I have changed my mind after reading the paper more carefully.
Here I said:
According to Wittgenstein, Christensen argues, ethics is "an active
perspective or attitude"
that structures one's view of the world in a particular way
"because it concerns the world as a place in which one has
to live" (p. 798). This sounds right, but it is a very broad view.
Christensen immediately refers, in fact, to "the ubiquitous character of
this conception," referring to Cora Diamond's work. And at the foot of the
same page Christensen says that, "Our ethical attitude [...] is not
just a particular view of the world; it encompasses our entire way of relating
to and acting in particular circumstances." This sounds like a
good description of ethics, but it doesn't seem like a definition.
Something that encompasses our entire way of acting sounds like life, or at
least something too big to be part of philosophy. It sounds bigger than
philosophy. Christensen says (bottom of p. 799)
that Wittgenstein places ethics within the question of the meaning of
life, but that he does not try to answer this question;
"instead, he is simply showing us how it arises, namely in any
attempt to live a human life" (p. 800). I don't know what to think about
this. I don't know how one would show that ethics (or anything
else) arises in any attempt to live a human life. One could try to argue
that it necessarily must do so, but that doesn't sound like Wittgenstein.
Or one could try to show that it just does arise in every human life, but that
sounds too empirical (and too time-consuming to be practical). But I don't mean
this as more than an objection, a point that might usefully be clarified. I
don't mean it as an attempted refutation of Christensen's position. In fact I
think she is at least partly right (and maybe completely right). Perhaps the
truth is that Wittgenstein does not try to show how
or that ethics arises in any attempt to live a human life but that he believes
it does (and perhaps shows that he believes so in various remarks).
I think the answer lies in this passage from pp. 803-804:
But Christensen has a nice response to this kind of objection: “we use the word ‘action’ for an event that is connected to a will.” McDowell sounds unlike Wittgenstein, but he can be understood as elaborating on a simple (albeit very significant) grammatical point. So far as action implies will (which implies regarding some things as better than others), ethics will arise in any attempt to live a human life. And it’s hard to imagine trying to show that this is the case. All that can be done is to elucidate what it means.
So, eight years later, I think I’ve answered my own question. Or realized that my objection/question was ill conceived.
Isn't the point here just to say that ethics invokes the subject as a presence in the world, a part of the world, and, when subjectness is included, there are things about our actions that must be adjusted to recognize that presence?
ReplyDeleteEthical judgments, being the way in which we sort our reasons for acting in relation to others, can thus be described as the valuing we engage in on a continuum of valuing activity where subjectness (the condition of being the kind of entities we are) is recognized by us as a distinct mode of existence and thus becomes a concern, too.
Dogs and cats are aware and even intelligent in an animal way, but they are not aware of themselves as a certain sort of thing in the world. They do not place themselves in relation to others in a conceptual way, in a manner that takes others to be others and not just sources of particular stimuli. They, and other non-language using animals, live in a world of reaction, not thought. And once thinking enters the picture so, too, does valuing, and when thinking rises to a level that enables awareness of selfhood and what that means (its presence in the same world with everything else yet not limited to ourselves but as a kind of condition shared by other entities), ethical concerns, as a sub-class of all values, enter the picture.
Selves become aware of other selves as sharing the same kinds of features, as distinct from non-selves, that is, and so as requiring different modes of relational behaviors. Ethics rests, then, on the modes of behavior peculiar to the interplay of selves to selves.
Maybe this is all Wittgenstein had in mind by pointing out that ethics is not of the world per se but part of "my world," of the world we each make by being part of it, being immersed in what is observed but also conceived. The world is not found in observable phenomena pe se, which become, through our capacity for conceptualization, our world, but in our capacity to conceptualize anything at all. Valuing and the recognition of selfhood as a referent in our world, and thus as something subject, itself, to valuation, becomes ethical valuation just because of the capacity we have to see a world in such a diverse way.
Ethics as such grows out of this ability, which language enables, once we reach a stage that makes of our experiences a world of complicated phenomena, of referents that include both the animate and the inanimate. And it is in relation to the animate, and especially to the animate of a certain type (with capacities akin to our own) that ethics makes itself felt.
Maybe Wittgenstein saw this early on but was unable to articulate it because he was still mired in the kind of thinking that produced the Tractatus, a straitjacket in which the representing paradigm was taken to be the whole, or at least the core, of language, everything else obliged to play second fiddle?
