tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64541615960944474482024-03-18T17:51:31.382-04:00language goes on holiday"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comBlogger1032125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-78215373561144760412024-02-19T18:15:00.005-05:002024-02-19T18:15:35.866-05:00Wittgenstein and Ethics<p>For the next ten days or so <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wittgenstein-and-ethics/455E40B287974236016714EDB452C65A" target="_blank">this new book by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen</a> is available to download for free. It's highly recommended, as is looking out for other books in this series. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjmKRkWJo5PcY8rvTHt6KRzo3KQ4dJHgfmm7dOG16RCr3HPvhtO7SXR-dGiOFmNf8TXvaJq0O_KTOXA1ZHJw541g4yyRiAQgQFei7fnRjUi2SFnUJCZu9eBJzLrep425GdUKXYr0JH8NGtxqLxD2dpOwWdYgrZBvvGfZwyi47Lgl-0SuPU8APxhOtjoxCE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="180" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjmKRkWJo5PcY8rvTHt6KRzo3KQ4dJHgfmm7dOG16RCr3HPvhtO7SXR-dGiOFmNf8TXvaJq0O_KTOXA1ZHJw541g4yyRiAQgQFei7fnRjUi2SFnUJCZu9eBJzLrep425GdUKXYr0JH8NGtxqLxD2dpOwWdYgrZBvvGfZwyi47Lgl-0SuPU8APxhOtjoxCE" width="164" /></a></div><p></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-1818381957138863452022-11-23T09:25:00.001-05:002022-11-23T09:25:07.474-05:00Rachel Fraser on Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Although I have yet to read the book under review, I have some thoughts about Rachel Fraser's criticism of Sophie Grace Chappell's new book <i><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/epiphanies-9780192858016?cc=us&lang=en&" target="_blank">Epiphanies</a>. </i>All quotes from <a href="https://bostonreview.net/articles/you-owe-me-an-argument/" target="_blank">this in the</a><i><a href="https://bostonreview.net/articles/you-owe-me-an-argument/" target="_blank"> Boston Review</a>. </i>Bits that seem extra important to me are in bold.</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chappell’s proposal for managing disagreement is what she calls “a republic of conversation.” We should explore together our various epiphanies. Only extremists—those whose epiphanies preclude such conversation—will be excluded. This, of course, is textbook political liberalism. As such, it inherits much of the dreamy unreality characteristic of liberal visions of collective life. There are particular agents with their private projects. Sometimes those agents come together. When they do, their conduct is governed only by the thinnest of requirements: be tolerant, be respectful.</span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This seems unfair.
Chappell is not responsible for the alleged faults of other members of the same tradition or
family of views. And Chappell offers, apparently, a <i>proposal </i>(concerning what we should do), while Fraser criticizes a
“fantasy” of how our collective lives <i>are lived</i>.</span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a fantasy.
<b>Our collective lives are always governed by a thicket of normatively structured institutions—institutions
that orient us to a particular conception of the good</b>. [...] <b>Arguably, it is just these thickets which enable conversation. Meaningful discourse requires an interpersonal infrastructure,
which cannot be laid in a normative vacuum; it needs some lifeworld to bed into</b>. But it
seems to be within just such a vacuum—all moral content thicker than civility pumped out—that
Chappell proposes we converse.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Evidence that Chappell proposes conversation in a moral vacuum? None that I can see. But, of course, I haven't read the book.</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once we start thinking of ethics as a social technology, systematicity and argument take on a different hue. It’s hard to be all that piecemeal or poetic when thinking about how to organize social institutions. We may live by our visions, but they can’t write our social policy. And <b>some of us are doomed to live within a moral order that we disavow. This, I am inclined to think, is an unavoidable feature of human life: there could not be a form of life both neutral and meaningfully collective</b>.</span></p></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once we do <i>what?!</i> Can this be a good idea? I would think that piecemeal is the only way to think about social institutions. Pretty much for reasons that Fraser gives. We are borin into a world of such institutions and they shape the way we think. We can destroy everything but only literally, only physically. We cannot imaginatively or intellectually wipe the slate clean and then think afresh from there. Wiping the slate clean removes the tools we need to think with. We are stuck with something like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reflective-equilibrium/" target="_blank">reflective equilibrium</a> as the best or only option for social evaluation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moving on... So, to converse (meaningfully and collectively) we need a lifeworld. This will not be neutral. And so neither can we ever be. OK.</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be articulate. In other words, you owe me an argument. <b>The vision of the good life that our social institutions encode should be explicit and contestable. </b>And to be explicit and contestable—well, that sounds a lot like the law, and less like art criticism (at least as Chappell conceives it). Arguments can be challenged, rather than merely traded, in a way that visions cannot. </span></p></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Couldn’t one equally say, “But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be civil, tolerant, and respectful”? And surely articulating a vision of the good life need not, and usually will not, take the form of putting forward an argument. And how contestable will a vision be that is encoded into the social institutions that enable the very conversation in which alone it can be contested? Somewhat, no doubt, but imperfectly or awkwardly, I would think, at best.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This seems like the key to the mystery here. There's an ideal (that seems visible in Fraser's thinking) of stepping back to get as clear a view as possible of social norms so that they can be critiqued and changed as desired. But there is also a recognition that we cannot do this except from within a lifeworld that is not completely separable from those norms and institutions. Which makes Chappell's view seem more correct than Fraser's. </span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-7245685773591353112022-10-05T18:17:00.002-04:002022-10-05T18:17:23.598-04:00Wittgenstein's Philosophy in 1929<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikCVAh052iCM8jUVY2jsmX0a2sjZiscWLRhMOMINm0uULxqaI1QyaXq2ChUuVe6yt2QcpTQ4eRaI5aXZ3A4qp-FwrM_1oiKLgQ8JadwSbcvboSa1dtywDLq0Op5cLo3yNj9cPQKxG6FsRj4Um8uYuFOHIh2V3QlMHa3U657fVedWT482G2bENmjhVf" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="350" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikCVAh052iCM8jUVY2jsmX0a2sjZiscWLRhMOMINm0uULxqaI1QyaXq2ChUuVe6yt2QcpTQ4eRaI5aXZ3A4qp-FwrM_1oiKLgQ8JadwSbcvboSa1dtywDLq0Op5cLo3yNj9cPQKxG6FsRj4Um8uYuFOHIh2V3QlMHa3U657fVedWT482G2bENmjhVf=w416-h640" width="416" /></a><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">Edited By </span></div><p></p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; display: inline; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-style: italic; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.5rem; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0.8em 0px 0.2em;"><a href="https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Florian%20Franken%20Figueiredo" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #10147f;" title="Search for more titles by Florian Franken Figueiredo">Florian Franken Figueiredo</a></h2><div><br /></div><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">The book explores the impact of manuscript remarks during the year 1929 on the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. Although its intention is to put the focus specifically on the manuscripts, the book is not purely exegetical. The contributors generate important new insights for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his place in the history of analytic philosophy.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Wittgenstein’s writings from the years 1929-1930 are valuable, not simply because they marked Wittgenstein’s return to academic philosophy after a seven-year absence, but because these works indicate several changes in his philosophical thinking. The chapters in this volume clarify the significance of Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy in 1929. In Part 1, the contributors address different issues in the philosophy of mathematics, e.g. Wittgenstein's understanding of certain aspects of intuitionism and his commitment to verificationism, as well as his idea of "a new system". Part 2 examines Wittgenstein's philosophical development and his understanding of philosophical method. Here the contributors examine particular problems Wittgenstein dealt with in 1929, e.g. the colour-exclusion problem, and the use of thought experiments as well as his relationship to Frank Ramsey and philosophical pragmatism. Part 3 features essays on phenomenological language. These chapters address the role of spatial analogies and the structure of visual space. Finally, Part 4 includes one chapter on Wittgenstein’s few manuscript remarks about ethics and religion and relates it to his Lecture on Ethics.</p><h2 id="toc" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "Droid Serif", "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.9em; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5rem; margin-top: 0.5em; padding: 0.8em 0px 0.2em;">Table of Contents</h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Introduction: Wittgenstein in 1929 <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Andrew Lugg</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Part 1: Mathematics and Thinking the New</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">1. Wittgenstein’s Struggle with Intuitionism <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mathieu Marion and Mitsuhiro Okada</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">2. The Origins of Wittgenstein’s Verificationism <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Severin Schroeder</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">3. Searching in Space vs. Groping in the Dark: Wittgenstein on Novelty and Imagination in 1929-30 <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Pascal Zambito</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Part 2: Method and Development</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">4. The Color-Exclusion Problem and the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Oskari Kuusela</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">5. What Would It Look Like? Wittgenstein’s Radical Thought Experiments <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mauro Luiz Engelmann</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">6. Phenomenological Language: "not possible" or "not necessary"? <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Florian Franken Figueiredo</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">7. Hypotheses as Expectations: Ramsey and Wittgenstein 1929 <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Cheryl Misak</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Part 3: Phenomenology and Visual Space</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">8. Simplicity in Wittgenstein’s 1929 Manuscripts <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Michael Hymers</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">9. Temptations of Purity: Phenomenological Language and Immediate Experience <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mihai Ometiță</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">10. Speaking of the Given: The Structure of Visual Space and the Limits of Language <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jasmin Trächtler</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">Part 4: Ethics</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;">11. The Good, the Divine, and the Supernatural <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Duncan Richter</i></p></div>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-27558341954943857652022-09-12T18:36:00.003-04:002022-09-12T18:36:55.980-04:00The Creation of Wittgenstein<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjn-XgHf1AEXmsJLI4aHdUZXdb1ypWcokobAs6kIMiqr-tlASXDZHpSw_dOKzM1ZR09uWeZLCP_CDmGl1LydnOyBdHkBkfDhN1lPk9_sMdjCa_-eH3b-qBNhaasgwYky-qfYLMNmOoI76c-Zs_SbKmqzkvC6m8_7evpLL8qVyIKZ1EgdVcAmUJ_4f3h" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="360" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjn-XgHf1AEXmsJLI4aHdUZXdb1ypWcokobAs6kIMiqr-tlASXDZHpSw_dOKzM1ZR09uWeZLCP_CDmGl1LydnOyBdHkBkfDhN1lPk9_sMdjCa_-eH3b-qBNhaasgwYky-qfYLMNmOoI76c-Zs_SbKmqzkvC6m8_7evpLL8qVyIKZ1EgdVcAmUJ_4f3h=w427-h640" width="427" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal">Table of Contents<o:p></o:p></p><div>
<p class="MsoNormal">ABBREVIATIONS<br />
1. Introduction, Thomas Wallgren (University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
<br />
Part I: Portraits of Wittgenstein's Literary Heirs<br />
2. Rush Rhees: “Discussion is my Only Medicine” , Lars Hertzberg (Åbo
Academy University, Finland)<br />
3. A Portrait of Elizabeth Anscombe, Duncan Richter (Virginia Military
Institute, USA)<br />
4. Georg Henrik von Wright – A Biographical Sketch, Bernt Österman (University
of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
<br />
Part II: Understanding the Editors' Contributions to the Wittgenstein Scholars
Have Known and the Philosophical Implications of their Achievement<br />
5. The Letters which Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Georg Henrik von
Wright Sent to<br />
Each Other, Christian Erbacher (University of Siegen, Germany)<br />
6. The Revision of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics, Kim Solin (University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
7. Naked, Please! Elizabeth Anscombe as Translator and Editor of
Wittgenstein, Joel Backström (University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
8. From A Collection of Aphorisms to the Setting of Wittgenstein's Later
