "I am guilty whatever I do" is quoted again, although the quotation marks might only indicate that Sluga/Wittgenstein is talking about this proposition, not that Wittgenstein used these exact words. Maria Balaska also identifies a feeling of "absolute guilt" as one of the three feelings (along with wonder at the existence of the world and a feeling of absolute safety) discussed in Wittgenstein's lecture. (She discusses this on pp. 8-9 of her very good book Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment.) But I don't think Wittgenstein says or means absolute guilt or anything other than ordinary guilt. So someone is wrong, and I wonder where the mistake comes from.
There are multiple drafts of the Lecture on Ethics. The first, which is just some crossed out notes, does not, I think, mention guilt. The second, which is the first real draft, talks about "the experience of feeling guilty" and connects this with the expression "that God disaprooves of our conduct." The revised manuscript, which is what Wittgenstein probably presented to the Heretics, says: "A third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty & again this was described by the phrase that God disaprooves of our conduct." In the typescript this is cleaned up: "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." (All quotations from Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lecture on Ethics, edited by Edoardo Zamuner, et al.)
I can think of two reasons why someone might think Wittgenstein is talking about something other than the ordinary feeling of guilt here. One is that the other experiences he talks about are unusual. The first is wonder at the existence of the world, which he contrasts with ordinary wonder at the size of some dog, say. The second is feeling absolutely safe, safe no matter what happens. So one might think he must mean an unusual feeling of guilt, even if he doesn't say so explicitly.
Relatedly, he says of all these experiences that their expression is nonsense and that they seem to have an intrinsic, absolute value. This makes them sound weird or special. So, again, one might think that he cannot have ordinary guilt in mind.
But I think he does. For one thing, he talks about the feeling of guilt, not some special or absolute feeling of guilt, and, for another, he talks about God's disapproving of our conduct, and I don't think anyone believes that God disapproves of our conduct no matter what we do. The relevant distinction is not between strange, absolute feelings of guilt and normal feelings of guilt, as I see it, but between feelings of (moral) guilt and findings of (legal) guilt, as in a criminal trial.
Two more points while I'm on the subject. I've mentioned Grantchester before and said then that "When Wittgenstein talks about the right way to Grantchester in his Lecture on Ethics, presumably he just picked a destination more or less at random." I still think this is true, but I'll add that he once lived on Grantchester Road. Brian McGuinness (Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911 - 1951, p.6) says he lived there during the 1929-30 academic year, so that's probably what made him think of it. Also, for what it's worth, Wikipedia says this:
The history of The Orchard started in 1897 (the orchard itself was first planted in 1868) when a group of Cambridge students asked the landlady, Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House, if they could take their tea in the orchard rather than on the front lawn as the custom was. This practice soon became the norm, and the place grew in popularity. The next phase in the history of The Orchard began when the poet Rupert Brooke took up lodging in the house in 1909. A graduate student of great popularity in the university community at the time, Brooke soon attracted a great following at the place, among them Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – the so-called Grantchester Group, or the neo-pagans as Woolf called them. Brooke later lodged in a neighbouring house, the Old Vicarage and immortalised both houses in his poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.Secondly, I wonder how to understand the sentence "Black lives matter" in relation to Wittgenstein's lecture. Although someone might believe or say the contrary, it does seem a bit like something that one would have to either affirm or else feel guilty about not affirming. Not in some timeless, absolute sense, but here and now. Ray Monk has said that the sentence is not used to express an obvious truth, but I think there's a sense in which it is. [UPDATE: Monk is talking about "All lives matter," not "Black lives matter."] At least one way to think of it is as a reminder of an obvious truth that is too often neglected. And, although it is a truth that could be denied, it (roughly speaking) never is. Instead people counter with "All lives matter" or "My life matters" (said by a white person) or "Blue lives matter." Practically speaking (in the world as we have made it), it is an undeniable truth.
This isn't the same as being absolutely correct or right in Wittgenstein's sense though. For one thing, it is presumably possible to deny that black lives matter without feeling guilt. For another, to the extent that it is not possible to do so, this impossibility is partly social. Some people seem to feel constrained by the fact that they are not 'allowed' to express such thoughts. The shame one might feel when violating a social norm is not quite the same thing as guilt, although I think it's closely related. Guilt is more internal, more personally owned, than shame.
" I don't think anyone believes that God disapproves of our conduct no matter what we do."
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is so strange; it goes along with the Augustinian-Lutheran view of original sin (which Heidegger praises Luther for in "Being & Time"). That is very much a "in relation to God I am always in the wrong" sort of guilt (as Kiekegaard put it in one of the "Upbuilding Discourses"). Which LW plausibly would've been familiar with from his religious readings, I think.
The texts you quote do suggest "ordinary" moral guilt as being what LW is talking about, but I suspect that ordinary moral guilt is not as far from the hyper-guilt Luther talks about as you let on; "God disapproves of our conduct" is not "I feel I have violated one of God's stated rules", which is really just the ordinary legal feeling of guilt (but intensified).
Also, the Monk tweet you linked is about "All lives matter", not "Black lives matter"; he is surely right about that one -- it's like "boys will be boys", which is "not a statement of the law of identity" (as LW said of "war is war"). Also "black lives matter" is certainly not undeniable; it is just widely agreed upon, and often paid lip service when it isn't: https://twitter.com/icecube/status/1269967249915260928
Yes, Wittgenstein would have been familiar with that extreme kind of guilt. And perhaps it's what he had in mind. I just don't think it necessarily is. But I need to think about this some more.
