[Wittgenstein gives the following no title, although I think it was listed as "Ethics" in the Heretics' (see below) schedule of events. As Stephen Mulhall points out, it is really more of a talk than a lecture. The audience was the Heretics. They were a pro-science, humanist organization led by C. K. Ogden. The text of the lecture and much more can be found here. Other readings I recommend include Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen "Wittgenstein and Ethics" in Marie McGinn & Oskari Kuusela (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press (2011) and Stephen Mulhall "The Road to Grantchester: Composite Photography, Physiognomy and Privative Recasting in the Composition of Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”", in J. Beale and R. Rowland (eds.), Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy, New York: Routledge, forthcoming. I also have a relevant paper forthcoming called "The Good, the Divine, and the Supernatural". What follows is Wittgenstein's text, in red, and my comments, in black. There are two versions of the text, and I think what I have here is the first paragraph of one and the second of the other. I need to fix that, although the two versions are similar. My comments are pretty rough, but perhaps a useful starting point for something.]
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Before I begin to speak about
my subject proper let me make a few introductory remarks.
[The immediately following, then,
is not really part of the talk proper.]
I feel I shall have great
difficulties in communicating my thoughts to you and I think some of them may
be diminished by mentioning them to you beforehand.
[Some but not all? Cf. Notebooks
1914-1916: "My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of
expression," 8th March 1915]
The first one, which almost I
need not mention, is, that English is not my native tongue and my expression
therefore often lacks that precision and subtlety which would be desirable if
one talks about a difficult subject.
[So is he going to be talking
about a difficult subject or not? Will precision and subtlety be called for?]
All I can do is to ask you to
make my task easier by trying to get at my meaning in spite of the faults which
I will constantly be committing against the English grammar.
[Is Wittgenstein "committing
faults against the English grammar" here deliberately? He doesn't make that
many mistakes in the rest of the talk. Also, note that here he distinguihses
undertsanding his meaning from understanding the meaning of
the words he uses to express it.]
The second difficulty I will
mention is this, that probably many of you come up to this lecture of mine with
slightly wrong expectations.
[Here he does call the talk a
lecture, so maybe the standard title is justified after all. Why "come
up," I wonder? The talk was given in an upstairs room, so that might be
why.]
And to set you right in this
point I will say a few words about the reason for choosing the subject I have
chosen: when your former secretary honoured me by asking me to read a paper to
your society, my first thought was that I would certainly do it and my second
thought was that if I was to have the opportunity to speak you I should speak
about something which I am keen on communicating to you and that I should not
misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic.
[Wittgensetin did not give many
public talks, so it's interesting that he was so eager to give this one. Was he
unusually enthusiastic just then about communicating something? I argue that he
was (based on ideas from Cora Diamond and Michael Kremer in the paper mentioned above. Also
note, although only as a curiosity (I don't think there is any philosophical
significance to this) how good Wittgenstein's English is here.]
I call this a misuse for to
explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not
an hour’s paper.
[So he will not be talking about
something scientific or technical.]
Another alternative would have
been to give you what is called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture
intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you do
not understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires
of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries
of science.
[What he intends to say will not
be superficial and will, he expects, be understood by at least some of the
audience.]
I rejected these alternatives
and decided to talk to you about a subject which seems to me to be of general
importance, hoping that it may help to clear up your thoughts about this
subject (even if you should entirely disagree with what I will say about it).
[How will it help clear up
people's thoughts even if they disagree entirely with what he says? Presumably
his aim is not, or not only, to defend some kind of thesis. He wants clarify
things.]
My third and last difficulty is
one which, in fact, adheres to most lengthy philosophical lectures and it is
this, that the hearer is incapable of seeing both the road he is lead and the
goal which it leads to.
[This is not going to be a
lengthy philosophical lecture by normal standards, and it apparantly will not
be very technical, so why the difficulty?]
That is to say: he either
thinks ‘I understand all he says, but what on earth is he driving at’ or else
he thinks ‘I see what he is driving at, but how on earth is he going to get
there’.
[The first horn of the dilemma
is, I think, a problem that Wittgenstein felt people often had with his later
philosophical work. The second is a problem less often associated with
Wittgenstein's work, but here perhaps he means that people won't see what he
says as proving anything.]
All I can do is, again, to ask
you to be patient and to hope that in the end you may see both the way and
where it leads to.
[We need to be patient, so virtue
is called for, and we might not see the way until we have reached its end.
Which is a puzzling idea. Apparently he cannot tell us now what his conclusion
will be. Perhaps this is because he is not defending a thesis, or not only
doing that.]
I will now begin.
[All that came before was one paragraph, which is, it seems, not really part of the lecture itself. The rest of the lecture is all one paragraph, and constitutes, if anything does, the actual lecture.]