Philosophy: G.H. Von Wright's Work on Wittgenstein's General Remarks, Bernt
Österman (University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
9. “… Finding and Inventing Intermediate Links”: On Rhees and the Preparation
and Publication of Bemerkungen Über Frazers “The Golden Bough”, Peter K.
Westergaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)<br />
10. Editorial Approaches to Wittgenstein's “Last Writings” (1949–51): Elizabeth
Anscombe, G.H. von Wright and Rush Rhees in Dialogue, Lassi Jakola
(University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
11. Art's Part in Wittgenstein's Philosophy, Hanne Appelqvist (Helsinki
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland)<br />
12. Unearthing the Socratic Wittgenstein, Thomas Wallgren (University of
Helsinki, Finland)<br />
<br />
APPENDIX 1:<br />
Wittgenstein's Will. Facsimilie of G.H. von Wright's exemplar, kept at WWA.<br />
APPENDIX 2:<br />
Table of Writings Published Postuhumously with Ludwig Wittgenstein Named as
Author and at Least One of the Following As Editor: Rush Rhees. G.E.M.
Anscombe, G.H. Von Wright. Created By Rickard Nylund In Cooperation With Thomas
Wallgren.<br />
BIBILIOGRAPHY<br />
- Compiled by Patrik Forss in cooperation with Thomas Wallgren.<br />
NOTE ON ARCHIVAL RESOURCES<br />
- Compiled by Anna Lindelöf in cooperation with Bernt Österman and Thomas
Wallgren.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/creation-of-wittgenstein-9781350121096/" target="_blank">Available for pre-order here</a>.</p></div>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-31102720835566284522022-08-10T04:31:00.003-04:002022-08-10T04:36:02.104-04:00The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbgVmGXQPxZCR864dBZ0cmt3CIOMBGwjRNylWN6ZN5LlJbtuOW9NpMM59zAKZVj_Vpt9D2CI8OIGNlvvuRTOe6cHKaOb55yLSIisnbsiuyJuUX1FCnDrQIPPrL4uO41ynrYtgHslZ7OopfGCTtm8VTvM7xBVPDAF1XsZZSCvqDUoGmj-xbEfiXTEoH" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1048" data-original-width="756" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbgVmGXQPxZCR864dBZ0cmt3CIOMBGwjRNylWN6ZN5LlJbtuOW9NpMM59zAKZVj_Vpt9D2CI8OIGNlvvuRTOe6cHKaOb55yLSIisnbsiuyJuUX1FCnDrQIPPrL4uO41ynrYtgHslZ7OopfGCTtm8VTvM7xBVPDAF1XsZZSCvqDUoGmj-xbEfiXTEoH=w461-h640" width="461" /></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">Introduction, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Roger Teichmann</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Part I: Intention<br /></strong><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">1. 'On Anscombe on Practical Knowledge and Practical Truth,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Lucy Campbell</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">2. 'Intention with Which,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Charles F. Capps<br /></em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">3. 'Intention, Knowledge and responsibility,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Rémi Clot-Goudard</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">4. '"Practical knowledge" and testimony, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Johannes Roessler</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Part II: Ethical Theory<br /></strong><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">5. 'Anscombe's Three Theses After Sixty Years: modern moral philosophy, polemic, and "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Sophie Grace Chappell</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">6. 'Practical Truth, Ethical Naturalism, and the Constitution of Agency in Anscombe's Ethics,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">John Hacker-Wright</em><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">7. 'Criterialism and Contextualism,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Gavin Lawrence</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">8. 'Anscombe on Double Effect and Intended Consequences,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Cyrille Michon</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">9. 'Anscombe on </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Ought,</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Anselm</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"> </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Mueller</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Part III: Human Life<br /></strong><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">10.'Justice and Murder: The Backstory to Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">John Berkman</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">11. 'Anscombe on euthanasia as murder,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">David A. Jones</em><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">12. 'The Knowledge of Human Dignity,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Micah Lott</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">13. 'Life and Other Basic Rights in Anscombe,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Katharina Nieswandt</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">14. 'Anscombe: Sexual Ethics,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Duncan Richter</em><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">15. 'Linguistic idealism and human essence,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Rachael Wiseman</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Part IV: The First Person<br /></strong><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">16. 'The first person, self-consciousness and action,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Valerie Aucouturier</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">17. 'Anscombe and Self-consciousness,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Adrian Haddock</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">18. 'The first person and "The First person,"' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Harold Noonan</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Part V: Anscombe on/and Other Philosophers<br /></strong><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">19. 'Anscombe's Wittgenstein,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Joel Backström</em><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">20. 'Anscombe and Aquinas,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">John Haldane</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">21. 'Ethics and Action Theory: An Unhappy Divorce,' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Constantine Sandis</em><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;" /><span face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-size: 12.32px;">22. 'Anscombe and Wittgenstein on Knowledge "without Observation,"' </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #58595b; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px;">Harold Teichman</em></div><p></p></blockquote>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-42912098272394643312022-08-04T04:02:00.001-04:002022-08-04T04:04:48.958-04:00Schopenhauer on relative and absolute good<p>The following are selections from §65 of Volume I of <i><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf.pdf" target="_blank">The World as Will and Representation</a></i>.</p><blockquote><p>First, however, I wish to trace back to their real meaning
those conceptions of <i>good</i> and <i>bad</i> which have been treated
by the philosophical writers of the day, very extraordinarily, as
simple conceptions, and thus incapable of analysis; so that the
reader may not remain involved in the senseless delusion that
they contain more than is actually the case, and express in and
for themselves all that is here necessary. I am in a position to
do this because in ethics I am no more disposed to take refuge behind the word <i>good</i> than formerly behind the words <i>beautiful</i>
and <i>true</i>, in order that by the adding a “ness,” which at the
present day is supposed to have a special [solemnity], and therefore
to be of assistance in various cases, and by assuming an air of
solemnity, I might induce the belief that by uttering three such
words I had done more than denote three very wide and abstract,
and consequently empty conceptions, of very different origin
and significance. Who is there, indeed, who has made himself
acquainted with the books of our own day to whom these three
words, admirable as are the things to which they originally refer,
have not become an aversion after he has seen for the thousandth
time how those who are least capable of thinking believe that
they have only to utter these three words with open mouth and
the air of an intelligent sheep, in order to have spoken the greatest
wisdom?</p></blockquote><p>The above sounds like the kind of thing the later Wittgenstein, at least, might have agreed with. </p><blockquote><p>We now wish to discover the significance of the
concept good, which can be done with very little trouble. This
concept is essentially relative, and signifies <i>the conformity of an
object to any definite effort of the will</i>. Accordingly everything
that corresponds to the will in any of its expressions and fulfils
its end is thought through the concept good, however different
such things may be in other respects. Thus we speak of good
eating, good roads, good weather, good weapons, good omens,
and so on; in short, we call everything good that is just as we
wish it to be; and therefore that may be good in the eyes of
one man which is just the reverse in those of another. The
conception of the good divides itself into two sub-species—that
of the direct and present satisfaction of any volition, and that of
its indirect satisfaction which has reference to the future, i.e., the
agreeable and the useful.</p></blockquote><p>Compare Hume: "personal merit consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities <i>useful</i> or <i>agreeable</i> to the <i>person himself</i> or to <i>others</i>" <i>An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals</i>, 9.1</p>This idea of good seems very much like Wittgenstein's idea of relative goodness or goodness in the relative sense.<blockquote><p>It follows from what has been said above, that the <i>good</i>
is, according to its concept, ["something belonging to the relative"]; thus every good
is essentially relative, for its being consists in its relation to
a desiring will. <i>Absolute good</i> is, therefore, a contradiction
in terms; highest good, <i>summum bonum</i>, really signifies the
same thing—a final satisfaction of the will, after which no new
desire could arise,—a last motive, the attainment of which would
afford enduring satisfaction of the will. But, according to the
investigations which have already been conducted in this Fourth Book, such a consummation is not even thinkable.</p></blockquote><p>Wittgenstein might sort of agree with this, seeing as he thinks talk of anything absolutely good or good in an absolute sense is nonsense. But he does not say that goodness is essentially relative, nor that absolute good is a contradiction in terms. He focuses, rather, on what people who use such words are trying to say.</p><blockquote><p>If, however, we wish to give an
honorary position, as it were emeritus, to an old expression,
which from custom we do not like to discard altogether, we
may, metaphorically and figuratively, call the complete selfeffacement and denial of the will, the true absence of will, which
alone for ever stills and silences its struggle, alone gives that
contentment which can never again be disturbed, alone redeems
the world, and which we shall now soon consider at the close of our whole investigation—the absolute good, the <i>summum
bonum</i>—and regard it as the only radical cure of the disease of
which all other means are only palliations or anodynes. </p></blockquote><p>Here Schopenhauer too adopts the words "absolute good" for a kind of metaphorical use. That much is a bit like Wittgenstein in the Lecture on Ethics. But Schopenhauer relates the absolute good to the denial of the will, which Wittgenstein doesn't talk about.</p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-83184573427667405032022-07-21T06:55:00.002-04:002022-07-21T06:55:19.102-04:00Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, part two<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">He says: "Ethics is the
general enquiry into what is good." </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[In section 2 of the first
chapter of </span><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53430/53430-h/53430-h.htm#Sec_2" target="_blank"><i>Principia Ethica</i></a><i><span style="color: black;"> </span></i><span style="color: black;">Moore writes:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">So Moore sees himself as taking
on a broader enquiry or subject than most moral philosophers.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[But Wittgenstein goes broader
still.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now the first thing that
strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used
in two very different senses. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[It might not matter, but it's
not obvious that this would strike everyone very quickly. It is helpful that
Wittgenstein points it out.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I will call them the trivial or
relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the
other. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">In fact the word ‘good’ in the
relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined
standard. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[So what has been said about
'good' also goes for 'important' and 'right'.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Used in this way these
expressions do not present any difficult or deep problems. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But this is not how ethics uses
them. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Wittgenstein's idea of ethics is
not factual or naturalistic in this kind of way.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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’.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Something a <i>little </i>like
this happened with Wittgenstein. F. R. </span><span style="color: black;">Leavis
describes the first time he met Wittgenstein as follows. (See pp. 65-66
of “Memories of Wittgenstein” in Rush Rhees (ed.) <i>Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Personal Recollections </i>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.</span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><span style="color: black;">This was sometime in 1929, probably before the lecture,
