My subject, as you know, is
Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has
given in his book Principia Ethica.
[He doesn't really do this
though, as we will see. Or he adopts it in the sense of taking it up, but he
doesn't simply accept Moore's definition/explanation/account of what ethics is.
Moore was associated with the Heretics and the Bloomsbury Group.]
He says: "Ethics is the
general enquiry into what is good."
[In section 2 of the first
chapter of Principia Ethica Moore writes:
many
ethical philosophers are disposed to accept as an adequate definition of
‘Ethics’ the statement that it deals with the question what is good or bad in human
conduct. They hold that its enquiries are properly confined to ‘conduct’ or to
‘practice’; they hold that the name ‘practical philosophy’ covers all the
matter with which it has to do. Now, without discussing the proper meaning of
the word (for verbal questions are properly left to the writers of dictionaries
and other persons interested in literature; philosophy, as we shall see, has no
concern with them), I may say that I intend to use ‘Ethics’ to cover more than
this—a usage, for which there is, I think, quite sufficient authority. I am
using it to cover an enquiry for which, at all events, there is no other word:
the general enquiry into what is good.
So Moore sees himself as taking
on a broader enquiry or subject than most moral philosophers.]
Now I am going to use the term
Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I
believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called
Aesthetics.
[But Wittgenstein goes broader
still.]
And to make you see as clearly
as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before
you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be
substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce
the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos
of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture
of the typical features they all had in common.
[There's quite a bit going on
here. Maximum clarity is aimed at by multiplying examples, not by focusing in
on one thing. And there is an interesting I-you distinction: Wittgenstein seems
to know what he means but he will have to work to get his audience to see what
this is. This despite the fact that he began by telling them that he was using
Moore's explanation, which sounds easy to understand.]
And as by showing to you such a
collective photo I could make you see what is the typical—say—Chinese face; so
if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will,
I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and
these are the characteristic features of Ethics.
[It would be very hard to say in
a precise way what the typical features of a Chinese face are, especially if we
want to distinguish Chinese faces from, say, Korean or Japanese faces. Indeed,
there is something inherently blurry about a composite portrait, created by
adding multiple pictures on top of one another. And we are looking, Wittgenstein
says, not for a single essential feature but for characteristic features of
multiple expressions. Presumably what they have in common cannot be put in a
single sentence, at least not by Wittgenstein. And he is the only one so far in
a position to know what he has in mind.]
Now instead of saying
"Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is
the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I
could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what
makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.
[Why could he have said any of
these things? Because they mean roughly the same to him? Or because they mean
roughly the same to us? It seems like it's the latter. In which case, why does
this need to be explained?]
I believe if you look at all
these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is
concerned with.
[But didn't the audience already
have a rough idea what ethics is? I suppose they now know more about what Wittgenstein
means by it, how he is taking the word 'ethics' in this talk.]
Now the first thing that
strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used
in two very different senses.
[It might not matter, but it's
not obvious that this would strike everyone very quickly. It is helpful that
Wittgenstein points it out.]
I will call them the trivial or
relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the
other.
[The non-ethical sense, then, can
be thought of as trivial, even though it covers all facts, including facts
about wars, famines, etc. Of course, 'trivial' is a technical term here, but it
is not a word chosen at random. There is a fact/value distinction here that we
might question.]
If for instance I say that this
is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined
purpose and the word ‘good’ here has only meaning so far as this purpose has
been previously fixed upon.
[Here 'good' is used in a factual
way, which is not ethical in Wittgenstin's sense and which depends on a
convention or abritrary definition.]
In fact the word ‘good’ in the
relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined
standard.
[I.e., this kind of use of the
word 'good' is really factual, although it is still evaluative in a simple
sense. That is, a very familar kind of evaluation involves seeing whether
something meets a certain standard. But, Wittgenstein implies, what he means by
'ethics' is not about this.]
Thus when we say that this man
is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of
difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity.
[There might be some subjectivity
in judgments of this kind, like the subjectivity involved in sporting and
artistic competitions in which judges give marks out of ten. Wittgenstein still
counts these as matters of fact.]
And similarly if I say that it
is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces
certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right
road I mean that it is the right road relative to a certain goal.
[So what has been said about
'good' also goes for 'important' and 'right'.]
Used in this way these
expressions do not present any difficult or deep problems.
[Even when judgments involve some
subjectivity, they are not therefore hopelessly subjective or impossible to
make or purely arbitrary, as some people sometimes seem to think.]
But this is not how ethics uses
them.
[Wittgenstein's idea of ethics is
not factual or naturalistic in this kind of way.]
Supposing that I could play
tennis and one of you saw me playing and said ‘Well you play pretty badly’ and
suppose I answered ‘I know, I am playing badly but I do not want to play any
better’, all the other man could say would be ‘Ah then that is all
right’.
[It's a little hard to imagine
this as a real conversation, but never mind. Certainly someone might say that
they knew they played badly but that they didn't care, and someone else might
reasonably accept this as fine. Wittgenstein played tennis badly with David
Pinsent, before giving it up. See Ray Monk's biography, pp. 76-77.]
But suppose I had told one of
you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said ‘You are behaving like a
beast’ and then I were to say ‘I know I behave badly, but then I do not want to
behave any better’.
[Something a little like
this happened with Wittgenstein. F. R. Leavis
describes the first time he met Wittgenstein as follows. (See pp. 65-66
of “Memories of Wittgenstein” in Rush Rhees (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Personal Recollections Rowman and Littlefield, 1981). A young man who
had been asked to sing something by Schubert nervously suggested that
Wittgenstein might correct his German. Wittgenstein said that he could not do
so, and left the room as soon as the young man had finished singing. On the
face of it this does not sound particularly bad, but Leavis saw it as “cold
brutality” (p. 65). He tells us that Wittgenstein’s declining to correct the
man’s German (the way he did it, that is, more than the fact that he refused,
but unfortunately Leavis reports that he cannot describe Wittgenstein’s manner)
“was essentially meant to be a routing” (p. 66) and that Leavis thought that
Wittgenstein left the room “triumphantly” (p. 66). Leavis caught up with Wittgenstein
and told him that he had behaved disgracefully. Wittgenstein, surprised,
replied that he had thought the man foolish. Leavis responded: “You may have
done, you may have done, but you had no right to treat him like that. You’ve no
right to treat anyone like that.” (p. 66) It was at this point that
Wittgenstein said they needed to get to know each other, and they parted,
Wittgenstein heading to Cambridge and Leavis going towards Grantchester. This was sometime in 1929, probably before the lecture,
which was given in mid-November that year.