Thanks for an excellent and perceptive commentary on this rather, and sometimes, cryptic talk by Wittgenstein (which he later dismissed -- perhaps with excess humility? -- as not amounting to much). As your comments show, there is quite a bit there and much worth following up on. [Because of limitations on responding here, I will add the second half of my thought on this in a second post below.]
ReplyDeleteIn that vein I would suggest one omission in his talk which his own later philosophical work suggests he ought to have covered ("ought" in the practical or relative sense, of course), and that is the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" re: how we use these terms.
Ethical claims do have an important sense in which we expect them to be "absolute." But what does it mean to be "absolute"? We tend to think in terms of something otherworldly, something from outside the world that imposes itself on the world (as Wittgenstein himself conceived it in his comments in, and about, his own Tractatus). But is THAT really what we mean by "absolute"?
Why do we expect "absolute" to designate something beyond ourselves, beyond the relative judgments we are prone to make in getting around in the world?
Perhaps "absolute" should not be thought of as something transcendent, as if it is beyond us, but as something we can find at a deeper level of our very human, contingent experience -- something which is deep enough to be, if not transcendent, as in being outside our world, but trans-cultural and so something common to human experience itself. If moral judgement addresses how we ought to behave with one another, and particular cultures sanction different behavioral practices, perhaps it is not wrong to look for commonalities across cultures in those sanctioned practices and those that cultures tend to reject.
We tend to think in terms of something otherworldly, something from outside the world that imposes itself on the world (as Wittgenstein himself conceived it in his comments in, and about, his own Tractatus). But is THAT really what we mean by "absolute"?
DeletePossibly not, but it does seem to be what Wittgenstein meant by it. Perhaps that was misguided of him, but if we're going to argue with him (rather than talk past him or just ignore him, which might ultimately be wise to do) then we seem to have to accept his meaning of the term.
That seems rather fast. Isn't Wittgenstein's conception of ethics that it is a condition of the world like logic? I'm paraphrasing one of his comments in NB to precisely that effect. Logic does not intrude into the world. It is notable in the lecture that he says there is no state of affairs that would be compelling or cause us to feel guilty if we do not comply--these are chimeras.
DeleteYes, all of this is fast. But I'm not sure we can assume that in the LE he still holds any particular view that he expressed in NB.
DeleteIt is true that his view of logic might have changed, though the introduction in the book to which you linked argues that his ethical outlook had not and did not. The tenor of the ethical remarks in the Geheime Tagebucher (newly translated into English FYI) and the 1937 diaries is strikingly similar. Indeed, he makes identical notes in 1916 and 1930, viz. “the good life is the world seen *sub specie aeternitatis.* This suggests that in Wittgenstein still thought the perspective the ethical (or the ethical subject) was outside the world, in some sense related to what is higher, absolute or supernatural.
DeleteI agree that his ethical outlook does not seem to have changed much over the course of his life. This is not to say, though, that it did not change at all, nor that his thinking about philosophy didn't change.
DeleteLet me try to get the issue here into focus. SWM suggested that ethical demands seem to come from outside the world and be imposed on it. As if, we might say, from God. I do think that Wittgenstein thought this way. You seem to be saying something similar at the end of your comment here. But (if I'm understanding correctly) you question the idea that ethics intrudes into the world because, like logic, it is a condition of the world.
I'm not sure what to say about this. I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that ethics is a condition of the world, and that Wittgenstein believed this, but it also sounds a bit metaphysical or theoretical in a way that he would not have liked. So I'm torn/undecided. (Perhaps "ethics is transcendental" could be understood as purely analytic and not really metaphysical at all. I don't know.) As for ethics coming into the world from outside, I suppose it can't really do this if it is a condition of the world (in something like the way logic is), but it could still *seem* to do so. Indeed being ethical might seem to require that we think of it as a demand that comes from outside.
Which is all to say that there is a lot to think through here, and you're right that I was going much too quickly.