which was given in mid-November that year.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%;">Contrast Anne-Marie
Søndergaard Christensen “The Institutional Framework of Professional Virtue” in
David Carr (ed.) <i>Cultivating Moral Character and Virtue in Professional
Practice</i>, Routledge, 2018, pp. 124-134. Deliberative excellence (<i>euboulia </i>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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Would he then say ‘Ah, then
that is all right’? </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Certainly not; he would say
‘Well, you ought to want to behave better’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[I think we have our answer here,
although, of course, people do say all kinds of things. Decency is not
inevitable.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Here you have an absolute
judgement of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative
judgement. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[So we have a fact/value
distinction. Stephen Mulhall points out that the name of the village is
actually </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantchester" target="_blank">Grantchester</a><span style="color: black;"> (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 </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_(2022_film)" target="_blank"><i>Men</i></a><span style="color: black;"> 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 </span><a href="http://languagegoesonholiday.blogspot.com/2018/04/grantchester.html" target="_blank">here</a><span style="color: black;">.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>The Problems of Philosophy</i>. These include Hume's <i>Enquiry</i>.
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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[This sounds a bit Cartesian, but
it's only part of a thought experiment or metaphor.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And suppose this man wrote all
he knew in a big book. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Does this include 2 + 2 = 4?
Possibly not.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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).]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">There are no propositions
which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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!’ </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But this again could lead to a
misunderstanding. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[As I hope I just explained.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Quite so.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Cf. Hume:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%;">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 (<i>A
Treatise of Human Nature</i>, 3.1.i).]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">The murder will be on exactly
the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– 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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">Note also</span><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><span style="color: black;">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 <i>Principia
Ethica</i>. Wittgenstein's audience, the Heretics, are generally pro-science
and not very pro-religion. But, presumably, they thought of themselves as being
ethical].<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">It seems to me obvious that
nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[And here Wittgenstein denies
that there can be any such thing as a science of ethics.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">That we cannot write a
scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime,
and above all other subject matters. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– Our words, used, as we use
them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning
and sense, natural meaning and sense.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">['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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– I said that so far as facts
and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good,
right etc. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[This clarifies, I think, what
"ethics is supernatural" means.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And let me, before I go on,
illustrate this by a rather obvious example. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Another metaphor and another
indication ("before I go on") that we are in some sense not getting
anywhere.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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) <i>obviously </i>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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now let us see what we could
possibly mean by the expression ‘The, absolutely, right road’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[It's hard to make sense of this
idea. How could <i>logical </i>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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And I want to say that such a
state of affairs is a chimera. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">No state of affairs has in
itself, what I would like to call, the coercive power of an absolute judge.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– 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? </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">What you would do then would be
to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">For, bearing this situation in
mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">One man would perhaps choose as
his stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer day. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Walking to Grantchester,
perhaps.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now in this situation I am if I
want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[<i>His </i>example will be
of <i>his </i>experience. We are trying to understand what <i>he </i>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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">(As I have said before, this is
an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more
striking) </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I believe the best way of
describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the
world. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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 <i>how</i> the
world is that is mystical but <i>that</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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 <i>ceteris
paribus</i> 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 <i>a priori </i>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." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">A person who is moved by the
almost godlike nature of human beings is not really <i>illogical </i>if
they then murder someone, nor does being so moved <i>cause</i> one
not to commit murder (necessarily), but there does seem to be <i>some</i> kind
of contradiction between the kind of artistic sensitivity required to
appreciate </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_a_piece_of_work_is_a_man" target="_blank">Hamlet's words</a><span style="color: black;"> 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, <i>wrong</i>, about destroying, or just harming, a
being that one is capable of wondering at.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">If what one wonders at is
existence itself then what seems wrong, or perhaps <i>should</i> 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: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">1. I must do what is
aesthetically necessary<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">2. Obeying my conscience is
aesthetically necessary<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">3. Therefore I must obey my
conscience<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And I am then inclined to use
such phrases as ‘How extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘How
extraordinary that the world should exist’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[The concrete, tractable
associate of the experience is not objects such as sunshine or trees but certain
sentences.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Why introduce another example so
quickly? Perhaps to increase the chances of people in the audience relating to
what he is saying.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I mean the state of mind in
which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever
happens’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.).]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now let me consider these
experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to
get clear about. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[We are to consider experiences but
can only do so by way of the linguistic expressions they give rise to, and
which define them.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And there the first thing I
have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences
is nonsense! </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[But these expressions don't make
sense!]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">If I say ‘I wonder at the
existence of the world’ I am misusing language. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[This is debatable, but let's see
where Wittgenstein goes with it.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">In every such case I wonder at
something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[We don't, of course, <i>only</i> 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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">To say ‘I wonder at such and
such being the case’ has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[This is a necessary, not a
sufficient, condition for intelligible surprise or wonder.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Now we are considering amazement
at something's existence, not its size.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But it is nonsense to say that
I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not
existing. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I could, of course, wonder at
the world around me being as it is. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Because it could have been
different, in the sense that we can imagine its being different.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But that is not what I
mean. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[So never mind all that.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I am wondering at the sky
being, whatever it is. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">One might be tempted to say
that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not
blue. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">["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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But then it is just nonsense to
say that one is wondering at a tautology. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Because the necessary condition
just described is not met? Or just because <i>of course </i>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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now the same applies to the
other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">We all know what it means in
ordinary life to be safe. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I am safe in my room, when I
cannot be run over by an omnibus.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I am safe if I have had
whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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."]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">‘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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Being pedantic, I think 'highly
unlikely' might be more accurate here than 'impossible', and we might ask
whether it is <i>nonsense </i>to<i> </i>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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Again this is a misuse of the
word ‘safe’ as the other example was a misuse of the word ‘existence’ or
‘wondering’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Says who? Well, it is an unusual
or non-standard use, I think we could agree.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now I want to impress on you
that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical
and religious expressions. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>Language, Truth and Logic</i>, 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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">All these expressions seem,
prima facie, to be just similes. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>like </i>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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now all religious terms seem in
this sense to be used as similes, or allegorically. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>seem</i> 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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But this allegory also
describes the experiences which I have just referred to. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Thus in ethical and religious
language we seem constantly to be using similes. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>accounts
of the meaning</i> 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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But a simile must be the simile
for something. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>is</i>, not
merely what it is like.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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."]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And so, what at first appeared
to be a simile, now seems to be mere nonsense.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– 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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">['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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Two things to think about here.