Wittgenstein was very much in
favor of humanity, generosity, and kindness, but sometimes needed to be
reminded to act accordingly. Another example from Leavis ilustrates this. On
one occasion Leavis and Wittgenstein rented a canoe on a summer evening in
Cambridge. Having got out and started walking, Wittgenstein wanted to go
farther but Leavis pointed out that it was already about eleven o’clock, and
they had still to get back to the canoe and then return it. They finally
returned it “towards midnight” (p. 71). Wittgenstein paid but gave the man who
had waited for them no tip. Wittgenstein was displeased when Leavis then tipped
him for having waited two hours for them. Wittgenstein’s explanation was simply
that he “always associate[d] the man with the boathouse.” (p. 71) He had, as it
were, forgotten that, as Leavis put it to him, the man “is separable and has a
life apart from it” (p. 71).
Contrast Anne-Marie
Søndergaard Christensen “The Institutional Framework of Professional Virtue” in
David Carr (ed.) Cultivating Moral Character and Virtue in Professional
Practice, Routledge, 2018, pp. 124-134. Deliberative excellence (euboulia in
Aristotle’s Greek) “often involves the use of imagination, to explore the
variety of ways in which one’s decisions and actions might affect all concerned
and to predict the reactions and feelings that these might give rise to.” (p.
128) Wittgenstein seems to have lacked this imaginative capacity, or else
simply not to have cared about certain other people’s reactions and feelings,
perhaps especially, or even only, when he was in someone else’s company. He
seems, for instance, to have been having a good time with Leavis, which might
have distracted him from proper concern for the boatman.]
Would he then say ‘Ah, then
that is all right’?
[We might (try to) imagine
soemthing like this happening in the cases Leavis describes. Wittgenstein
explains his rude or thoughtless behavior by saying that the young man was
foolish or that he associates the boatman with the boathouse. Might Leavis then
have said "Ah, then that is all right"? Might Wittgenstein have said
this to someone else in similar circumstances?]
Certainly not; he would say
‘Well, you ought to want to behave better’.
[I think we have our answer here,
although, of course, people do say all kinds of things. Decency is not
inevitable.]
Here you have an absolute
judgement of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative
judgement.
[The relative judgment, I take
it, was that a player who does, or fails to do, certain things counts as a bad
tennis player. And whether one is good or bad at tennis doesn't really matter.
It depends on what you want. The absolute judgment, in contrast, does not
depend on what you want. It tells you what you ought to want. And it is not a
factual or objective or scientific matter what this is.]
The essence of this difference
seems to be obviously this: every judgement of relative value is a mere
statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all
the appearance of a judgement of value: instead of saying ‘This is the right
way to Granchester’ I could equally well have said ‘This is the way you
have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time’; ‘This man
is a good runner’ simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a
certain number of minutes, and so forth.
[So we have a fact/value
distinction. Stephen Mulhall points out that the name of the village is
actually Grantchester (Wittgenstein has ommitted the silent 't'). Judging by the
pictures on Wikipedia you would certainly be murdered if you went to
Grantchester, or find yourself reliving the movie Men in some way. Perhaps appropriately, it's the setting for a
popular TV detective series. Mulhall has thoughts on the significance of
Wittgenstein's choice of Grantchester in the example. I have some of my
own here.]
Now what I wish to contend is,
that although all judgements of relative value can be shown to be mere
statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgement of
absolute value.
[No 'ought' from an 'is',
although Wittgenstein said he had never read Hume. That wouldn't, of course,
stop him from coming up with simlar ideas on his own, or picking them up from
other people. And I wonder how literally we should take his claim in the first
place. It was made in response to a comment about Hume's being clever rather
than really philosophical. Perhaps Wittgenstein simply didn't feel that he knew
Hume's work well enough to comment on that. On p. 50 of Monk's biography, David
Pinsent is quoted writing that Wittgenstein "has only just started
systematic reading" in philosophy. I would think that likely candidates
for what he would have read include the suggested readings that Russell gives
in The Problems of Philosophy. These include Hume's Enquiry.
Pinsent also remarks that Wittgenstein is disgusted by the mistakes made by the
great philosophers he is reading, which perhaps explains why he didn't end up reading
more of the classics of the field.]
Let me explain this: suppose
one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of
all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states
of mind of all human beings that ever lived.
[This sounds a bit Cartesian, but
it's only part of a thought experiment or metaphor.]
And suppose this man wrote all
he knew in a big book.
[All that there is to know here
seems to be treated as a matter of bodily movements (perhaps including
motionlessness and location?) plus human mental states. And it can all be
written down. There is nothing ineffable.]
Then this book would contain
the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book
would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgement or anything that
would logically imply such a judgement.
[If you've read the work of
Elizabeth Anscombe or Philippa Foot then you might want to ask about whether
the book would record debts, acts of rudeness, or judgements such as "One
ought to pay one's debts" or "Rudeness is bad". Does "One
ought to pay one's debts" count as an ethical judgement? Perhaps it does
in one sense and not in others. If it only means that you can get in trouble if
you don't pay them then it is a relative judgement. It it means you really
ought to pay them regardless of any possible trouble, then it might be an
ethical judgement.]
It would of course contain all
relative judgements of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact
all true propositions that can be made.
[Does this include 2 + 2 = 4?
Possibly not.]
But all the facts described
would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions
stand on the same level.
[Nothing would matter unless, and
only insofar as, someone cared about it. And it would be arbitrary what people
care about. There would be no right ot wrong caring. This is pretty much Hume's
view, at least when he says that it is no more contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the world to the scratching of one's finger. We value what we
value, and all that can be said in defence of a claim that something ought to
be valued is that it is valued (cf. Mill).]
There are no propositions
which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.
[Earlier Wittgenstein
distinguished the absolute/ethical sense of certain expressions from the
relative/trivial sense, which is the factual one. Since propositions state
facts, he seems to be assuming, they never express absolute judgements of
value. In this sense they are all trivial. But this just means that they are
propositions. They are not trivial in any other sense.
Except that they are, or could
be. If we are using expressions in an absolute or ethical way, then "He
committed murder" is very important, while "He usually drank coffee
with his breakfast" is (usually) trivial. But this depends on how we
(choose to) use words. And if we use words in the ethical sense, Wittgenstein
is saying, then we are not speaking in propositions. Propositions express facts
(or falsehoods) and facts just are not judgements of absolute importance or
trivilaity.]
Now perhaps some of you will
agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet’s words: ‘Nothing is either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so!’