DeleteThanks for setting me straight on Monk. I have misread that tweet repeatedly somehow.
I was also struck by your saying “I don't think anyone believes that God disapproves of our conduct no matter what we do.” – Given its cultural impact, I’m not sure it would be quite right to say that the idea of us as ‘fallen’ is “extreme,” as you say in the reply above, although I think I can see why you want to say that.
ReplyDeleteYou then say: “The relevant distinction is not between strange, absolute feelings of guilt and normal feelings of guilt, as I see it, but between feelings of (moral) guilt and findings of (legal) guilt, as in a criminal trial.” –The second distinction here between moral and legal guilt is clearer to me. But I’m not sure the first distinction is really irrelevant, as you say. At least, the distinction is interesting to think about, and I’m not sure we can rule out its relevance until we clarify it. Again, by switching to the distinction between moral and legal guilt you might be sidestepping an important question, and I am not yet convinced we should make this switch.
Not that I feel I understand this first distinction. Will you say more about it? I realize I’m asking you to say something about what you explicitly say you think is irrelevant. But you nevertheless still seem to think there is some distinction there. – Is this right? What is a ‘normal feeling of guilt’ as opposed to the other kind? Is it an emotion (as opposed to legal guilt, which is just a status I guess, and not an emotion)? Does it involve a kind of recognition about oneself, remorse? – It sounds like you mean something contained, not over-blown, something with clear limits, as opposed to absolute guilt which is out of control and is a kind of bottomless pit. – Is this right?
I’m not sure why, but for some reason, in the case of guilt, it seems to me more difficult to make the relative/absolute distinction: as if guilt, if it is not just recognition of failure (‘No biggie, I’ll try again later’), always has absolute horizons. Maybe I’m wrong. And maybe this is partly why you think this whole business is irrelevant.
Well, as I said in reply to Daniel Lindquist, I need to think about this more. I don't have an account of guilt to offer. I certainly didn't mean to imply that guilt involves some sense of "no biggie." My main point about guilt is that when Wittgenstein talks about it in the Lecture on Ethics he says "feelings of guilt" and not "feeling absolute guilt" or "feeling guilty whatever I do." Something is being added without justification here, it seems to me.
DeleteNow the question is how much is being added. Is the feeling of absolute guilt really all that different from feeling regular guilt? I don't know how to answer that. There does seem to be a difference, at least conceptually, between feeling guilt about one's specific conduct and feeling that we are fallen. If you have committed murder and believe that this is an offence against God then this is certainly not "no big deal", but it seems like a different thing from believing that "each of us is guilty before all for everyone and everything" (Balaska quoting Dostoevsky). Perhaps the right way to see things involves denying that there is a significant difference here after all, but if we are going to attribute this view to Wittgenstein I'd want to see some more justification for doing so.
A question: if I understand, you think there is some contrast in Lecture between relative and absolute guilt. – Is this right? If so, are you sure it is in the Lecture? It seems to me that in the Lecture Wittgenstein only uses the notion of guilt to demonstrate the absolute.
DeleteThis doesn’t mean that we cannot explore a possible distinction between relative and absolute guilt—possibly more than one distinction. You offered one distinction, Tommi offered another; they both seem good to me, and it is not clear to me in the Lecture W had one specific contrast in mind. In fact, I’m not at all sure he had any such contrast in mind. The word ‘guilty’ only appears in the Lecture twice, and it seems that W reserved it both time to talk of something absolute. If I’m right, the contrast in the Lecture, if there is one, is not with some sort of relative-guilt, but with something else: a mistake, or a failure of some sort, which does not seem to amount to guilt. Perhaps this is the source of the idea that for him guilt there means absolute guilt.
But again, it doesn’t mean we cannot explore a distinction or distinctions between absolute and relative guilt, or between kinds of relative guilt, or indeed between kinds of absolute guilt.
And wat I really want to ask about is connected to this last possibility. You seem to me to have in mind a contrast between absolute guilt, which you understand in religious terms (although perhaps you’ll say this is not necessary), with guilt that does not go as far as that. And it seems to me—correct me if I’m misunderstanding you—that you want to say of the second kind that it is not absolute. And what I’m not sure I fully understand is why the second kind for you is not absolute (assuming that for you it is indeed not absolute)? Again: how do you determine that some feeling of guilt is not absolute? What is the essential difference between feeling absolutely guilty and plain old feeling guilty? – What I wonder is whether this non-absolute feeling of guilt that I think you have in mind, which you take to be non-absolute at because it does not involve feeling guilty whatever I do, might nevertheless be a kind of absolute guilt? – I think Rai Gaita describes such a feeling of guilt (over killing someone), which is both absolute and do not amount to feeling guilty whatever one does.
What I wonder is whether this non-absolute feeling of guilt that I think you have in mind, which you take to be non-absolute at because it does not involve feeling guilty whatever I do, might nevertheless be a kind of absolute guilt?
DeleteI think the answer is Yes, but I need to clarify. Maria Balaska talks about absolute guilt and explains this idea with reference to Dostoevsky, who talks about being guilty for everything. That is the idea that I want to resist attributing to Wittgenstein in the Lecture on Ethics (at least without further argument).