First, are they experiences? In the <i>Tractatus </i>Wittgenstein
talks about an experience that is no experience. (For more on this see </span><a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871321 " target="_blank">Michael Kremer</a><span style="color: black;">.) 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 <i>intrinsic </i>meaning or importance that they have. But,
Wittgenstein seems to be asking, how can this be?] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And so from what I have said
some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute
value. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>the</i> 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 <i>seem </i>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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>supernatural </i>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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 </span><a href="https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43811/hume-on-miracles.htm" target="_blank">what Hume says</a><span style="color: black;">.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">It obviously is simply an event
the like of which we have never yet seen. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Now suppose such an event happened. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[OK, we might think, but where is
this going?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Take the case that one of you
suddenly grew a lion head and began to roar. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 </span><a href="https://irl.umsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1197&context=thesis#:~:text=D.,-%C2%A9%20Copyright%202009&text=Wittgenstein's%20Tractatus%20Logico%2DPhilosophicus%20has,be%20said%20in%20three%20words.%E2%80%9D" target="_blank">the motto of the <i>Tractatus</i></a><span style="color: black;">? I think for now it is better not to be side-tracked by such
questions.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Certainly that would be as
extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[We might imagine more
complicated or surreal things, but I think this claim is true.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">And where would the miracle
have got to? </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">Also worth noting here is
Wittgenstein's pointing out that it is possible to mean more than one thing by
the term 'miraculous.'] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">This shows that it is absurd to
say ‘Science has proved that there are no miracles’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>possibility</i> 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 <i>might</i> 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 <i>a priori</i>. Which
might be fine, but it shouldn't be mistaken for proof.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">The truth is that the
scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a
miracle. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">For, imagine whatever fact you
may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">For we see now that we have
been using the word ‘miracle’ in a relative and an absolute sense. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">But what then does it mean to
be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– Now the answer to all this
will seem perfectly clear to many of you. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[This seems unlikely, but people
have thought something like the suggestion that follows.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– 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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">For all I wanted to do with
them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant
language. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>event</i>, 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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">This running against the walls
of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">– 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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 char</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit", serif;">acteristically
reach for to talk about such things is nonsensical. Consider, for instance,
Matthew 13: 45-46: <span style="background: white;">“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.] </span></span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">What it says does not add to
our knowledge in any sense. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-46784202202735955252022-07-21T06:43:00.000-04:002022-07-21T06:43:05.592-04:00Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, part one<p>[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 <a href="https://heritage.humanists.uk/the-cambridge-heretics/" target="_blank">t</a><a href="https://heritage.humanists.uk/the-cambridge-heretics/" target="_blank">he Heretics</a>. They were a pro-science, humanist organization led by C. K. Ogden. The text of the lecture and much more can be found <a href="https://cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/ludwig-wittgenstein-lecture-on-ethics.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. Other readings I recommend include Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen "Wittgenstein and Ethics" in <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Marie McGinn & Oskari Kuusela (eds.), </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein</span>,</em><span style="background-color: white;"> Oxford University Press (</span><span itemprop="copyrightYear" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box;">2011</span><span style="background-color: white;">) </span></span>and Stephen Mulhall "<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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.), </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">,
New York: Routledge, forthcoming. I also have a relevant paper forthcoming called </span>"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.]</p><p>
</p><p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Ladies and Gentlemen. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">Before I begin to speak about
my subject proper let me make a few introductory remarks. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[The immediately following, then,
is not really part of the talk proper.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[Some but not all? Cf. <i>Notebooks
1914-1916</i>: "My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of
expression," 8th March 1915]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[So is he going to be talking
about a difficult subject or not? Will precision and subtlety be called for?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 <i>his </i>meaning from understanding the meaning of
the words he uses to express it.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">The second difficulty I will
mention is this, that probably many of you come up to this lecture of mine with
slightly wrong expectations. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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 </span><a href="https://www.unioviedo.es/Teorema/English/Issues/XL2.html" target="_blank">Cora Diamond and Michael Kremer</a><span style="color: black;"> 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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[So he will not be talking about
something scientific or technical.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[What he intends to say will not
be superficial and will, he expects, be understood by at least some of the
audience.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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).</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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?]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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’. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">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. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #cc0000;">I will now begin. </span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black;">[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.]</span></p><p></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-8163853186630273842022-03-12T10:57:00.002-05:002022-03-12T10:57:57.873-05:00Moralism<p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Stephen Mulhall says that:</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., </span><i style="color: #222222;">Cora Diamond on Ethics</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">, p. 184]</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mulhall’s words might suggest
that vitality is a non-moral value, which in turn might lead one to think that
it is, after all, a value, and so could perhaps be added to a list of virtues,
or some such thing. This would go against his point about unruliness and the
importance of being open to it, however. His point, I take it, is not that
there are various values, some moral and some not, but that Wilson’s vitality
is a radically different kind of good from moral values. Hence Mulhall’s reference
to “turbulent heterogeneity”. We can write lists of heterogeneous values or
virtues, but doing so might obscure just how different some are from others.
There is something mysterious about Wilson’s vitality, as Diamond emphasizes.
Or perhaps the mystery concerns not so much his vitality itself as what is good
about this vitality. Why should it seem good that the “currents of life run
very strong in him” (Diamond, p. 210)? Not, surely, because such currents are beneficial
to social animals. It’s more mysterious than that, although connected with more
obviously normal virtue such as Wilson’s allegedly never complaining about his
lot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Diamond begins with a kind of
Rawlsian idea from D. A. J. Richards, according to which “we would accept, in
an appropriately defined ‘original position’, a moral principle about mutual
love ‘requiring that people should not show personal affection and love to
others on the basis of arbitrary physical characteristics alone, but rather on
the basis of traits of personality and character related to acting on moral
principles.’” (Quoted in Diamond, p. 198) Bernard Williams calls this “righteous
absurdity” and Rai Gaita calls it moralistic. It is less obviously terrible to me,
but I think I see the objection. I take Richards’ point to be motivated by the
thought that who someone is, what they are like as a person, should matter in
romantic and sexual attraction, not only what the shape or color of their body
is, as if they were an object (and as if, perhaps, a robot might be just as
good). This does not seem objectionably moralistic to me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's really the reference to
moral principles, and perhaps just to principles, that spoils things. Without
the word ‘principles’ Richards might be taken to be saying only that
personality and/or character should matter and that it shouldn’t be only bad or
immoral aspects of someone’s personality that attract one to them. Love based
on shared racism would not be good, for instance. Another problem with the idea
of moral principles here is the initial question that Richards sems to be
asking: “What moral principle about mutual love would be most acceptable?” Must
we have a moral principle for this? Does everything have to be governed by moral
principles?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Things change if the “personal
affection and love” in question includes the love between siblings or between a
parent and a child. If Richards is saying that no one should love their family members
just because they are their family members then that seems moralistic. Or if he
would object to love between the last two people on earth just because they
were the last two people on earth then that seems obnoxious too. But, as I say,
I think it is really the mention of “moral principles” that turns what might be
a good thought into a bad one.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's interesting to relate this
to what Amia Srinivasan has to say about the “<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex" target="_blank">right to sex</a>.” To what extent are
we responsible for who we find attractive? To what extent can we try to change?