[Hamlet's words are ambiguous. In
the language of facts what he says is quite true. If I think I ought to play
tennis better then it is bad that I don't. If I think how I play is good
enough, then that's all right. But this is to say nothing at all about good and
bad in the absolute/ethical sense. In that sense, the absolute or ethical
sense, things are good or bad regardless of what anyone thinks.]
But this again could lead to a
misunderstanding.
[As I hope I just explained.]
What Hamlet says seems to imply
that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes
of our states of mind.
[But a state of mind is exactly
one of the things that would go in the big book, so it is a fact, not a
judgement of ethical value in Wittgenstein's sense.]
But what I mean is that a state
of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no
ethical sense good or bad.
[Quite so.]
If for instance in our
world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical
and psychological the mere description of these facts will contain nothing
which we could call an ethical proposition.
[Cf. Hume:
Take
any action allowed to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in
all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence,
which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain
passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in
the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object (A
Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.i).]
The murder will be on exactly
the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone.
[As Hume implies, we don't find
any vice or moral badness here (in Wittgenstein's sense) so long as we keep to
objective cataloguing of facts.]
Certainly the reading of this
description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read
about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of
it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no ethics.
[The book of facts might record
that the vicar was struck with a candlestick in the conservatory and everyone
was sad about it, but it will not provide any sort of meta judgement along the
lines of "And that was bad". It will, by definition of the kind of
thing it is, just say what happened.]
– And now I must say that if I
contemplate what ethics really would have to be if there were such a science,
this result seems to me quite obvious.
[Note how often Wittgenstein
starts a sentence with "Now" or, as here, "And now." This
might be just a sort of verbal tic, but it can feel as if he is always
starting, or always interrupting his own attempts to move forwards.
Note also that here he switches from telling us what ethics is, or
what he means by 'ethics' in this talk, to what ethics would have to be if
there were to be a science of ethics. Moore was Lecturer in Moral Science at
Cambridge, and he refers to ethics as a science multiple times in Principia
Ethica. Wittgenstein's audience, the Heretics, are generally pro-science
and not very pro-religion. But, presumably, they thought of themselves as being
ethical].
It seems to me obvious that
nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.
[And here Wittgenstein denies
that there can be any such thing as a science of ethics.]
That we cannot write a
scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime,
and above all other subject matters.
[Could there be such a book at
all, just not a scientific one? Could there be a book whose subject matter was
sublime, only not intrinsically so?]
I can only describe my feeling
by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on ethics which really was a
book on ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books
in the world.
[Words cannot express how words
cannot express ethical value. Or they can only do so by way of a metaphor. The
metaphor suggests the utter incompatibility of statements of fact with judgements
of ethical value.]
– Our words, used, as we use
them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning
and sense, natural meaning and sense.
[They can express facts, in other
words, but not what Wittgenstein means by 'ethics'. Which also means, of
course, that no one can give a talk on ethics either. They cannot, that is,
give a talk, the subject matter of which would be intrinsically sublime.
Perhaps they could give talk about why it is impossible to do this though.]
Ethics, if it is anything, is
supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold
a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.
['Supernatural' here seems to
mean somthing like ineffable or absolute in the sense he has been explaining.
This might be irrelevant, but a teacup is a very bourgeois thing and a teacup
full of water sounds completely dull and unappealing.]
– I said that so far as facts
and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good,
right etc.
[This clarifies, I think, what
"ethics is supernatural" means.]
And let me, before I go on,
illustrate this by a rather obvious example.
[Another metaphor and another
indication ("before I go on") that we are in some sense not getting
anywhere.]
The right road is the road
which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all
that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a
predetermined goal.
[This sounds straightforward and
true. But is it really? It's not hard to imagine a book or talk called
"The Right Road" about either religion or self-help. This is roughly
what "the Dao" means. One might reject such talk as nonsense, but it
isn't (in many contexts) obviously nonsense. And, indeed,
having just said that "it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense
in talking about the right road apart from" an arbitrarily predetermined
goal, Wittgenstein immediately raises the question of what such talk could
mean.]
Now let us see what we could
possibly mean by the expression ‘The, absolutely, right road’.
[Why are we considering this
expression, which sounds odd and hasn't been mentioned so far? It suddenly
sounds ethical or religious. It might also be worth remembering that at the
beginning of his talk, Wittgenstein said that a problem he faced was that the
audience was likely to see either where he is going but not how he is going to
get there, or how he is proceeding but not where he is going to. So he is
concerned both with "The (Right) Way" and with the right way to talk
about it.]
I think it would be the road
which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be
ashamed for not going.
[It's hard to make sense of this
idea. How could logical necessity come into such a state of
affairs? It's hard enough to imagine some kind of psychological necessity. That
is, I can imagine a world in which all human beings felt bad if they ever
committed, say, murder. So we would all have to avoid committing murder or else
feel bad. But it seems likely that there would be exceptions, people whose
brains worked differently. And if there were a real necessity here, it would
not be logical. And perhaps the bad feeling would not even count as shame. If
the people had no language, for instance, could they feel shame?]
And similarly the absolute
good, if it is a describable state of affairs would be one which everybody,
independent of his tastes and inclinations, would, necessarily, bring about or
feel guilty for not bringing about.
[This too is hard to imagine.
That is, what would an absolutely good state of affairs be? Not to mention
problems such as what if bringing about such a state of affairs required doing
something evil?]
And I want to say that such a
state of affairs is a chimera.
[This seems true. But there are
multiple issues or questions we might ask here. Wittgenstein seems to be
focusing on the inconceivability or impossibility of an either/or: either
everybody brings about the absolute good or they feel guilty for not doing so.
But I can imagine neither what the absolute good might be (could it be
everyone's being at one with God?--but that is an obscure idea to begin with,
and if it is to be a completely describable state of affairs we would have to
specify the number of people, as well as the nature of God) nor what
(logically?) necessary guilt for not bringing it about would be. Does
Wittgenstein see it this way too? And does this mean that the idea of the best
of all possible worlds is also in trouble? Or the greatest good for the
greatest number? He doesn't say.]
No state of affairs has in
itself, what I would like to call, the coercive power of an absolute judge.
[So either we give up the idea of
such power or we give up the idea of thinking about ethics in terms of bringing
about certain states of affairs?]
– Then what have all of us who,
like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as ‘absolute good’,
‘absolute value’ etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to
express?
[Instead of talking about how we
should act or how to think about ethics, Wittgenstein asks about what people
like him mean when they use certain expressions. He is seeking to understand
people, including himself, not recommend any change in language use or
behavior.]