I think there is a tension in the later Wittgenstein's thinking between a kind of transparency that should exist for any attribution to a person of a thought (this being a general consequence of the PLA) and the kind of (radical) individuality that informed Wittgenstein's ethical outlook. You're right to worry. His view, I think, which is also more or less latent in 6.422, is that the things of the world are no locus for ethics. No ethical improvement or failure occurs through the coming to obtain of this or that happening or state of affairs. A man makes his life a good or a bad one in an ethical sense in some endeavour that is not realised in the world. One way to go then is to think that there are some ethical predicates that apply to the *attitude* one took in life, but these ethical predicates are neither grounded as other predicates nor expressed using the usual bases for meaning. This looks shaky to me, but there is a hint of what this might look like in PI §77, where W seems to posit a manifestable concept that lacks much objectivity in the sense that we cannot reliably expect that one person will use it the same way as another (hence the failure of copying mentioned in §77). In this sense, it is a kind of individual concept that does little for anyone else. A second approach is to suppose that Wittgenstein is enjoining the taking up of a supernatural perspective on the world 'as a limited whole' seen 'sub specie aeternitatis' which we might recognise as treating the world like a miracle. Here, we often recognise in someone else what we might call the physiognomy of treating something as a miracle, without being able to say in what that attitude consists. Our recognition of the physiognomy might elicit respect, but neither they nor we can express in language anything of why we take it as a miracle, what is miraculous about it, etc. That, he says in the lecture, is precisely in the nature of taking something as a miracle. And the ethical perspective is precisely that one which is directed from the world of facts to the world as a whole, taken in the attitude of a miracle.
DeleteThanks. I don't mean to ignore this comment, but I'm on holiday at the moment (no room of my own, for instance) and won't be able to think about it properly until I get home.
DeleteWell, I'm not on holiday any more but I'm still not sure what to say about this. I don't really have a worked out view of what Wittgenstein thought about ethics (except what he says in this or that specific work). As I think I've said, he does sometimes seem to think that ethics requires that one obey one's conscience. What this means in practice will be different for different people, but it isn't impossible to express in language. It isn't a hugely appealing conception of ethics, though, I think. I'm afraid I have to do a lot more reading and thinking before I can say more on the subject with any reliability.
DeleteSecond part:
ReplyDeleteIf moral judgement is applicable to individual humans, as persons within this or that societal milieu (since moral questions seem to have no traction outside a social domain), then it is also applicable to the range of practices by individuals that this or that society sanctions or rejects. Thus societies, like individuals, can be assessed in moral terms and the idea of moral progress is applicable both to individuals and to societies as a whole.
But in that case, for there to be a notion of moral progress, there must be standards against which to measure them, no? And for standards to exist, they must stand outside the judgements and judgers themselves, so our judgements can be measured against them. This implies the need for an "absolute" moral norm (or norms), not subject to the vagaries of ordinary human life and sentiment.
And yet if there is nothing beyond the human, how can such a standard be?
Well the possibility I'd like to suggest is that the standard we seek lies within human existence, not in particular sentiments we may happen to hold but in the kind of beings we are and can discover ourselves to be. That is, the standard can be elaborated from a kind of analysis that reflects our coming to grips with the nature of human existence itself. And this should be understood as not culture-specific, though it may manifest differently and at different stages in different cultures. Rather it is trans-cultural in the sense that all human cultures are capable of coming to it, and do come to it, given certain conditions (i.e., certain cognitive development) and so find ways to express this common realization. Thus an "absolute" standard can be found for moral judgement, even if it is not "absolute" in any religious or metaphysical sense (where "metaphysical" refers to speculations concerning the underlying pillars of existence itself).
It is enough to ground our moral judgements and beliefs in certain insights concerning ourselves, our own nature, that can be achieved through cognitive effort. The idea that to have ethics we must have some absolute standard (which seems to be implied by the idea of ethics) is, thus, salvageable if we do not think of "absolute" in some abstract, metaphysical sense but as being grounded more deeply in ourselves, in what kinds of creatures we are.
In Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics I see an omission of what would later come to characterize his most enduring work, attention to the uses of key terms like "absolute" and its apparent opposite, "relative." And, I'd suggest, it is just this attention that, if applied, holds the key to providing a positive answer to the question of ethics' validity in human life because it gives us a way to have our ethical cake and eat it, too. We can have standards outside ourselves as individuals that are standards because they are discoverable within the foundation of human experience itself, and expressible in various but related ways across human communities.
I think if we are to find a plausible alternative to Wittgenstein's way of thinking then it does indeed lie in this kind of direction.
DeleteI actually meant to place these comments after your commentary on the Lecture but it seems I put them in the wrong place. In any case, one of the things that jumped out at me is his failure to explicate the sense of "absolute" as I said above. I think the later Wittgenstein would have done that but here we see him in a kind of transition phase.
DeleteAnyway, I think he was more right than wrong when he dismissed this effort as unworthy of him. He offers some interesting points but has not yet moved far enough along in his development of his later thought. If all our words have many meanings, the first place to start in this sort of analysis is to look at the range of meanings (uses) we put what he seems to think of as his most important words to. And here "absolute" recurs throughout his lecture as a way of distinguishing the moral from the factual. So it certainly deserves his and out attention which it does not receive adequately in that Lecture.
I did wish to thank you for your perceptive commentary along each step of the way as the Lecture unfolds. Very thoughtful and insightful.