As Srinivasan says: “[S]imply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or
an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over
something crucial.” [Note the word ‘simply’ here. Srinivasan <i>does</i> think it’s
true that no one is required to have sex with anyone else.] Personal
preferences, she says, are never just personal. That might be going too far—a preference
for people with long arms or eyes of two different colors might be purely idiosyncratic,
I would think, but her point is that common preferences are often either racist
or approximately as bad as racist preferences. A certain kind of rejection of
Richards’ idea might obscure this problem.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Srinivasan is eager to avoid
any coercion, going farther than I might in that direction. She says, for
instance, that “As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of
others as sacred.” Maybe this is true, as a matter of politics. But if a
middle-aged or older man prefers women much younger than himself and insists that they
be white and blonde, must we treat this as <i>sacred</i>? Better left alone maybe,
although if a close friend or one of his children wanted to suggest to him that
there could be something dodgy about his taste in women then I don’t think I
would object.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What Srinivasan is really
concerned about is not this, though. Instead she wants us to explore, both in
thought and practice, I think, the space between a moralizing dictation of
politically correct sexual preferences, on the one hand, and a complacent
conservatism about existing prejudices, on the other.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Openness to the turbulent
heterogeneity and unruliness of the world and its various goods is necessary
for such exploration to go well. Without it the exploration (and the thinking
it involves) either won’t happen at all or else it will take the form of
guilt-driven relationships (possibly only imaginary ones) that one has been convinced one ought to enjoy. What we need, it seems, is neither moralism nor complacency but a willingness to see what is
there to be found.</span></span></p><p></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-88967124117947927412022-03-02T08:01:00.001-05:002022-03-02T08:01:25.192-05:00More in response to Hamilton's review<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hamilton writes that:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;">Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;">Christensen is less preachy, it seems to me, than this might make her sound. As the back cover says, what she is doing is “to present an understanding of descriptive moral philosophy,” which is not the same thing as “telling us that we have to” engage in such a project. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that “adequate moral attention” (Christensen p. 88) is not desirable. The overcoming of “egoistic tendencies to wishful thinking” (Christensen p. 89, paraphrasing Murdoch) is necessary for an “accurate understanding of moral life,” Christensen says (p. 89). It is not something that she presents as a categorical imperative. Her focus is on what we will need to see things adequately, accurately, and “in their proper perspective” (Hannah Arendt, quoted on p. 90), as well as how we can understand “what will best serve the other person” (K. E. Løgstrup, quoted on p. 90). Hamilton seems to object not so much to the goal of seeing things accurately and in the right perspective—how could he object to that?—as to the emphasis on helping others. But Christensen’s focus is much more on the former than the latter, and she is detailing what we need if we want to do these things far more than she is recommending that we do them. Perhaps the objection is that she presupposes that we want to help others, but it’s hardly unreasonable for a book on moral philosophy and moral life to assume that its readers want to be moral. Or perhaps it’s the very reasonableness of the project that annoys Hamilton, but I find that I cannot imagine <i>philosophy </i>that doesn’t aim at being either reasonable or rational. And rationality without reasonableness seems worse than the kind of work that Christensen is doing and recommending to her readers.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;">It is also relevant that Christensen talks about exploring “different ways of living and thinking” (p. 90), so she is <i>not </i>committed to an exclusive concern with comfortable lives, even if she is perhaps writing primarily for (or talking to) people who live such lives. Hamilton’s examples of people who do not lead such lives reminded me of Hobart Wilson, whose story is told and discussed in Cora Diamond’s “<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/9/177/files/2008/04/diamondmoral-difference-and-distancespt1.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1646312274838000&usg=AOvVaw1kv-iVJa73n06aK49ad0Hs" href="https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/9/177/files/2008/04/diamondmoral-difference-and-distancespt1.pdf" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions</a>.” Implicit in Christensen’s work, it seems to me, is the suggestion that we find out about lives such as his, and bring appreciation of them into our lives. None of us knows Wilson, who died in 1981, but we can know the version of his life told by Chip Brown. Of this person, Stephen Mulhall writes:<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;">Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., <i>Cora Diamond on Ethics</i>, p. 184]<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;">Mulhall’s reaction is exactly the kind of thing, I take it, that Christensen is trying to encourage and enable us to have. She isn’t writing for people like Wilson, as far as I can see, but then he would hardly be likely to read a work of philosophy at all, even if it were written in a very different style. Is she perhaps guilty of writing without awareness of non-moral values? Well, maybe. Given the title of her book, naturally she focuses on moral values. But I don’t see that she rules out the existence of other values. Indeed, as I say, she provides very thoughtful and insightful advice on how to attend not to morality but to reality in precisely the kind of way that might best make one aware of non-moral values. So the criticism really seems to come down to the fact that Christensen did not write some other book on a different subject. And that just isn’t really a criticism that can be taken seriously except as an invitation to write another book. Which is no criticism at all. </p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-58962653827298088922022-02-24T19:16:00.002-05:002022-02-25T07:54:29.142-05:00Hamilton v. Christensen<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">Christopher Hamilton’s <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HAMASC-3" target="_blank">review of Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen’s</a></span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;"><a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HAMASC-3" target="_blank"> </a></span><i style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HAMASC-3" target="_blank">Moral Philosophy and Moral Life</a> </i><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: small;">is provoking, and not just of thought.</span><i style="color: #222222;"> </i><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">It feels like violence. Thinking about what he means and why I disagree is therapeutic, though, so I keep doing it. And it might be useful to me in other ways, since Christensen’s project (if that’s the word) seems so close to my own. If she is badly wrong then so am I, so I’d better pay attention to criticisms of her work. Hamilton’s criticisms are strange ones though: that Christensen is too right, and .... nothing. Let me explain.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">She is too right in the sense that “Most of the positions for which [her book] argues [are] so obvious that they hardly seem worth arguing for.” They <i>are</i> worth arguing for, however, Hamilton concedes, because so many moral philosophers take a very different view. “To that extent, Christensen’s book assembles a set of helpful reminders.” So, what she says is certainly correct (according to Hamilton) and yet underappreciated. What she offers are helpful reminders, and in this she is successful. This all suggests that her book was after all well worth writing.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Her work is largely one of synthesis, Hamilton suggests, of the work of people such as Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and Wittgenstein. But it isn’t only that (as I have tried to show in <a href="http://languagegoesonholiday.blogspot.com/2021/03/moral-philosophy-and-moral-life.html" target="_blank">my review of the book</a>) and this isn’t such an easy feat to achieve, as Christensen’s critical discussions of authors she only mostly agrees with shows.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Her work might not persuade the unsympathetic, Hamilton notes, but this is very rare anyway, as Hamilton also notes. So can Christensen be criticized for this? She still might persuade some people, and her work is anyway useful to the rest of us (as a set of reminders, for instance) if we pay attention to it in the right way.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Having criticized the book for being, in effect, too right, Hamilton goes on to say that Christensen’s correct views bring up two big problems. One of these is obscure and has several parts, so I will start with the other: Christensen’s style. Hamilton’s complaint is that “her style is that of mainstream analytic philosophy.” This is, allegedly, bourgeois and conventional. Would it be better if Christensen wrote in some unique style of her own? Well, maybe. It’s impossible to judge without knowing what the style in question might be. More to the point, if her goal is to try to persuade other analytic philosophers to be more receptive to the kind of ideas that she is promoting, then it makes sense to try to speak to them in their own language. And if her goal is to remind analytic philosophers of a certain persuasion of things they already believe about moral life and moral philosophy then, again, the language of analytic philosophy seems apt. It seems as though Christensen is being criticized for not having written a different book, rather than for having written the one she has written. “I don’t wish to be unfair,” Hamilton writes, but I think he is being so. Its not being something else is not really a criticism of Christensen’s book at all.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What of the other criticism, which I think also amounts to nothing? Hamilton begins to explain the problem he sees by mentioning egoism, but his concern is a bit obscure to me. Here is part of what he says:<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christensen’s writing expresses her own moral outlook, as she grants. Fine. But the issue is what that outlook is. Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The problem, I take it, is that egoism is good, actually. Hamilton writes: “I doubt that anyone would fall in love without a big dose of wishful thinking, and you certainly revel in your own self when you do fall in love.” What is the wishful thinking here? That the person one loves will love one back? Unrequited love still happens. Or is it that the person one loves is better, more lovable, than a neutral observer might recognize? But then that doesn’t seem egoistic. Or perhaps the wishful thinking is optimism about the future of the relationship, but (as the case of unrequited love shows) falling in love is not the same thing as being in a relationship. Maybe marriage involves wishful thinking, but it needn’t involve the kind of fantasy that people reject when they reject wishful thinking. People joke that second marriages are a triumph of hope over experience, but surely one can enter a second marriage knowing quite well what some of the dangers are and what it might take to make the marriage work. So I disagree with Hamilton about wishful thinking here. I also disagree with him about egoism.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Murdoch’s view of love is that it is the opposite of egoistic:<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (“The Sublime and the Good” p. 51)<b><u></u><u></u></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This seems true to me, although of course one could argue about it. It seems much more plausible than Hamilton’s counterclaim, which he seems to think is simply obvious. (Although, to be fair, he has limited room to defend his claims in a book review.)<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Do you revel in your self when you fall in love? I don’t think you do if the love is unrequited. And if it’s requited, don’t you revel more in the object of your love or the love that you share itself? The word ‘certainly’ certainly does not belong in that claim (“you certainly revel in your own self when you fall in love”), which I think is more likely to be false than true.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps there is egoism in love of one’s children, but I think, if there is, it is largely unconscious. My immediate reaction to his reference to the “obvious egoism that attaches parents to their children” is: <i>you’ve</i> obviously never had children! I don’t intend to check whether this gut reaction matches the facts. The point is rather that Hamilton’s claim about an allegedly obvious truth strikes me as obviously, or at least apparently, false. Raising young children is largely a matter of dealing with sleeplessness, excretion, and tedium. There is also something else, but rather than egoism I would say it is a sense of amazement that what started as a quantum of slime is slowly exploding in visible stages, achieving its own being. Wonder at this is tattooed into you (if you are lucky) over the years, and can spread into a sense of wonder at every living creature. (Although in the case of human beings, the delight is often more potential than actual.)<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hamilton is probably right that egoism is involved in writing books, but is this enough to show that egoism is not so bad? I would think that books written out of mere vanity are likely to be much worse than those written by people who feel that they have something to say and cannot resist saying it.