It presumably seemed senseless to him to attempt to elucidate this (in either his early work or the later) but surely it could have been done -- and can be -- if we begin to look at ethics as just one type of valuing we do (and are compelled, by our form of life, to do), reflecting our recognition of selfhood as a referent in our world, too -- along with everything else, including rocks and trees, airplanes and games, institutions and practices and so on.
Isn't the point here just to say that ethics invokes the subject as a presence in the world, a part of the world, and, when subjectness is included, there are things about our actions that must be adjusted to recognize that presence?
ReplyDeleteSomething like that, yes.
Then that is the point of ethics as an activity we engage in and it is something we can elucidate via philosophical effort. We don't have to consign the matter to silence after all (contra the Tractatus or even Wittgenstein's later work which focused on language use as such rather than on particular applications in the realm of ethical choice).
DeleteThere is room, then, for an analysis that makes ethics, as an activity, clearer and which enables us to recognize it as a conceptually substantive enterprise after all. To those who ask 'why be good?' or 'why care about others if I don't have to?' or 'be honest if it doesn't serve my purposes?', we can offer a reason, within the game of ethics, a reason that has a sound conceptual basis we can explain. And isn't that all that philosophical inquiry into ethics aims to achieve?
To each of these sentences I want to reply that it's all more complicated than that. (E.g., what is "ethics as an activity we engage in"? Ethical behavior?, ethical reflection on behavior--actual and possible?, ethical reactions to behavior?, meta-ethics?, normative theory?, applied ethics?, anti-theory?, critical reactions to any particular bit of philosophizing about ethics?, all of the above?, etc. etc.) But precisely because it is so complicated, I can't really defend this response at all. So perhaps I should just say nothing.
DeleteUnderstood. Yes it is complicated and more complicated than my comments manage to convey. That's why we call it philosophy I guess. If it were easy we wouldn't need to explore these issues in such great depth. Or care to.
DeleteI didn't mean to suggest that what I'd said put paid to any of these questions. I am just saying that perhaps Wittgenstein's reticence on the subject (in his later years especially) merely reflected his own lack of concern with looking at this in the kind of depth that seems, to some of us at least, to be required. The earlier Tractarian Wittgenstein seems to have tried by taking a somewhat Schopenhaurian approach, looking to lodge our ethical sense in a feeling that takes us outside the world of observation statements. But he really doesn't do much more than affirm a kind of mystical silence about this, asserting a picture that really cannot be visualized and offers no help in coming to grips with how the moral aspect of our lives works.
The later Wittgenstein steers clear of the ethical in his writings (obviously not in life though), although he establishes a basis for engaging ethically in his treatment of language (making room for ethical language games along with all the others). But he doesn't seem to find much to inquire about when it comes to how we can take ourselves to hold ethical views, to act on them, etc.
But that is the essence of philosophical ethics, or so it seems to me. We wonder not only what's right or wrong to do but also what kinds of rightness or wrongness are relevant in different situations in which we find ourselves. And how can we take these claims of right and wrong to be compelling on ourselves or others and what kind of compulsion is at work? Anscombe said the moral ought makes no sense today and in that she seems to have had in mind the ought of divine authority. Wittgenstein in his Lecture on Ethics looks to an ought that has an absolute sense, that we somehow must do and yet, he asks why must I?
Isn't the whole issue in moral philosophy about the effort to explicate this "why must I" element that seem to be intrinsic in our moral claims? If moral claims lack cognitive substance, then they cannot compel us beyond their emotive force and yet that force can never serve to justify another's acts or even our own if we or they don't feel it. If our moral claims rest on feeling they can have no place in a realm of reasons -- and yet moral claims are about giving reasons.
So the moral philosopher (not the moralist which is a different type) wonders how to square these several circles. I am not suggesting simplicity here but only an area which can benefit from thoughtful analysis and that such analysis must go further than Wittgenstein did, either in the Tractatus or the Lecture and that it must do what he chose, for whatever reason, not to do in his later work, i.e., explore the ways in which the moral language game works to show how it fits in with the other things we do in our particular "form of life."
I didn't mean so much to criticize what you said--of course a comment on a blog isn't going to go into everything fully. It was more that I was trying to explain why I hadn't replied--which seems rude to me. But much the same reason why I didn't feel able to reply properly before applies again now: a proper answer would be as long as a book. It's just a huge subject.
DeleteNo problem. I understand and appreciate even that brief response. These formats aren't much good for in depth discussion, I have found.
ReplyDelete