But I don't mean to deny that he is talking about absolute guilt in some sense, because I take him to be making a series of contrasts between normal/meaningful wonder and ethical/nonsensical wonder, regular/relative safety and peculiar/absolute safety, and finally (presumably) regular guilt and ethical guilt. He does not say that there is such a thing as regular guilt, nor does he say what this is, but I read the lecture as implying a contrast between the kind of feeling of guilt that is relevant to ethics, and whose expression is nonsense, and some other kind of guilt. I also read the lecture as implying that this contrast is parallel to that between wondering at the size of an unusually big dog and wondering at the existence of the world, and between feeling relatively safe and feeling absolutely safe. Perhaps this is a mistake, but it's what I take him to be implying.
So, what might normal/regular/factual/relative guilt be? There seem to be various possibilities, but I think the most obvious/likely one is legal guilt. Perhaps there is no such thing as feeling legally guilty, or perhaps feeling guilty in this sense is just feeling whatever you feel when you have in fact been found guilty of breaking the law. This unproblematic kind of guilt is then, I take it, contrasted with the feeling of guilt that can be expressed in religious terms (but does not have to be) by saying that God disapproves of one's conduct. This is indeed (according to Wittgenstein, as I read him) a kind of absolute guilt. But it needn't be disconnected from specific things one has done.
I take the reference to God, or the connection with a certain kind of talk about God, to show that there is something weird going on here. Something infinite, unbounded or absolute. Perhaps there is a sense that one has incurred a debt that can never be paid. But it isn't (necessarily) as if one had somehow taken on all debts, or as if one would be just as guilty (or in debt) no matter what one had done.
Thanks.
DeleteYou seem to be suspicious of the Dostoevsky concept of guilt. I don’t want to defend it myself here. I’ll just note that it is a culturally important concept, and even if for this reason alone, I feel it would be worthwhile to try to better understand it.
I’m not sure why you don’t want to attribute this particular concept to Wittgenstein. But I’m also not sure why you think this matters. It seems to me that for his purposes in the Lecture, he can appeal to other absolute notions of guilt, or to leave it open which particular notion of absolute guilt he wants to appeal to. We then each, in reading the lecture, can find the concept in terms of which the argument in the Lecture makes most sense to us. – Would this make any difference to the argument?
Regarding the series of contrast you mention. I agree, of course, that there is such a series. I wonder if *in the Lecture* the relative-guilt/absolute-guilt is one of them. Again, I don’t want to deny the theoretical possibility of some relative notion of guilt (e.g. of legal guilt). I just wonder if Wittgenstein in the Lecture is alluding to any such concept. My impression is rather that in the Lecture he takes guilt to exemplify an absolute notion, and contrasts it, albeit implicitly with plain recognition of failure (which does not amount to guilt), e.g. at playing tennis, or at choosing the right way home. So I’m not sure what in the Lecture makes you want to say that he alludes to some relative-guilt/absolute-guilt contrast. Would his point not be served just as well if he only alluded to the kind of contrasts I just mentioned (i.e. between guilt and plain recognition of failure)? Why do you think he needs a notion of relative guilt in the Lecture?
By the way—and this goes beyond the contours of the discussion so far, and it’s a smallish point, and I don’t think we disagree about it, but I nevertheless think this is important: You mention a contrast between wondering at the size of an unusually big dog and wondering at the existence of the world. The first you present as a relative kind of wonder and the second as an absolute kind of wonder. – I think your presentation here can be misleading: It is not *WHAT* we wonder at that makes the wonder relative or absolute. It is in *HOW* we wonder. We can wonder at the existence of the world in the way astronomers do—i.e. as a natural phenomenon. This would be relative wonder. And we can wonder at the size of an unusually big dog in a way that doesn’t look for an explanation, but simply expresses the impression that the size of the dog gives us.
I'm not particularly suspicious of Dostoevsky's idea of guilt. I just don't think there's much reason to think that it is what Wittgenstein is talking about in the Lecture. (I agree that it might be.)
DeleteOn the second point, I think he needs a sense of relative guilt because he wants something like a metaphor whose meaning cannot be expressed non-metaphorically and that is therefore, as he sees it, nonsense. So feeling guilty, in the ethically significant sense, means something like feeling as it were and yet not literally guilty. And that seems to depend on there being such a thing as being, or feeling, guilty in a literal sense. Either that or else Wittgenstein thinks the word 'guilty' is meaningless. Perhaps that is what he thinks, but I doubt it.
On your last point, I think we agree, but can what we wonder at and how we wonder at it really be separated here? I can wonder absolutely at a very big dog, but then I'm not wondering at its size being this rather than some other that it might have been. Right?
“I just don't think there's much reason to think that it [the Dostoevsky sense of guilt] is what Wittgenstein is talking about in the Lecture.” – But then again, there is no reason to think he talks of any other sense either. And furthermore, I don’t see a reason to think that he has any specific sense of absolute guilt in mind. I’m not sure why it matters. You give the impression that you think he must have a certain sense in mind. I don’t see why.
Delete“Either that or else Wittgenstein thinks the word 'guilty' is meaningless.” – I don’t think this follows. Again, it very much seems that *in the Lecture*, guilt is for Wittgenstein a moral word (if you disagree, I’m not sure why), and he only uses it there in the moral sense, which I guess according to the view in the Lecture means that it is nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that the writer of the Lecture would not be able to recognize relative senses of ‘guilt.’ And it also doesn’t mean he needs a relative sense of guilt in the Lecture, because he can contrast—and apparently does contrast—guilt with other relative phenomena (e.g. playing tennis badly). Why must the contrast be with relative guilt?