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the course of this discussion Hamilton brings up Christensen’s reference to twin dangers involved in moral philosophy, namely those of deflecting from unacceptable or uncomfortable thoughts and reshaping them into something more bearable. He agrees, but thinks that a relevant (and problematic for Christensen?) example is the unpalatable truth that you can’t have virtue without vice. I don’t think this is a problem for Christensen, though, because I don’t think she denies it, and, more to the point, I don’t think it’s true. Obviously, it’s at least rare for anyone to have no vice, but must we think it is impossible? And even if it is impossible in practice, can’t perfect virtue be a reasonable or useful goal? When raising children, for instance, can’t we aim to encourage the development of as much virtue as possible, without trying to develop any vice? Even if we accept that they are bound to end up at least a bit vicious. And can’t we try to minimize the vice in our own character? And aren’t some people clearly more virtuous than others? I see no reason at all to believe that everyone must for some reason have an equal balance of virtue and vice (if that is the idea) so that every apparent improvement brings some hidden decline with it. But this also seems almost entirely irrelevant to what Christensen talks about in her book.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Something seems to be eating at Hamilton, but I haven’t yet put my finger on what it is, so let’s keep looking. It’s clear, he says,<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">that what Christensen has in mind is a world of denizens of materially comfortable, politically stable social worlds whose main concern is with family, career etc. – in other words, the bourgeois world she and her readers inhabit. In such a context, where we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern, such a view of morality perhaps makes sense. But we are all limited in our sensitivity and it’s just as well: if I were now truly morally discerning of the world, I’d be utterly overwhelmed by the monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering of it all. Of course, this is not what Christensen has in mind. But that’s my point.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is it really so clear that the “world of denizens” of comfortable worlds is what Christensen has in mind? If so, why? I don’t think she explicitly says that this is what she is talking about. If it’s obvious nevertheless that she is doing so, I would think that this is because the context in which she is writing and we are reading makes it clear that she is thinking primarily of the “world she and her readers inhabit.” But what’s wrong with writing about the world we live in? It doesn’t preclude others writing about other actual or possible worlds. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this context, a view of morality such as Christensen’s “perhaps makes sense,” Hamilton says. He blesses with faint criticism (or praises with faint damnation). After all, this <i>is</i> our context. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine any other type of context for human life than one in which “we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” People close to death might not care much about what others think of them, but children in school care about this sort of thing, adults in prison care about it too, and so does just about anyone who lives in a society. So to concede that in almost any situation other than a desert island, a death camp, or a hospice “such a view of morality perhaps makes sense” is to concede much more than the grudgingness of the concession lets on. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“We are all limited in our sensitivity” Hamilton rightly says. But some are more limited than others. And it is because of this limitation that all of us “are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” In other words, the world Christensen writes about (allegedly) is the one we all (or almost all) live in, for reasons that Hamilton well recognizes. So what is his complaint? That she doesn’t also address the “monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering” of the world? Or that she doesn’t address the difficulty of acknowledging all this? It seems reasonable not to address every issue in one book. It also seems to me that the only way to become <i>more</i> sensitive to the evils of the world is to do so in just the kind of way that Christensen recommends and to do so gradually (which is probably inevitable anyway, if it happens at all), so as not to be overwhelmed in the way that Hamilton seemingly has in mind. UPDATE: On second thoughts, presumably Hamilton is concerned about people who would be better off becoming, if anything, less sensitive to the evils of the world. I think they might benefit from becoming more sensitive to other, better things. Reduced sensitivity in general seems like a recipe for evil, unhappiness, or boredom. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So far I cannot see what the criticism of something other than her allegedly too normal writing style is meant to be. Here, perhaps, is a better idea of what Hamilton is trying to get at. This, he says, is “a problem with Christensen’s book: she sees only people. Where is there discussion of the man who needs to become <i>less</i> sensitive so that he can lead his <i>own</i> life?” Some well known and obviously terrible men come to mind, but Hamilton gives the following examples:<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the man who stakes his all on being a musician of the first rank and, failing this, finds his life empty and pointless and breaks his own hands (Larry Malik)? Or the person who needs conflict with others to feel that he is alive (Thomas Bernhard)? Or the woman who wants constantly to test herself in extreme situations (Elise Wortley)? Or the man who needs to consume others so that he can paint (Francis Bacon)?<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The fact that Christensen does not say much about such cases doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Her book does not tell us how to live, so it does not tell us not to be like any of these people. It’s about the relation between philosophy and life. It doesn’t say “Don’t be a tortured artist” or “Don’t read Nietzsche.” It certainly doesn’t say “Have no passion!” or “Conform!” One thing it does suggest is, in the spirit of Murdoch, paying attention to the reality of individual people. I think this would best be done in the case of the people named by Hamilton by considering each one individually rather than trying, as I am almost tempted to do, to say something about the value of passion or individuality. In that way what is good and what is bad in each of these lives could be brought out without damage or falsification. But that isn’t something that Christensen could be expected to do in her book, and it isn’t something that the book suggests in any way ought not to be done. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hamilton’s remaining criticism concerns the value of reading literature. Having complained that her agreement with Murdoch (among others, such as Cora Diamond) is too obviously correct, only to then reject utterly Murdoch’s very well known views on love, Hamilton now rejects Christensen’s agreement with Diamond on the potential value of literature for moral life. Literature doesn’t always promote morality, and people often fail to learn anything at all from it. But this does not contradict the claim of people such as Diamond that we <i>can</i> learn from it and <i>can </i>become better people as a result. And this is what Christensen says. So, as I have hinted already, I think Hamilton’s second criticism is a complaint that the book talks about its own subject matter and not something else. But that is to criticize it for nothing at all.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0px 0.25in 12pt 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I began by mentioning my anger, but I don’t mean only to bash what Hamilton says. I strongly disagree with him, but I would read a book on the issues he brings up. That just wouldn’t be Christensen’s book (which, of course, is Hamilton’s point, but I think this point is irrelevant as criticism of Christensen). </span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-65158849193041023972022-02-15T17:53:00.002-05:002022-02-15T17:53:38.258-05:00Niklas Forsberg on language and political extremism<p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/62966171/_The_Concept_Forming_Words_We_Utter_Extremism_and_the_Formation_of_a_Political_We_" target="_blank">This</a> is a really interesting (if depressing) paper about politically motivated manipulation of language. Here's the abstract:</p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This article takes off from Wittgenstein’s observation that “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, §65), and Murdoch’s related observation that “We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable” (Murdoch 2003, 260). I want to show that these two sentences contain an accurate observation about how our uses of words, and more importantly, how shifts in our uses of words, partake in transforming the moral landscape itself. Taking these two lessons to heart enables us to see more clearly that political and moral changes in public opinion are not simply rooted in people changing their opinions but must be traced back to conceptual changes that a community has “accepted”, as it were, unwarily. I discuss two examples of how the undercurrent of language has been altered with rather massive effects on the more familiar and visible level of “moral discourse”: the alt-right movement in Sweden, and political election strategies in Sweden.</span></span></p></blockquote>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-20979358315331815412022-01-16T10:52:00.000-05:002022-01-16T10:52:14.301-05:00The Wittgenstein Initiative and the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project<p> <a href="https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/">This</a> is well worth looking at:</p><blockquote>The <a href="https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/">Wittgenstein Initiative</a> is a Vienna-based international forum that aspires to make present in the city of his birth Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest thinkers and most remarkable individuals of the 20th century. We aim to demonstrate Wittgenstein’s present-day relevance in various areas of public and private life and bring his cultural legacy to the general public.</blockquote><p>As is <a href="https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page">this</a>: </p><blockquote>The <a href="https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page">Ludwig Wittgenstein Project</a> provides complete, well-formatted, downloadable, free books: the German or English originals are available as well as translations in multiple languages, some of which were purpose-made by our team.</blockquote><p> </p><p> </p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-67128336703233530792021-12-18T10:30:00.002-05:002021-12-18T10:30:45.564-05:00Picture of me<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgubOCYdzCoyhIJClf-8Q2fOqXLtPH6UcQYbOjkL5CJ7O5f-mhaYTboGRMezn9MLX-4iAohUKTD-zLPw258E8HAr6xzlp3omSWtqGFgxDAYmwaXNC8MpVUd40gGkjzf10MZleCGlLhw3EQmthp3bh--jwmatoHx0PfWZz71sQUe00FnxHuC_JZq9YTg=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="853" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgubOCYdzCoyhIJClf-8Q2fOqXLtPH6UcQYbOjkL5CJ7O5f-mhaYTboGRMezn9MLX-4iAohUKTD-zLPw258E8HAr6xzlp3omSWtqGFgxDAYmwaXNC8MpVUd40gGkjzf10MZleCGlLhw3EQmthp3bh--jwmatoHx0PfWZz71sQUe00FnxHuC_JZq9YTg=w427-h640" width="427" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This isn't really a blog post, sorry. Just an attempt to get a more recent picture of me on the internet in case anyone ever wants or needs one.</div><p></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-34293557342153118292021-09-15T17:26:00.003-04:002021-09-15T17:26:28.040-04:00British Wittgenstein Society TLP Centenary Lecture<p>This was not a lecture but three short presentations and a discussion, involving James Klagge, Richard Barnett, and me. You can watch it <a href="https://vimeo.com/605540917" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-36321093420110584322021-09-12T09:33:00.001-04:002021-09-12T09:33:08.059-04:00More links and free stuff<p>The <a href="https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page" target="_blank">Ludwig Wittgenstein Project</a> aims <span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #202122; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">to make available as many of Wittgenstein's works as possible free of charge and with a free licence". Find out more <a href="to make available as many of Wittgenstein's works as possible free of charge and with a free licence" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #202122; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">And there is news <a href="https://wittgenstein.world/?fbclid=IwAR3UFOG-pdZZM-OMP-XDnVS6b7k0gamdzef2_EfCxica22fhAdkx546VGjE" target="_blank">here</a> about a forthcoming <a href="https://wittgenstein.world/?fbclid=IwAR3UFOG-pdZZM-OMP-XDnVS6b7k0gamdzef2_EfCxica22fhAdkx546VGjE" target="_blank">Wittgenstein symposium in Croatia</a>, along with some other material about Wittgenstein (e.g. a short video and a blog post). </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #202122; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Both look like sites worth checking in on from time to time.</span></span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-86705572013750134012021-07-03T09:28:00.005-04:002021-07-03T09:28:50.094-04:00Free readings on the Tractatus<p>Mauro Luiz Engelman's <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-wittgensteins-tractatus/69683B904CEB346FFC2759D0817591C5">Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus</a> </i>is available to download for free until July 13th <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-wittgensteins-tractatus/69683B904CEB346FFC2759D0817591C5">here</a>. </p><p>And Joshua Eisenthal's <a href="https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/4818">article-length review</a> of Jose Zalabardo's <i>Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein's Tractatus </i>is <a href="https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/4818">here</a>.</p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-63643552585620491982021-06-03T17:23:00.003-04:002021-06-04T16:53:23.645-04:00Foolish peasants<p style="text-align: center;"> <span style="text-align: center;">I</span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">In Tolstoy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anna Karenina</i> Konstantin Levin tries to introduce various reforms
to improve the productivity and profitability of his country estate, but the peasants
are too stuck in their ways, either unable or unwilling to learn new methods,
and the reforms don’t work. Levin also tries to rationalize or make sense of
his life with a similar lack of success. Tolstoy seems to see the two projects
and their failure as related. In Chapter 10 of the last part of the novel he
writes of Levin that:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">He knew
he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire men under bond,
paying them in advance at less than the current rate of wages, was what he must