Now whenever I try to make this
clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would
certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation and which you
would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of
pleasure.
[The point here, I take it, is
not so much to identify what the expressions in question refer to but to get
clear about the contexts in which they are used.]
What you would do then would be
to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure.
[To think about pleasure, he
suggests, we would (not should) think not about an inner feeling but about real
life situations of a certain kind.]
For, bearing this situation in
mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable.
[I take 'controllable' here to
mean tractable. We can get a grip or handle on what we are talking about if we
use an example, preferably a familiar one involving publicly accessible,
concrete objects.]
One man would perhaps choose as
his stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer day.
[Walking to Grantchester,
perhaps.]
Now in this situation I am if I
want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value.
[Wittgenstein's English slips a
bit here. Presumably the situation he is in is that of wanting a good example
to help him think, not that of experiensing the pleasure of taking a walk on a
fine summer day. But the two might be related.]
And there, in my case, it
always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me
which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the
reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and
foremost example.
[His example will be
of his experience. We are trying to understand what he means,
after all. This is all quite personal, although he thinks there are others like
him who use similar expressions, presumably in a similar way.]
(As I have said before, this is
an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more
striking)
[Other examples would,
presumably, make the same point, despite their being different and given by
different people. So the matter is not entirely personal or idiosyncraic.]
I will describe this experience
in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so
that we may have a common ground for our investigation.
[This again sounds a bit
Cartesian or Lockean (if I am remembering my early modern philosophy
correctly). It's as if ideas/memories/experiences are objects floating above
the stage of an internal theatre and that, while one person cannot share their
ideas with others, they can talk about the shared physical world in such a way
that others call up similar ideas in their own mental theatres. But
Wittgenstein isn't really getting metaphysical here. It's just an apparently
harmless way of talking.]
I believe the best way of
describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the
world.
[This seems like the kind of experience
one might have on a nice walk, although instead of referring to concrete things
such as country paths or sunshine he mentions only a certain psychological
(spiritual?) reaction. That is, instead of saying something on the model of
'Pleasure is what I feel when I take a walk on a sunny day' he says 'The
experience I am talking about is one that makes me wonder at the existence of
the world.' The experience, if we take him literally, is not the wonder or
wondering itself.
It is perhaps worth pausing to
note how far this is from ordinary moral philosophy. One might wonder at nature
and think that it is necessary that we should do much more to protect the
environment, or wonder at the nature of human beings (as Hamlet and Pico della
Mirandola have, for instance) and conclude that murder is a terrible evil. But
this is not what Wittgenstein is doing or talking about here. It is not how the
world is that is mystical but that it is. What is great, to
put it crudely, is not how the world is but simply that it exists at all, in
any form. Nothing follows from this about how one ought, or ought not, to
behave. If I am marveling at the infinite faculties of human beings then it
makes sense to think that I will not or ought not to reduce those faculties in
any particular human being. But if I marvel simply at the being of whatever
there happens to be, then, since nothing I do can reduce or increase the being
of what there happens to be, then nothing follows about what I am likely to do
or what I ought to do.
I'll try to say a bit more about
this, but I'm not sure it's necessary, and I am sure it will be at least a bit
crude. Consider these three kinds of necessity: logical, causal, and aesthetic.
What I mean by logical necessity includes both truths like "If A then B,
A, therefore B" (which has a kind of abstract purity) and truths like
"If the ball crosses the line it's a goal, the ball crossed the line,
therefore it's a goal" (which might involve various ceteris
paribus conditions). What I mean by causal necessity includes cases
that are close to the logical kind, such as "Cutting a cake causes the
cake to be cut" (the act of cutting does indeed affect the cake, but
without the effect the cause doesn't really count as having occurred), as well
as cases that don't seem a priori or analytic in this way at
all, such as "Adding chemical A to chemical B leads to a loud explosion
soon afterwards." And then by aesthetic necessity I mean cases such as
"This piece really needs to be played more slowly" or "What this
song needs is more cowbell."
A person who is moved by the
almost godlike nature of human beings is not really illogical if
they then murder someone, nor does being so moved cause one
not to commit murder (necessarily), but there does seem to be some kind
of contradiction between the kind of artistic sensitivity required to
appreciate Hamlet's words and the kind of insensitivity (seemingly) involved in murder
or any other kind of cruelty or inhumanity. Perhaps such sensitivity can be
turned on and off, or operates in some areas but not all. Still, there is
something shocking, wrong, about destroying, or just harming, a
being that one is capable of wondering at.
If what one wonders at is
existence itself then what seems wrong, or perhaps should seem
wrong, is not so much particular kinds of behavior but simply unethical
behavior itself. If I wonder at the universe then in some sense, it seems, I
should obey the universe and its demands. And I might regard the voice of
conscience as the voice of the universe, feeling that I must (as a matter of
what I am calling aesthetic necessity) do whatever it demands of me. I don't
mean:
1. I must do what is
aesthetically necessary
2. Obeying my conscience is
aesthetically necessary
3. Therefore I must obey my
conscience
Rather, I mean that one might
obey one's conscience in the way (roughly) that a tailor might say, "This
sleeve needs to be cut here. Therefore [snip]". This is a case of thinking
in terms of aesthetic necessity, but reference to aesthetic necessity is no
part of the thinking itself. If one wanted to justify such aesthetic thinking,
though, then one might refer to the wonders of well made or well designed
clothing. And if one wanted to justify obeying one's conscience (understood as
the voice of the universe when it has a demand to make) then one might refer to
the wonder that there should be a universe at all.
Wittgenstein seems to have
thought and lived in something like this way (he wrote in his wartime Notebooks
that "Conscience is the voice of God"), and something along these
lines seems to me to be advocated by the Bhagavad Gita (very roughly: don't
think too much about what is right and wrong--you are a warrior, so fight!). It
is quite different from a view such as Anscombe's, for instance, which tries to
be more rational. Anscombe rejects the idea of doing whatever one's conscience
dictates because one might have an evil conscience. Instead, if she wants to
think about, say, sexual ethics, she is likely to start from the purpose or
good of sex (as she understands it) and reason from there about what kinds of
sexual activity are good and what bad. But, at least for now, we should
probably return to what Wittgenstein says.]
And I am then inclined to use
such phrases as ‘How extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘How
extraordinary that the world should exist’.
[The concrete, tractable
associate of the experience is not objects such as sunshine or trees but certain
sentences.]
I will mention another
experience straightaway which I also know and which others of you might be
acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling
absolutely safe.