“I can wonder absolutely at a very big dog, but then I'm not wondering at its size being this rather than some other that it might have been.” – It might not, but I don’t see why this must not be the case. There could, I guess be cases of wondering at an absence, or wondering at something *not* being how we expect it to be—like wondering at the hairlessness of certain cats. https://featuredcreature.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/beauty_exotica22.jpg Similarly, I don’t see why it should in principle be the case that one could not wonder at the fact that a certain dog is not a certain size. Again, It is not *WHAT* we wonder at that makes the wonder relative or absolute. It is in *HOW* we wonder. Maybe I’m missing your point about separating the how and the what.
I don’t see a reason to think that he has any specific sense of absolute guilt in mind
DeleteRight. If we can think of more than one that is compatible with what he says, then there is no reason to suppose he means one rather than some other. I agree.
*in the Lecture*, guilt is for Wittgenstein a moral word (if you disagree, I’m not sure why), and he only uses it there in the moral sense, which I guess according to the view in the Lecture means that it is nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that the writer of the Lecture would not be able to recognize relative senses of ‘guilt.’
OK. What I was trying to say is that the Lecture implies that the word 'guilty' as used in the Lecture is nonsense, which means either that this word is always nonsensical or else that there is one or more other ways it can be used. You seem to be saying that this idea is not in the Lecture, while I'm saying that it seems to be implied. I'm not sure that it matters which way we put it.
As for wondering and the how and the what, it seems to me that how we wonder depends on what it is about the thing we wonder at that we are wondering at. I have in mind this passage:
It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than anyone I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at
something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say “I wonder at such and such being the case‹”› has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees
it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it’s clouded. But that’s not what I mean.
I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is.
Do you disagree with any of this? I don't see how what I'm saying is different.
About the passage you quote from the Lecture, I admit that I am a bit embarrassed by it.
DeleteThe writer of the Lecture, I think, should say that someone who wondered at the size of a really big dog, and explained their wonder by saying: “look how big it is! This is extraordinary!” was speaking nonsense. The writer of the Brown Book may perhaps not say that (use the word ‘nonsense’ here), but he would say that the wonder here is different from a similar wonder that was explained in a different way: “I want to know what the causes were that made the dog as big as it is.” So “to wonder” here is ambiguous; and this view, I think, is Wittgenstein’s early and late. Wittgenstein in this passage is not so clear about this ambiguity. He does not mention (notice?) that wonder at the size of the dog can be absolute kind of wonder, and I’m not sure why.
(In defense of my reading I cannot say: “the dog example is not a moral example, so there is no question of the wonder here being absolute.” That would make ethics a subject matter, and I want to reject that.)
Wittgenstein goes on to say: “I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder.” – If there is a ‘must’ there somewhere, namely if it is like saying “If I could conceive of a dog of another size, then my wonder must be of this relative kind”, then I disagree, and I don’t think Wittgenstein should have said that. I simply don’t think this is true. I can wonder at, or be astonished by, the colors of the sky at sunset, while being perfectly able to imagine the sky having different colors. I mean here a wonder of the kind that doesn’t look for a scientific explanation, but simply involves being *impressed* with the colors.
He then says: “To say ‘I wonder at such and such being the case’ has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.” – This really does sound like language-policing. I don’t want to say it myself, and I don’t think Wittgenstein should have said it. – What would this rule be good for? I generally think that language-policing interpretations of Wittgenstein make him a lesser thinker. I would prefer a reading of this passage that did not make Wittgenstein a language-policeman. I don’t have one.
He then says: “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.” – I am uncomfortable. First, ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ does not HAVE to be nonsense. It can be given a perfectly good sense (e.g. the astronomer’s sense). Second, it can be nonsense (speaking in the Lecture-language) even if I can imagine otherwise. So it is nonsense not because of that. Rather, it is nonsense, if I didn’t give the word ‘wonder’ any clear function: if I did not at least imply some particular method of answering the wonder. I want to say that there is something that is at least misleading in the way Wittgenstein formulates his view here.
I am not sure what to say. Again, I’m embarrassed. I am not sure there is a way of squaring what Wittgenstein says in this passage with my reading. My reading of the Lecture as a whole is heavily influenced by my reading of other things—earlier and later—that he wrote.
I think he found better ways later to say some of the things he says in the lecture. So it isn't very embarrassing to think he didn't express himself very well at some points in the lecture.
DeleteBut I'm still not convinced that it is possible to determine the kind of wonder one feels without bringing in, if only implicitly, what one is wondering at, or rather what it is about the thing that one is wondering at. Mere curiosity about, or surprise at, something, I take it, is not wonder in the absolute sense. If I wonder (am curious about) how the dog got to be so big, or if I did not know that dogs could be that big, then this is a (relatively) boring sort of wonder. The interesting kind is, as you say, one that involves being impressed. But impressed in a particular way--not, e.g., being impressed at the skillful management of the dog's diet. (Although perhaps one could wonder absolutely even at that.) I want to say it has to do with love, although maybe awe is more relevant. It has to do with the example of someone growing the head of a lion. We can wonder at this in the sense that we take it to be a problem to be solved (through science) or we can wonder at it in the sense that we regard it as a miracle. In the first case we might show that this is the kind of wonder we feel by taking certain steps or by asking certain kinds of questions. These would show what aspect of the phenomenon we wondered at (primarily its cause). In the case of regarding it as a miracle we would (probably) behave very differently. And this would show what it was about the phenomenon that we wondered at: perhaps nothing but the thing itself.