not do, even though it was very profitable. Selling straw to the peasants in
times of scarcity of provender was what he might do, even though he felt sorry
for them; but the tavern and the pothouse must be put down, though they were a
source of income. Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but
he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields; and though
it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on
his land, he could not keep their cattle as a punishment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">To Pyotr,
who was paying a money-lender ten per cent. a month, he must lend a sum of
money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants who did not pay their
rent, nor let them fall into arrears. It was impossible to overlook the
bailiff’s not having mown the meadows and letting the hay spoil; and it was
equally impossible to mow those acres where a young copse had been planted. It
was impossible to excuse a laborer who had gone home in the busy season because
his father was dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must subtract
from his pay those costly months of idleness. But it was impossible not to
allow monthly rations to the old servants who were of no use for anything.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Levin
knew that when he got home he must first of all go to his wife, who was unwell,
and that the peasants who had been waiting for three hours to see him could
wait a little longer. He knew too that, regardless of all the pleasure he felt
in taking a swarm, he must forego that pleasure, and leave the old man to see
to the bees alone, while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to
the bee-house.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Whether
he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far from trying to prove
that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk about it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Reasoning
had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing what he ought to do and
what he ought not. When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually
aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of
two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as
soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">So he
lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and what he
was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge to such a point that he
was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying down his own individual definite
path in life.</span></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="text-indent: 0.25in;">Levin is here close to suicide, so his situation is
hardly ideal, but a solution to all his problems (a solution other than suicide)
seems to be close at hand. Reasoning and thinking, looking for answers and
wondering whether what he is doing is right or wrong, is the source of his
problems. Not thinking about such things but simply getting on with his work in
the traditional way appears to be the answer.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-right: 0.25in; tab-stops: 6.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.25in;">In the next chapter,
a conversation with a peasant named Fyodor, who contrasts those who live for
their bellies with those who live for their souls, fills Levin with excitement:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">The
words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock,
suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of
disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind.
These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about
the land.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">He was
aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet
knowing what it was.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Not
living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything
more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own
wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are
attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for
God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I
understand those senseless words of Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I
doubt of their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I
understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more
fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have
I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole
world understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no
doubt and are always agreed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“And I
looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would
convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle,
the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides,
and I never noticed it!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Fyodor
says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All
of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but live for our belly. And all
of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but
must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and
millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor
in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their
obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing:
what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm,
incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the
reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“If
goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not
goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“And yet
I know it, and we all know it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“What could
be a greater miracle than that?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Can I
have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin,
striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and
experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so
delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and
incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down
in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and
lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Yes, I
must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at
the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle,
advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of
goat-weed. “What have I discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf
of goat-weed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above
for the beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“I have
discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force
that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free
from falsity, I have found the Master.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Of old
I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this
beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown
away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with
physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the
aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution.
Evolution from what? into what?—Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though
there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was
astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I
could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and
yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for
my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and
marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride,” he
said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of
blades of grass, trying not to break them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“And not
merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most of all, the
deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of
intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">And he
briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last
two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the
sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">Then,
for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was
nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his
mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life
so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or
shoot himself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">But he
had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had
even at that very time married, and had had many joys and had been happy, when
he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">What did
this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">He had
lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked
in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition
of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">Now it
was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he
had been brought up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“What
should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these
beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own
desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the
chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost
stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have
been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“I
looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my
question—it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me
by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that
knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all
men, <i>given</i>, because I could not have got it from anywhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">“Where
could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love
my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I
believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who
discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and
the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our
desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason
could never discover, because it’s irrational.”</span></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">This,
apparently, is what Tolstoy thought at the time is the meaning of life. Reason
leads to Schopenhauerian despair, although not necessarily to wrong living. A
consistent rational thinker would rob, lie, and kill. An inconsistent,
hypocritical one, will behave well but feel suicidal or as if life is
meaningless, and will ignore truths that they have known their whole lives. A consistent,
honest person will, instead, live irrationally and love their neighbor. This is
not arbitrary irrationality. It is rule-governed and time-tested. But it is
incomprehensible and expressible only in senseless words.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">Problems: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Can truths that we all
know really be inexpressible in language that makes sense?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Can it really be
irrational to believe such truths?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">A worry that some
people have about the idea that one cannot rationally decide what is the best
way to live but that one should, nevertheless, throw oneself into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something </i>wholeheartedly is that this
will lead to people becoming Nazis or joining ISIS. Tolstoy avoids this problem
but perhaps does so at the cost of committing himself to a very conservative
(though not in the sense that Nazis are very conservative) position.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Relatedly, does
Tolstoy implicitly compliment Thrasymachus too much by suggesting that his view
is indeed the rational one to take?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;">II<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in;"><span style="color: black;">In the story “Die klugen Leute” by the brothers
Grimm (translated as “Wise Folks,” although I would say “Clever People”)
invites a mixed reaction to some simple country folks. (Link: </span><a href="https://www.grimmstories.com/language.php?grimm=104&l=en&r=de">https://www.grimmstories.com/language.php?grimm=104&l=en&r=de</a><span style="color: black;">) One of them agrees to sell three cows on credit, security
for which is offered in the form of one cow’s being left with her until the
buyer returns with the money. This makes sense to the woman, so she accepts the
deal. Of course, the buyer has no intention of coming back, so he gets two cows
for free. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">In the next episode of the
story, the woman’s husband pretends to have fallen from heaven and cons a woman
into giving him money to pass on to her husband there. Of course, he intends
only to keep the money for himself. When this second woman’s son rides out to
find the man and ask him about heaven, he pretends to be someone else and
persuades the boy to give him his horse so that he can ride after the man from
heaven. In this way he gets a free horse as well as the money. But, the story
concludes, “you no doubt prefer the simple folks.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Two kinds of people are
contrasted in this story. The first kind is self-interested men who are cunning
and cruel. They are happy to lie and cheat in order to get what they want. The
main character, who is one such man, threatens his wife with a beating if she
does anything foolish. When he gets both money and a horse for free he
‘rewards’ her by postponing the beating. He is not likeable at all, but he does
appear to be genuinely happy at his success. He is not troubled by guilt.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">The other kind of person is
the two women and the boy. They sincerely believe in heaven, and are very
trusting of other people. They are also kind. Not only do they not threaten to
beat people, the second woman even stands in her cart so as not to flatten the
straw in it, which, she believes, would make it heavier for the cattle that
pull the cart. They engage in a kind of reasoning, but it is a nonsensical kind
of reasoning (a denser pile of straw is not heavier than a loose one, and a cow
is no security at all (let alone sufficient in the circumstances) when, until
he pays, the man leaving it is not its owner. Like the first kind of person,
these people are happy. They lose out in terms of property, but their faith
means that they do not know they have lost out. The second woman and her son,
for instance, believe that their money and their horse have gone to someone
they love in heaven. As the story says, we certainly prefer such people to the
cruel cynics.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Everyone would, presumably,
like to have plenty of the trusting people around. They will not cheat you,
and, if you want to, you can easily cheat them. You have much to gain and
nothing much to lose from their presence. Unless you marry one and they give
your cows away. But you wouldn’t prefer to marry someone who beats you.