[Why introduce another example so
quickly? Perhaps to increase the chances of people in the audience relating to
what he is saying.]
I mean the state of mind in
which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever
happens’.
[It's hard to say exactly what
this state of mind is. One might think of Socrates' claim thta a good person
cannot be harmed, which would suggest ethical self-confidence or a clear
consience. Or one might think of the Capital Cities song "Safe and
Sound", which suggests being happily in love. What we know for certain is
that the state of mind in question inclines one to use words like these (i.e.,
"I am safe," etc.).]
Now let me consider these
experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to
get clear about.
[We are to consider experiences but
can only do so by way of the linguistic expressions they give rise to, and
which define them.]
And there the first thing I
have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences
is nonsense!
[But these expressions don't make
sense!]
If I say ‘I wonder at the
existence of the world’ I am misusing language.
[This is debatable, but let's see
where Wittgenstein goes with it.]
Let me explain this: 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 anything which, in the
common sense of the word, is extraordinary.
[People would be more likely to
say "Look at the size of that dog!" or (in response to "What are
you looking at?") "I'm just amazed how big that dog is!" than to
say "I wonder at the size of that dog". But I don't think this
affects the point.]
In every such case I wonder at
something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case.
[We are amazed, that is, by
things being this way rather than that. That is, there is a 'that' that we can
easily imagine or describe.]
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.
[We don't, of course, only wonder
at the size of the dog because we can conceive of a dog of a different size. My
dog is medium sized, and I don't wonder at her size just because I can imagine
a small or large sized dog. But I would not wonder at the size of even the
largest (or smallest) dog unless I was aware of some contrast between its size
and the kind of size I would have expected it to be.]
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 is a necessary, not a
sufficient, condition for intelligible surprise or wonder.]
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.
[Now we are considering amazement
at something's existence, not its size.]
But it is nonsense to say that
I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not
existing.
[Can we imagine the world's not
existing? Presumably this is not a question that invites us to try to imagine
something and find out that way whether it is possible or not. Even a void
would count as a world, in the sense Wittgensetin apparently means here. So the
world's non-existence is simply inconceivable or, we might say, logically
impossible. Whatever there is, including nothing at all (?), counts as the
world. The world = all that is the case, whatever this is.]
I could, of course, wonder at
the world around me being as it is.
[Because it could have been
different, in the sense that we can imagine its being different.]
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 is clouded.
[It is certainly possible to
wonder at the weather being so nice, but I think it is also possible to wonder
at the sky's being blue rather than, say, pink or green. Those seem to be
conceivable possibilities, even though wonder at the sky's being blue as
opposed to purple seems very different from wonder at its being blue rather
than cloudy.]
But that is not what I
mean.
[So never mind all that.]
I am wondering at the sky
being, whatever it is.
[The comma suggests that we are
talking about wonder at the very existence of the sky, rather than the sky's
happening to be this way or that.]
One might be tempted to say
that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not
blue.
["I am wondering [or amazed]
at the sky's very being, whether it is cloudy or blue" seems to mean
something like "I am wondering at the sky's being blue or not blue,"
which sounds like wondering at a tautology.]
But then it is just nonsense to
say that one is wondering at a tautology.
[Because the necessary condition
just described is not met? Or just because of course this
makes no sense? I think it's more the latter, although if someone somehow
didn't see this then we might use the necessary condition to help explain it.
That is, I don't think what is or isn't nonsense is supposed to require
anything technical, such as the identification and application of necessary or
sufficient conditions (or rules of some kind). We all know nonsense when we
see/hear it, with few exceptions.]
Now the same applies to the
other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety.
[That is, I take it, talk of
absolute safety is nonsense. It isn't tautological at all. It's just that there
is no such thing, and perhaps we can't even imagine such a thing. Although we
do seem to be able to imagine an Achilles or Superman with invulnerability. As
long as the gods don't turn against them.]
We all know what it means in
ordinary life to be safe.
[True, although again this is one
of those examples (like Augustine on time) where we feel that we know, but if
we stop and think we might feel less sure.]
I am safe in my room, when I
cannot be run over by an omnibus.
[Wittgenstein gives examples
rather than an account or definition of what safety is. And this example, at
least, seems both obvious and questionable. What if the omnibus were going very
fast and your room were on the ground floor?]
I am safe if I have had
whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again.
[This is another example of an
ordinary (although perhaps slightly odd) use of the word 'safe'. That is, I
think people might be more likely to say 'all right' or 'not worried' than
'safe', but still, if someone says "Don't go in there, you might catch
whooping cough," an intelligible reply would be "It's all right, I've
had it before so I'm safe."]
‘To be safe’ essentially means
that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me, and
therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens.
[Being pedantic, I think 'highly
unlikely' might be more accurate here than 'impossible', and we might ask
whether it is nonsense to say that I am immune
from all physical dangers no matter what happens. Is it not, perhaps, simply
false? We might also ask whether 'to be safe' has an essential meaning. I might
prefer to say that 'to be safe' has an ordinary meaning (or family of
meanings/uses) and that talk of 'absolute safety' or 'safety whatever happens'
is extraordinary or very odd. But an ordiunary way of making this point might
be to say that such talk is nonsense.]
Again this is a misuse of the
word ‘safe’ as the other example was a misuse of the word ‘existence’ or
‘wondering’.
[Says who? Well, it is an unusual
or non-standard use, I think we could agree.]
Now I want to impress on you
that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical
and religious expressions.
[Wittgenstein basically asserts
this out of the blue. He has given just a few, debatable examples, and now
makes a universal claim about both ethical and religious expressions. Perhaps
his audience would have sympathized with the idea that religious expressions
are nonsensical misuses of language. The group was called Heretics for a
reason. Would they have said the same about ethical uses of language? Some
might. They might have already been mentally prepared to agree with A. J.
Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, for instance, when it came out
(in 1936, years after Wittgenstein's lecture). But perhaps some of them would
have been shocked at the suggestion that ethics and religion are in the same
boat.]
All these expressions seem,
prima facie, to be just similes.
[They don't really. Similes are
typically thought of as using words such as 'like' or 'as', whereas these words
are absent from the sentences "I wonder at the existence of the
world" and "I am absolutely safe." But if we attempted to
explain these sentences, or others like them, we would be likely to say that
the meaning of 'wonder at' and 'safe' is similar to the meaning of these words
in more normal sentences. And the feelings referred to are like the feelings
one has when one wonders at the size of a very big dog or feels safe from
traffic when indoors.]