I wonder whether we can say this. One can wonder in the absolute sense at anything, but when one does so one will simply wonder at it, at its existence, or at its being as it is (but not in contrast to its being some other possible way). Relative wonder involves wondering at other things, asking questions like "How did that happen?" Relative wonder has a question mark while absolute wonder has an exclamation mark. One wants answers, the other does not.
Thanks. I mostly agree.
DeleteYou say you are “still not convinced that it is possible to determine the kind of wonder one feels without bringing in, if only implicitly, what one is wondering at.” – Not that I’m sure it is possible, but what exactly do you have in mind? Are you saying that there are things that are impossible to have absolute wonder about? Or things about which there cannot be relative wonder? Or are you saying that what we are wondering about, say absolutely, will change how we are wondering about it, and then we can have different kinds of absolute wonder?
You later talk about wondering at a cause, and I’m not sure you are saying it, but it sounds like you might want to say that wondering at a cause has to be a relative kind of wonder. – Are you saying it? If so, then I think I disagree. I think it is perfectly possible to wonder (absolutely) about something being the cause of something else. It is wonderful how fire burns things, or how when you just let go of something, it falls! Causes can seem miraculous. But the case can be vague. This connects to the next point.
You talk of mere curiosity. And I think this is an interesting thing to ask about. You say curiosity is still not wonder. My inclination is to say that in some cases, at least, mere curiosity is a kind of natural and primitive reaction, and as such it can be a kind of undetermined case between absolute and relative wonder. It can be like something that is budding, and has not fully blossomed, and it might blossom either into a relative or into an absolute wonder. – does this make sense? It is not an objection to anything you are saying. But it might be useful to allow that in some actual cases, we either don’t know enough to decide, or it might simply not be fully determined, if a wonder is relative or absolute. – I’m not sure we need to call such cases vague. Sometimes there might not be any need or intention to determine that.
Also, you talk of wondering of something when put in contrast to something else, and suggest that that would be a relative kind of wonder. – Again I’m not sure. The normal size dog may be a (used as a) criterion, a standard. But it may just be a sort of cause that makes someone who is used to normal-size dogs to become surprised, or be struck with awe, at the size of a certain dog. And again, I think, in actual cases, things might not be fully determined.
I think I agree with all your suggestions here, but I'll try to answer your questions.
DeleteAre you saying that there are things that are impossible to have absolute wonder about? Or things about which there cannot be relative wonder?
No. What I have in mind is, say, a case where you see someone staring at something with a funny look on their face. You ask what they are doing, and they say they are wondering at whatever the thing they are staring at is. If you wanted to know what kind of wonder they were feeling, the only thing I can think to do would be to ask them questions. And these would not be about the feeling of wonder (its intensity, duration, etc.) but about the object of their wonder. Particularly, what it is about the thing that makes them wonder at it. Now, if they say "its color" or "its size" or "what might have caused such a thing" then, as you point out, this doesn't settle the matter. But if anything would settle the matter then I think it would be asking more questions along the same lines, i.e. pursuing this inquiry farther. What is it about the color, say, that makes you wonder?
Partly I suppose you would pay attention to the tone of their answers and the look on their face, but I also think the answers themselves are relevant. If they are surprised that a bird can be blue because they have only seen brown ones before then this suggests relative wonder. But if their answer is more like "It's just so blue!" then this suggests absolute wonder. In the former case they are wondering at the bird's being this color rather than some other, while in the latter they are wondering at the bird's color itself.
Other reactions seem relevant too. Relative wonder might lead someone to Wikipedia or science, while absolute wonder might cause them to fall silent, or be extra talkative, or to try to write a poem, or to become more religious. But they might not do any of these things, and even if they did, that wouldn't prove what kind of wonder they had experienced. I think it would be a mistake to try to separate the kind of wonder from the kind of thing wondered at. If their wonder can be cured by giving them more facts, if it is wonder about that sort of thing, then it is relative. If it is wonder at the facts themselves, or at some feature of reality (the kind of wonder that only goes away with time or some kind of distraction), then it is absolute. (But I'm getting abstract and general here, which probably isn't helpful, and involves making claims that I'm not sure I would want to defend if pushed). Does that help?
I think my basic idea is that the difference between relative and absolute wonder is a difference in the kind of thing, or the kind of feature or aspect of a thing, that is wondered at. Perhaps this is it: relative wonder is wonder at the kind of thing that can be put into words, and absolute wonder is wonder at the kind of thing that cannot be put in words*. Then you might prefer to say instead that relative wonder can be expressed in words while absolute wonder cannot be. I think this is what Wittgenstein says in the lecture. But I don't want to say that because it suggests that the relative/absolute distinction is itself ineffable (because what absolute wonder is cannot be said), and because I think I want to be able to say that words such as "Wow!" (or "God be praised!", etc.) could be an expression of absolute wonder.
*Here you might ask me what kind of thing is this? That's a fair question. Maybe I should just say that absolute wonder is the kind that leads to nonsense and relative wonder is the kind that need not do so. But if you ask me where the nonsense-producing problem lies--in the thing wondered at, in the reaction to it, in the attempt to express this reaction in words--then I don't find it easy to say.
Suppose you ask that person with the puzzled look on their face what they were puzzled about, and they say “The color.” As you say, that doesn’t settle whether their wonder is absolute or relative. So suppose, as you suggest, you then ask them “What is it about the color that puzzles you?” – Is this now a question about the WHAT or about the HOW? – It seems to me ambiguous on this point; it might be either. But suppose that the person takes it to be a question about the WHAT; suppose they reply: “It is a strange hue, don’t you think?” – Will that finally tell you what kind of wonder it is? – I think not. If, however, they take your question as one about the HOW, and answer “Oh, I’m just amazed by the color. I find it strangely absorbing,” then I think that clarifies that their wonder is of the absolute variety. Or alternatively, if they tell you: “I’ve been manufacturing colors for 30 years now, and I never could get this precise hue. I wonder how they managed that”—this, again, will tell you that their wonder is of the relative sort; and it will do that precisely because they answered the HOW question, not the WHAT. And I agree that the tone of the answer is also important, but it seems to me that it is important precisely because it gives an indication about the HOW, not the WHAT.
DeleteTrue, the WHAT can give us a clue sometimes. There are things that would be unusual to wonder at—either relatively or absolutely. The setting sun, cats, the fact that babies are usually born with 5 toes on each foot—these are often things people wonder at in an absolute sort of way; the chemistry of marijuana and the working of the brain are usually things people wonder at relatively. So if someone wonders at such things, that might give us a clue. There are also personal inclinations: if someone typically has an empiricist attitude to things, then this can also give us a clue. And the fact that someone knows, or is expected to know, the technical details about something and still wonders at it, can also give us a clue: If you see an adult marveling at the fact that objects always fall when you drop them, then it is probable that their wonder is of the absolute kind. (I think something similar can be said about your example of the man who has never seen a blue bird before). But the WHAT in such cases is not the criterion, it is just a hint.
I want to note about something you say: “If their wonder can be cured by giving them more facts, if it is wonder about that sort of thing, then it is relative.” – I think this can be dangerous. I personally know people who regularly “drown” or “stifle” their absolute wonders in relative technical inquiries. Some have made a habit of it: of falling into an empiricist slumber. This is quite sad. And it is actually quite common. I’m sure you know such people too. It is common for people to start with some wonder in the absolute sense, and then switch to technical issues. They often tell themselves they got what they wanted when they get the technical explanation—which was not a reply to their original wonder, but a reply to a wonder of a different (relative) sort that just happened to be formulated in the same words as their original wonder.
Cont.
Wittgenstein somewhere complains that people sometimes tell him about philosophical questions: “I don’t know how to answer that, I am not an expert” (I don’t’ remember the exact quote). I take his complaint to be somewhat similar to what I’m complaining about here: the tendency to “reduce” issues to something technical, to a matter of expertise, the empiricist attitude. So I wouldn’t take the fact that people say that their wonder is cured as a sign that their wonder is really cured. But this gets us into questions about first person authority, so it’s a dangerous discussion. (You didn’t say “if they say their wonder can be cured” but “if their wonder can be cured.” – But I don’t think this gets us out of the danger, because what would be the criterion for their wonder having been cured?) Anyway, I just want to note (and you’ll probably agree) that absolute wonder does not necessarily need to, and sometimes shouldn’t, be cured.
DeleteAnyway, to go back to the discussion about the WHAT and the HOW: The point of insisting on the HOW over the WHAT, is to insist that to say that some wonder is an absolute wonder or a relative wonder is a grammatical classification of the wonder—grammatical, as opposed to classification by subject matter. So I think I want to disagree with what you characterize as your basic idea when you say: the difference between relative and absolute wonder is a difference in the kind of thing, or the kind of feature or aspect of a thing, that is wondered at.
I know I’ve already been going on for too long, but I want to say one more thing: I wonder if it is possible to “translate” what you are saying into the language I’m proposing. I want to do that because I think the WHAT language is misleading. It makes the discussion look like a discussion about subject matter, not grammar. But perhaps this is just a misleading appearance. Towards the end you say: “relative wonder is wonder at the kind of thing that can be put into words.” – At first, when I read this, I felt I wasn’t sure you meant what I heard you as saying. I’m still not. I wanted to reply: Can’t we have absolute wonder at things we can put into words? Can’t we say: “the baby has 5 toes” and wonder at that? – What you said, the way you said it, sounded implausible to me. But then I thought: “When someone is wondering about the 5 toes absolutely, and when someone else is wondering about the toes relatively, they are not wondering about the same thing.” And I thought that perhaps your point is somewhere in the neighborhood of that. – So I don’t know exactly how to give the details of this idea. It seems to me that it would be tricky here to say what the difference in subject matter is. (The ambiguity of the word “aspect.”) I think this would involve a discussion about identity, and about the uses of figurative language in this discussion, and possibly other things I don’t clearly see. But perhaps, if we solve these problems, it might be possible to say that your and my views coincide, and you are just putting it in a (figurative?) subject-matter language, which might be dangerous, and even misleading, but is not necessarily wrong. – I’m not sure. Does that make sense?
Yes. I think we're sort of agreeing, but putting the point differently. When you say this:
DeleteIf, however, they take your question as one about the HOW, and answer “Oh, I’m just amazed by the color. I find it strangely absorbing,” then I think that clarifies that their wonder is of the absolute variety. Or alternatively, if they tell you: “I’ve been manufacturing colors for 30 years now, and I never could get this precise hue. I wonder how they managed that”—this, again, will tell you that their wonder is of the relative sort
This is exactly what I have been calling, and continue to think of as, getting at WHAT is wondered at. In the first case what they are amazed at is just the color. In the second what they are wondering at is how the color was produced. I agree that there is potential for misunderstanding here, but I don't know how to remove it. Maybe it's best to say that the different kinds of wonder can be thought of as about the 'what' in this sense (then say what that is), but also as about the 'how' in this sense (and say what that is).