Thus it seems that when we are
using the word ‘right’ in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not
‘right’ in its trivial sense, it is something similar, and when we say ‘This is
a good fellow’, although the word ‘good’ here does not mean what it means in
the sentence ‘This is a good football player’ there seems to be some
similarity.
[Wittgenstein seems to confirm my
point above that the 'nonsensical' use of words such as 'right' and 'good'
involves similes, or seems to do so, at least, in the sense that we think the
meaning in these cases is similar, albeit not identical, to the meaning of
these words in ordinary, non-ethical cases.]
And when we say ‘This man’s
life was valuable’ we do not mean it in the same sense in which we would speak
of some valuable jewellery but there seems to be some sort of analogy.
[The same point again, by the
looks of it. We might hear echoes of Aristotle and Kant in this part of the
lecture. Aristotle seems to think that, as there can be a good eye or a good
heart (in the sense of one that pumps blood well), so there can be a good human
being, one who performs well the function or functions of a human being.
Wittgenstein is suggesting, as if it is simply common sense or obvious, that
this is at most only like the truth in some way. Likewise,
Kant talks about a good will shining like a jewel but, unlike jewelry, having a
value that is absolute and priceless.]
Now all religious terms seem in
this sense to be used as similes, or allegorically.
[Is this the start of a defense
of religion to a skeptical audience? If so, it will be an odd kind of defense,
since the use of certain key words in ethical expressions has been said
to seem to involve "some sort of analogy," of a kind
that has yet to be explored or explained. So if religion is like ethics in this
regard then it is still a mysterious thing.]
For when we speak of God and
that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and
actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him
as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc. etc.
[There are both believers and
non-believers who talk as if God is just this kind of super-being.
Non-believers tend to reject the idea as absurd and lacking in the slightest
evidence, while believers sometimes mention fear of what such a being might do
to us if we don't obey as a reason to "believe". The idea of trying
to win God's grace is theologically debatable, and perhaps Wittgenstein chooses
his words here with a skeptical audience in mind. Presumably Wittgenstein was
aware, though, that not all believers think of God in this kind of way except,
perhaps, metaphorically or allegorically. Indeed, that is just the view he
presents here, even if it is possible to imagine atheists thinking he is
presenting something like their view.]
But this allegory also
describes the experiences which I have just referred to.
[So if (as perhaps some members
of the audience might have thought) Wittgenstein is attacking religion, he is
equally attacking ethics. And we are about to get Wittgenstein's view of what
monotheistic religion is, at least in key parts, about.]
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.
[Wittgenstein offers no evidence
for these claims, but then they are only claims about what he believes. He is
providing an interpretation of what religious believers might be talking about,
which we (and they) might find more or less plausible.]
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.
[People often take Wittgenstein
to be talking about a feeling of absolute guilt here, but he doesn't say that
he means anything other than ordinary feelings of guilt. Presumably, though, he
does not mean the feeling (if there is such a thing) that one gets upon being
found guilty in a court of law. So there is an element of simile here after
all. But I think he means feelings of what we might call moral guilt.]
Thus in ethical and religious
language we seem constantly to be using similes.
[Note the word 'seems', but what
Wittgenstein appears to think seems to be the case is not that we use similes
in a straightforward way. That is, we don't say "I feel as if I have
broken a law" or "God is like our father." Rather, we might say
"I have broken the moral law" (or violated a moral right) or
"God is our father." The simile comes in, and so is used, in accounts
of the meaning of such expressions. The moral law is understood to be like
the criminal law, the meaning of 'father' in "God is our father" is
like the meaning of 'father' in "I am a father of two children." We
might never give such explanations, but we might seem to rely on their
availability for much ethical and religious language to be intelligible.]
But a simile must be the simile
for something.
[To say what something is we must
be able to say more than just that it is a bit like something else. We ought,
it seems, to be able to say in what ways it is like that thing and in what ways
it is different. Perhaps we ought to be able to say what it is, not
merely what it is like.]
And if I can describe a fact by
means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the
facts without it.
[We might wonder where this
'must' comes from. Is it Wittgestein's demand? Common sense's? The important
question, perhaps, is whether we accept it or find that we can do without it.
(And whether any claim not to need it is, or can be, justified.]
Now in our case as soon as we
try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we
find that there are no such facts.
[This is quick. Has he tried to
identify relevant facts? Presumably, but he doesn't discuss candidates here.
And are there really no such facts, or simply not enough? If I say that I feel
safe in God's hands, for instance, couldn't this mean that I go into battle
without a look of fear on my face, say? Or that I am less concerned about death
than others, or than I usually am? I imagine that Wittgenstein thinks this kind
of fact, although real in some cases, does not capture the whole meaning of
expressions such as "I feel absolutely safe."]
And so, what at first appeared
to be a simile, now seems to be mere nonsense.
[I don't think we are meant to
understand Wittgenstein as operating with a particular theory of nonsense here.
He is, after all, not delivering a technical talk. And if everything is
nonsense unless one can say what it means in other words then we might seem to
be stuck endlessly explaining each explanation of meaning. Either that or we
could get away with nonsense by offering a supposed equivalent sentence that
might also make no sense in fact. So I think that what Wittgenstein means here
is something like: we thought we could say what we meant by expressions such as
"absolutely the right thing to do" or "morally wrong" or
"wondering at the existence of the world" but in fact it turns out we
do not know what we mean by these words.]
– Now the three experiences
which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to those who
have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic,
absolute, value.
['Value' here means something
like importance. A feeling of wonder at the existence of the world is doubtless
very pleasant, but feeling guilty isn't. Both seem to have a special kind of
value, though, and (because?) both are connected with the sense that life has
meaning. These are not just curiosities to be noted in one's diary or fun
experiences or hang-ups to be got over.]
But when I say they are
experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and there,
lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable.
[Two things to think about here.
First, are they experiences? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein
talks about an experience that is no experience. (For more on this see Michael Kremer.) That seems to be the kind of thing he has in mind here.
Secondly, it seems as though it is not so much the experiences themselves that
are important but rather their meaning. This is not confined to a limited place
and time but, rather, runs through one's whole life, or at least can do so. And
yet, in response to this suggestion, one might want to say No, it is not that
these experiences are important because they make such a difference in some
people's lives. To those who have and care about the experiences in question it
is the other way around. They are given a huge role in one's life because of
the intrinsic meaning or importance that they have. But,
Wittgenstein seems to be asking, how can this be?]
And so from what I have said
some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute
value.
[The answer to that question
("How can this be?") is that it cannot. The idea does not make sense.