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ReplyDeleteI too think "the relevant distinction is not between strange, absolute feelings of guilt and normal feelings of guilt", but unlike you, I think it is between normal feelings of guilt for something and (otherwise) normal feelings of guilt for not anything in particular. (Like Freud defined his concept of "melancholia" as a fear or sadness about not anything in particular.) And I too think this is connected to the Augustinian-Lutheran view of original sin.
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I associate the guilt passage with Remarks of the Foundations of Mathematics, I, §118:
Imagine that people used the expression: "The law §... punishes a murderer with death". Now this could only mean: this law runs so and so. That form of expression, however, might force itself on us, because the law is an instrument when the guilty man is brought to punishment. – Now we talk of 'inexorability' in connexion with people who punish. And here it might occur to us to say: "The law is inexorable – men can let the guilty go, the law executes him". (And even: "the law always executes him".) – What is the use of such a form of expression? – In the first instance, this proposition only says that such-and-such is to be found in the law, and human beings sometimes do not go by the law. Then, however, it does give us a picture of a single inexorable judge, and many lax judges. That is why it serves to express respect for the law. Finally, the expression can also be so used that a law is called inexorable when it makes no provision for a possible act of grace, and in the opposite case it is perhaps called 'discriminating'.
Now we talk of the 'inexorability' of logic; and think of the laws of logic as inexorable, still more inexorable than the laws of nature. We now draw attention to the fact that the word "inexorable" is used in a variety of ways. [...]
This is not "I am guilty whatever I do", but more like "He's guilty whatever anyone might do about it". But there is the same sense of understanding and acknowledging that what he calls "going beyond significant language" at end of the Lecture on Ethics "might force itself on us".
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It's apparent that Wittgenstein was long familiar with the Grantchester area (although he misspells it "Granchester"). Compare David Pinsent's diaries, 21 November 1912:
Then odds and ends till 1.45 when I set out with Wittgenstein to Couper's, where we got horses and went for a ride. We rode along the Trumpington road, through Grantchester, towards Coton and back by the Barron road. The weather was very dull and dark, though it did not actually rain much. Got back 3.45.
and 4 June 1913:
Did odds and ends till 11.0 – when I went on the river with Wittgenstein in a canoe. We went up to "the Orchard" at Grantchester, where we had lunch.
In F. R. Leavis's account of his own much later canoeing trip with Wittgenstein, they "went along the cart-track that borders the wood, and emerged, by the stone bridge, on the road that runs from Grantchester to Trumpington". Further, he also describes at least one other occasion when they were walking "on the Grantchester footpath".
Thanks, Tommi. Your point number 1 certainly might be right. That is, the distinction between moral guilt (absolute, mysterious) and legal guilt (relative, factual) might not be something that Wittgenstein had in mind at all. He doesn't say it is, after all. Perhaps the relevant distinction is between guilt from the perspective of someone who really feels guilty and guilt experienced or thought of as simply an unpleasant feeling brought about by the fact that one happens to have acted against the rules one has been conditioned to follow. And perhaps there are other possible contrasts that Wittgenstein might have had in mind.
DeleteI don't know enough about original sin, but is that idea well captured by saying that God disapproves of our conduct? Maybe it is. Especially if we add "no matter what we do." Then nothing we do would ever be good enough, which is close to the idea. This just seems like a bit of a stretch as far as interpreting what Wittgenstein actually wrote goes though. I'm not saying it's irrelevant. I'm just saying that I question the move from "Wittgenstein talks about feelings of guilt, which can be expressed by saying that God disapproves of our conduct" to "he is talking about original sin." Perhaps he is, but perhaps he's not. And perhaps if one thought through the concept and experience of guilt sufficiently then one would realize that an idea at least like that of original sin is essential to it. But, again, perhaps not.
Wittgenstein confessed specific sins to various people. Raskolnikov felt guilty about the murders he committed. I don't see justification in the text for thinking that Wittgenstein is talking about anything else than feeling the kind of guilt involved in these cases. And I don't see why this must involve feeling guilt "no matter what I do" or feeling something that ought to be called "absolute guilt" rather than simply guilt.
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DeleteI agree that "Wittgenstein is here talking about original sin" is not a warranted enough claim. The point though is that the image of God as a judge who disapproves of our conduct is part of the common cultural repertoire (or whatchamacallit) in the Lutheran part of Europe. And the accounts we have from various memoirists (written before the Lecture on Ethics was published), on the importance of this image for Wittgenstein privately outside philosophy, tally to a remarkable degree. In von Wright's biographical sketch of Wittgenstein he writes: "The thought of God, he said, was above all for him the thought of the fearful judge." And in Paul Engelmann's memoir: "'When we meet again at the last judgement' was a recurrent phrase with him, which he used in many a conversation at a particularly momentous point." And in Norman Malcolm's: "I believe that Wittgenstein was prepared by his own character and experience to comprehend the idea of a judging and redeeming God."
For what it's worth, I, who had an Eastern Orthodox father but a Lutheran mother, and thus a Lutheran education (in a country a part of whose self-image it is that it is so Lutheran that even the atheists are Lutheran without knowing it), can report a very strong feeling of familiarity with the image of God in question. What "God disapproves of our conduct no matter what we do" strikes me as is precisely a Lutheran child's Chinese-whispers version of what has been attempted to be taught to them about the Lutheran doctrine of original sin, in religion class at school (such as Wittgenstein himself had taught weekly for approximately six years of his life, remember!), or at Sunday school, or both.
To your questions "is that idea well captured by saying that God disapproves of our conduct?" the answer is: not at all, but there have been enough people who have attempted to capture it by saying so, and that is what counts more here.
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About Wittgenstein not having the distinction between moral guilt and legal guilt in mind: in the Koder diaries there is a passage where Wittgenstein talks about his own mother (for the only time in his surviving manuscripts, as far as I can tell), in connection with his infamous "confession" in 1936. He reports having thought that he "could in some sense retroactively redeem her through my confession", and the interesting thing is that he moves within the same paragraph from speaking of his confession as a confession of moral guilt (Beichte) to speaking of it as a confession of legal guilt (Geständnis). Naturally both Alfred Nordmann and I point this out in the notes to our respective English and Finnish translations, as it is so odd. But you have hit upon something on which the oddness might shed some light.
Anscombe of course talks about law and ethics together, as when she talks about a law conception of ethics in "Modern Moral Philosophy." She thinks we should either give up this kind of conception or else believe in God. Otherwise there are various dangers, but a big one is that we will talk nonsense. I think, but don't want simply to assume, that Wittgenstein is thinking on somewhat similar lines here.
DeleteOne difference, though, is that Wittgenstein thinks nonsense is inevitable in religion too. Changing how we speak won't help us avoid nonsense as long as we continue to talk ethics or religion. We could, perhaps, stop talking ethics. But I think what he really wants us to stop is gassing about ethics, i.e. "talking ethics" in a particular kind of way.
So he isn't all that similar to Anscombe after all, but I think both have an interest in what they see as an uncashable simile involving law and ethics.
In "Modern Moral Philosophy" Anscombe says of Protestants that "[t]hey did not deny the existence of divine law; but their most characteristic doctrine was that it was given, not to be obeyed, but to show man's incapacity to obey it, even by grace". Now as a matter of fact, this is more or less an exact paraphrase of the Lutheran doctrine of original sin that we have been discussing! And inasmuch as it was at the forefront of Wittgenstein's mind when he wrote the guilt passage of the Lecture on Ethics, it rather pulls him away from Anscombe here too.
DeleteBut Anscombe also claims that the conception of God as a law-giver "was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation", and this is something that I just deny. Anscombe writes that to have a law conception of ethics "is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man [...] is required by divine law". But the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms means that the law need not be divine, because secular law too comes from God, only through a different mechanism.
In your Anscombe book you do talk about Anscombe being wrong about history in "Modern Moral Philosophy", but I don't think the matter is of only historical interest in the way you imply there. This brings me back to the idea I mentioned that if a society is Lutheran enough, even the atheists there are Lutherans. Part of what is meant by saying this is that because the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms is what it is, it opens up a route for atheists to having a law conception of ethics such as Anscombe claims does not exist. Although the account of the legitimacy of the secular law had religious origins, the law itself was not divine law in the first place, and because of this, secularisation does not entail unintelligibility in the way Anscombe suggested it does.
It strikes me that the key Lutheran concept of Obrigkeit, which is Luther's German for St. Paul's Greek exousia, has no direct counterpart in English, although it has one in languages such as Swedish (överhet) and Finnish (esivalta). In dictionaries, Obrigkeit tends to be translated as simply "authority", but that is completely misleading: what it means is authority that is secular in character, but whose right to command obedience comes from God having the back of its holders, or so to say. Naturally enough, for Anscombe, the author of "Mr. Truman's Degree" and connoisseur of civil disobedience, the mere suggestion that such a thing existed would have made her just explode with rejection. But that is neither here nor there.
I think she does allow for the possibility of a law conception of ethics without a divine lawgiver, but she doesn't like any of the candidates she considers. I doubt she would like a Lutheran one very much, as you say.
DeleteI know this is not exactly what you’re contemplating in connection with the Lecture on Ethics, but I’m wondering about thinking of “Black lives matter” as something like a grammatical remark, in this case, as a performative venture to establish or unify a moral/political community. Implicit in the statement is recognition of the erasure and denial of the value of black lives within the broader culture and the urgent need for assertion of that value, morally and politically. In this way, it would be also a venture to change the moral and political agreement of the larger culture.
ReplyDeleteHere, I am trying to think along with Stanley Cavell, who writes in The Claim of Reason:
To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff—on some occasion, perhaps once for all—of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff—on some occasion, perhaps once for all—those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice—in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in art—and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. (p. 27)
Yes, I think "Black lives matter" is something like a grammatical remark. Albeit one that can be denied.
DeleteCavell's way of putting it is winsome in the characteristic Cavellian way. But what came to my more cynical mind was Wittgenstein's having said, in conversation with Rush Rhees in 1942, that "even 'Recht ist das, was uns gefällt' ['What pleases us is right', an aphorism attributed to Hermann Goering] is a kind of ethics. It is helpful in silencing objections to a certain attitude." Similarly, from this very different but no less Wittgensteinian vantage point, "Black lives matter" might be seen as "a kind of ethics" because it too "is helpful in silencing objections to a certain attitude".
DeleteOn "Black lives matter" and the Lecture on Ethics, by the way: the entry on attending the lecture in Arthur MacIver's recently published diary describes "an enormous crowd meeting in 'the Conservative Clubs with a terracotta bust of Disraeli on the mantelpiece". A bust of all things, and of Disraeli of all people: he who famously wrote "All is race" in both a fiction and a non-fiction book of his...!