Although Wittgenstein does not simply assert that it is nonsense. He says that
if we accept what he said some minutes ago then we have to accept that it is
nonsense. Perhaps--he hasn't yet ruled this out--if we went back we could change
something and not be committed to counting this as nonsense.]
And here I have arrived at the
main point of this paper: it is the paradox that an experience, a fact should
seem to have absolute value.
[If Wittgenstein has a thesis,
perhaps this is it. Although he implied at the beginning that the lecture might
be helpful even to people who disagree with him. So making this point might not
be his primary goal. Or, at least, getting others to accept the point might not
be his primary goal. But what is the point? Note that he says not that it is a
paradox that a fact should seem to have absolute value: it is the paradox.
So there is something especially important, or especially paradoxical, about
this paradox, it would seem. And yet it barely seems to be a paradox at all.
Why shouldn't a fact seem to have absolute value even if it
doesn't, or can't, have such value? I would think that it is because what we
are talking about both seems to be an experience, an event in the world, and
seems to be something otherworldly, of a different order of
significance.]
And I will make my point still
more acute by saying ‘it is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem
to have supernatural value’.
[Why does Wittgenstein want to
make the point more acute? Presumably he thinks there really is something odd
here and he wants to make sure we see it. To help with this he switches from
talking about absolute value to talking about supernatural value.
This sounds much more metaphysical or philosophically (ontologically) dubious
than talk about absolute value. Perhaps especially to the particular people he
was addressing in this talk.]
Now there is a way in which I
would be tempted to meet this paradox: let me first consider again our first
experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in
a slightly different way: we all know, what in ordinary life would be called a
miracle.
[Wittgenstein himself,
apparently, is not a happy mystic. He is inclined to try to dispel the paradox.
In order to do so, if he were to act on this inclination, he would dig a little
deeper, perhaps in an attempt to undermine it. But in doing so he starts
talking about miracles, which might not sound promising to religious skeptics.
Unless he is going to say something like what Hume says.]
It obviously is simply an event
the like of which we have never yet seen.
[This is neither Hume's
definition nor anything remotely technical. It is a plain account (although
still debatable) of the ordinary meaning of the word.]
Now suppose such an event happened.
[OK, we might think, but where is
this going?]
Take the case that one of you
suddenly grew a lion head and began to roar.
[This example fits the
description of "an event the like of which we have never yet seen."
It's tempting to speculate about the particular choice of example. Is there any
connection with Wittgenstein's late remark that if a lion could speak we would
not be able to understand it? Is the reference to roaring anything to do
with the motto of the Tractatus? I think for now it is better not to be side-tracked by such
questions.]
Certainly that would be as
extraordinary a thing as I can imagine.
[We might imagine more
complicated or surreal things, but I think this claim is true.]
Now whenever we should have
recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor
and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting
him I would have him vivisected.
[This sounds about right,
although it also sounds a little shocking. I think this is because when simply
hearing the case described we remain in the not-yet-recovered-from-our-surprise
stage while the cold, scientific approach is being described. It's easy enough
to imagine a scientist being brought to the scene and saying that, ideally, the
patient would be surgically investigated but that, of course, that's out of the
question because it would not only hurt but seriously, perhaps fatally, injure
him.]
And where would the miracle
have got to?
[This is surprising too. Isn't
something either a miracle or not a miracle? How could the response of human
beings make a difference to that?]
For it is clear that when we
look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we
mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science,
which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others
in a scientific system.
[Once again Wittgenstein offers
no argument beyond an appeal to what is (allegedly) clear. But I think he is
right. The case no longer feels like a miracle when it is being investigated
scientifically. Indeed, perhaps it can be said that it no longer feels like a
miracle once we have recovered from our surprise. Because our surprise
involved, or perhaps simply was, a sense of wonder or amazement. The scientific
outlook, the naturalistic, factual view or conception of things is simply not
the wondering or amazed view of things. Which is not to say that scientists are
never amazed. But scientific amazement (Wittgenstein seems to think) is
different from religious or ethical amazement. An important idea here might be
that of piety. A pious person (and I think multiple attitudes or forms of
behavior might reasonably be called pious, so this is just one example) might
wonder at human life in such a way that contraception, abortion, euthanasia,
and capital punishment all seem unthinkable. An impious person might find human
life fascinating and beautiful, and in this sense experience wonder, but see
nothing wrong at all with any such things so long as, for example, utility is
maximized. (And, to repeat or clarify, I think someone might have no objection
to contraception, and might favor legal abortion and euthanasia, while still
having a sense of (what I am calling) piety that makes them oppose the death
penalty and perhaps some acts (depending on the exact circumstances) of
abortion and euthanasia.) The difference I am trying to get at between
pious wonder and impious wonder is, roughly, that the former connects with a
sense that there are some things we must not (or perhaps must) do, while the
latter does not. An ‘impious’ scientist might marvel at the frog he is cutting
up or at the atoms he intends to split. A scientist might also cut up frogs or
split atoms but there will be some things that she won’t do, and her sense that
these things are not to be done will connect, or be part of, her sense that the
things not to be damaged or interfered with are amazing or, perhaps,
miraculous. I don’t mean to suggest that piety is right-wing and impiety is
left-wing.
Also worth noting here is
Wittgenstein's pointing out that it is possible to mean more than one thing by
the term 'miraculous.']
This shows that it is absurd to
say ‘Science has proved that there are no miracles’.
[This seems questionable, but
much depends on the meanings of words. For instance, if 'miracle' means simply
'event of a kind that we have never seen before' then science doesn't really
seem to disprove the existence of miracles, although much might depend on what
we count as a kind of event. This seems to relate to talk about laws of nature,
which could bring us back to Hume on miracles. Hume defines a miracle as a
violation of a law of nature by some supernatural agent. Science understood as,
at least in part, empirical investigation surely cannot disprove the possibility of
such an event. Nor, I would think, can it really prove (although it depends
what we mean by 'prove') that such an event has never happened. Even events
that appear to be regular might be miraculous in a way that we
can't detect. Science should perhaps be understood as a way to investigate the
world that includes the assumption that there has to be a rational explanation
for everything. This rules out the possibility of miracles a priori. Which
might be fine, but it shouldn't be mistaken for proof.]
The truth is that the
scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a
miracle.
[We have, Wittgenstein suggests,
two (or more) ways of looking at facts. And these are not just ways of looking
but of thinking and responding to them. Science has proved to be a very
productive way to look at things, but this does not make it the only good way
to look at them, or the best way, or the right way in some absolute (evaluative
and yet somehow neutral) sense.]
For, imagine whatever fact you
may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term.
[Here the question of what it
means for a fact to be miraculous in the absolute sense is hard to avoid. If
the ceiling of the room opened up to reveal a crowd of flying beings with
trumpets and a large, bearded head bellowing "Behold! I turn thy head into
a lion's!" and then someone gets a lion head and begins to roar, how could
this not be miraculous in every possible sense? One answer is that there could
be a scientific explanation even for these phenomena. Perhaps we only seem to
see these events when in fact we are dreaming or hallucinating. Or perhaps the
beings we see are not God and angels but aliens. Or they could be holograms.
Hume argues that it is always wiser to believe that there is an explanation of
this kind than to believe that one has witnessed a genuine miracle. But we need
to read on to see whether this is the argument that Wittgenstein is concerned with.]
For we see now that we have
been using the word ‘miracle’ in a relative and an absolute sense.
[Do we see this? A relative sense
would be purely factual, a miracle being basically a highly unusual event.
Science can handle those easily enough. An absolute miracle, or miracle in the
absolute sense, would be something else. I'm not quite sure exactly what it
would be, but perhaps an event that everyone would regard as miraculous, as not
explicable by science, or else feel guilty for not regarding that way.]
And I will now describe the
experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the
experience of seeing the world as a miracle.
[We are moving quite quickly
here, or not in the direction one might expect if one thinks about miracles
primarily in Humean terms. But I think the idea is relatively simple and
familiar. Wondering at the existence of the world, in the relevant sense of wondering,
is not having questions that science might answer. It is wondering in a way to
which such questions are irrelevant. It is closer to awe than
curiosity.]
Now I am tempted to say that
the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world,
though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language
itself.
[How would the existence of
language (or anything else, for that matter) be the right expression for
something? Does the existence of language express anything? Surely only uses of
language express anything. Do propositions just by themselves express anything?
I would think it depends what we count as a proposition and as expressing
something. For instance, we might disagree about whether a computer-generated
sentence really says anything, as we might disagree about something that looks
like a sentence that is only the result of the wind or the sea moving sticks
around on a beach. But perhaps the existence of language itself, which is a marvelous
thing, might be thought to mirror the marvelous existence of the world.]
But what then does it mean to
be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times.
[A miracle in the absolute sense,
I suggested above, is something like an event that everyone would regard as
miraculous with a kind of necessity. So then we surely couldn't, or wouldn't,
regard it as a miracle sometimes but not all the time. And yet we might only be
struck occasionally by how wonderful the existence of language, of meaning,
is.]
For all I have said by shifting
the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the
expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we
cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute
miraculous remains nonsense.
[So thinking of the existence of
language as the best or right expression of the miracle of the existence of the
world will not do. It doesn't do what we want it to do.]
– Now the answer to all this
will seem perfectly clear to many of you.
[This seems unlikely, but people
have thought something like the suggestion that follows.]
You will say: well, if certain
experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call
absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words
we do not mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an
experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it
comes to is, that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical
analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions.
[If we use words in a certain
way, one might think, then they do have a meaning after all. This meaning
simply is their use. If we say that an experience has "absolute
value" then it does have such value. (Not if just anyone says such a thing
now and again, but if this were an established way of speaking, that is.) All
that would remain would be to explain or describe exactly what this means. That
is the kind of work that philosophers do all the time. There is no excuse to
declare something nonsense just because it isn't immediately obvious what the
right account to offer is. So we might think.]
– Now when this is urged
against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that
no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by
‘absolute value’, but that I would reject every significant description that
anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its
significance.
[Wittgenstein rejects this
suggestion. It is not, he implies, that the right account has not yet been
found. Rather, any account that made sense of talk of 'absolute value', etc. is
wrong precisely because it makes sense of such talk.]
That is to say: I see now that
these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found
the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very
essence.
[It might sound strange to claim
to know that no significant description would ever be good, but, as we shall
see, Wittgenstein is talking about what he wants, and it is not strange for him
to know that.]
For all I wanted to do with
them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant
language.
[The point of choosing the
expressions that attracted him when thinking about the experiences he has in
mind was precisely that they "go beyond the world." So would just any
nonsense do equally well? Perhaps. On the one hand, as an exclamation of
amazement almost any words might do, as long as they were exclaimed in the
right tone. For instance, imagine someone saying something when an amazing event
occurs. In their amazement they might repeat whatever it was they just said but
in a dazed way that trails off. It doesn’t really matter what the words are
that they are repeating. And perhaps, even though the existence of the world is
not an amazing event, being struck by the miracle of existence might
happen suddenly and result in reacting as if to a miraculous event. On the
other hand, the way we know we are talking about the same experience each time
is that it gives rise to the same kind of expression.]
My whole tendency and I believe
the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was
to run against the boundaries of language.
[This might sound like a big
claim. How does he know what other people were trying to do? But presumably he
means ethics or religion in the particular sense, or of the particular kind,
that he is talking about here.]
This running against the walls
of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless.
[Hopeless because nonsense will
never make sense, and because nonsense is exactly what the people in question
want to speak. It's interesting that Wittgenstein uses the word 'absolutely'
again here, to describe the hopelessness of talk of 'absolute value' and the
like. I'm not sure that this is at all significant though.]
– Ethics, 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.
[Perhaps ethics in some other
sense could be a kind of science, but this isn't what interests Wittgenstein.
(And he would have opposed any attempt to make ethics a science.) It is not, I
think, the fact that it springs from a desire that means ethics can be no
science. After all, astronomy is a science, and it might spring from the desire
to know more about the heavens above. It is rather that the language we characteristically
reach for to talk about such things is nonsensical. Consider, for instance,
Matthew 13: 45-46: “Again, the kingdom of
heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had
found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought
it." This is the kind of thing people say, but the kingdom of heaven is
surely not exactly like a pearl of great price. It is priceless (if it is
anything at all). There can be no science of such things as value beyond measure.]
What it says does not add to
our knowledge in any sense.
[Whether this is true depends on
what we count as knowledge, I would think. We do talk about knowing right from
wrong, and sometimes call people who do evil ignorant. But we don't mean that
ethics is a science. I'm not sure whether Wittgenstein would consider such ways
of talking (potentially) misleading or simply wrong.]
But it is a document of a
tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and
I would not for my life ridicule it.
[The nonsense we are concerned
with here is not ridiculous nonsense. Indeed, if it is not scientific then, we
might think, so much the worse for science. Not that science is somehow
incorrect, but it is far from being the most important thing there is.]