Probably you would prefer to marry someone of the trusting kind, if you really
had to choose between these two types of person.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Which kind of person would you
rather be yourself though? It’s natural to resist the choice as overly simple,
but it’s also hard to imagine what a cross between the two would be. Most of us
probably are some sort of cross between the two, but it’s hard to imagine how
one could be such a thing without inconsistency. That is, we are all a bit
selfish and a bit altruistic, sometimes trusting and sometimes cynical, but
this looks like having a self-contradictory nature rather than anything that
presents a real third alternative. It is a bit of both, not evidence of another
option altogether. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="color: black;">Questions:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Is there a third
alternative after all that we might find if we looked harder?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">If both types are
happy and even use their own kind of reasoning (so that, in some sense,
perhaps, neither is more rational than the other), is there any reason to
prefer one to the other? Is it simply a matter of taste?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">What is the
significance of the fact that we prefer one kind to the other? Does it make it
rational to prefer to be a member of that kind? (I would say No, but there does
seem to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> kind of contradiction
in preferring one team but choosing to join the other.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Contrary to what I
implied in question 2, are the kind, faithful people objectively foolish and
not rational at all? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">If being rational
means reasoning correctly, by what standard can we judge who reasons correctly?
Is the answer, Tolstoy-style, that we have no choice but to use the only one(s)
we know?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">And do we have only
one standard of rationality? Rules of logic (e.g. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">modus ponens</i>) can seem like rules of a game, and there are lots of
games with lots of rules. Or, ignoring that line of thought, we might think of
rationality as purely instrumental, as only about means to some
non-rationally-determined end, or, alternatively, we might think of reason as
something that can help us choose ends as well as means. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Even if there are
competing conceptions of rationality or reason, might it be the case that we
ought to try to eliminate all but one. If it is a compliment to call someone or
some decision rational, ought we to resist calling Thrasymachus rational? And,
similarly, ought we to say that beliefs we favor are rational rather than mere
matters of taste? More strongly, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can </i>we
regard what we really believe as something like a mere matter of taste? (Cf.
Cora Diamond’s “The Problem of Impiety” p. 39: “</span>If you say, “I believe
that incest is absolutely ruled out, but I don’t believe the prohibition rests
on some rational justification; it’s simply what was passed down to me,” you
are, or so it would seem, undercutting your own claim genuinely to believe that
incest is ruled out.”)<span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;">III<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in;">Wittgenstein mentions the “Klugen Leute” when he talks about the people he
imagines selling wood in an unconventional way (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics</i> I §150 of the 1964
edition). The discussion begins conventionally enough. Wittgenstein says in
§141 that what he is doing is offering “remarks on the natural history of man”
and then, in §142, talks about teaching mathematics as part of various
techniques for accomplishing practical tasks: sharing out nuts, building a
house, selling piles of logs. If people only multiply or add in these specific
circumstances, and think of their calculations only as part of the process of
doing these specific things, are they not really calculating? Presumably they
are, even though their practice looks different from ours (in which, for
instance, we learn times tables in school).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Things start to get weirder in §147, when Wittgenstein
starts to ask questions about right and wrong (or right and more right):<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in;"></p><blockquote>These people—we should say—sell timber by cubic measure—but are they
right in doing so? Wouldn’t it be more correct to sell it by weight—or by the
time that it took to fell the timber—or by the labour of felling measured by
the age and strength of the woodsman? And why should they not hand it over for
a price which is independent of all this: each buyer pays the same however much
he takes (they have found it possible to live like that). And is there anything
to be said against simply giving the wood away?</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
There is an interesting shift here. The idea of selling wood by weight rather than volume does seem more correct, albeit perhaps unnecessary given the (I assume) more or less regular density of wood that might be sold in this way for firewood or small construction projects. If it weighs more, after all, there is more wood. But then, on second thoughts, what is the wood for? If it’s for burning, does dense wood burn as well? If it’s for construction, don’t the dimensions of each piece matter more than its weight? So the goals of the buyer come into play. As does the behavior of wood under various circumstances (e.g. how well does it burn when dense?, how much might it shrink or expand when left lying around waiting to be sold?, how much difference in cost might such things make?, and so on). It also matters a lot what people care about. Why weigh instead of measuring if measuring is easier and no one cares about the small difference in price that might result if we weighed instead?<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">But then people care about things other than cost and
what can be done with the wood. They care about justice, for instance. And they
have different ideas about what justice requires. There is certainly no easy
way to choose between these as long as all are practicable. Wittgenstein is
careful to bring in Tolstoy’s test of time: they have found it possible to live
like that.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Having raised the question of justice Wittgenstein
immediately abandons it:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Very well; but what if they piled the timber in heaps
of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the
area covered by the piles?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">And what if they even justified this with the words:
“Of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more”?</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<br />This does not seem just or practical to us, but, given that we have different ideas about the most just or most practical or most accurate way to sell wood, why shouldn’t we be open to other ways of doing it? Well, we aren’t (it seems). Perhaps we have the answer to question 5 above here. We might not be able to say why, but these people are behaving irrationally. It is at this point, in §150, that Wittgenstein comments: “(A society that dealt this way would perhaps remind us of the “Clever People” in the fairy tale.)”<br /><br />In what way might it remind us of them? Presumably in the sense that they engage <span style="text-indent: 0.25in;">in a kind of reasoning, or appear to do so, but not
one that makes sense to us. Or rather, they appear </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal; text-indent: 0.25in;">not </i><span style="text-indent: 0.25in;">to do what we call reasoning, but to engage in a kind of parody
or pseudo-version of it. They are, we might say, fools. (And Wittgenstein says
in §149 that he would try to show them that you don’t necessarily buy more wood
if you buy wood spread out over a bigger area. So his point is not that their
way is just as good as ours. He disagrees with them.)</span><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">But if they do remind us of the clever people then we
might ask whether we are like the amoral men in that story. We might wonder, in
particular, if there is something we are missing. Or if we can justify our way
of doing things, show it to be better than theirs and not simply the one we are
used to. And here “their way of doing things” would include not only how they
sell wood but also how they reject our attempts to convert them to our way of
thinking about how they sell wood. Obvious considerations would be whether they
seem to be happy, and whether their society functions. But if they are just as
happy as us and their society just as functional (as far as this can be
measured, given their apparent folly) then we don’t seem to be able to say much
except “How strange!” We might even wonder if they are morally or spiritually
better than us, as people sometimes wonder about people from other cultures,
although I doubt we could say anything to justify any such suspicion.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;">IV<o:p></o:p></p><p align="center" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in;">Above I posed four problems and seven questions. Here are the problems:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Can truths that we all
know really be inexpressible in language that makes sense?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Can it really be
irrational to believe such truths?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">A worry that some
people have about the idea that one cannot rationally decide what is the best
way to live but that one should, nevertheless, throw oneself into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something </i>wholeheartedly is that this
will lead to people becoming Nazis or joining ISIS. Tolstoy avoids this problem
but perhaps does so at the cost of committing himself to a very conservative
(though not in the sense that Nazis are very conservative) position.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 57.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 57pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo3; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Relatedly, does
Tolstoy implicitly compliment Thrasymachus too much by suggesting that his view
is indeed the rational one to take?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: black;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: black;">Here are the questions:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Is there a third
alternative after all that we might find if we looked harder?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">If both types are
happy and even use their own kind of reasoning (so that, in some sense,
perhaps, neither is more rational than the other), is there any reason to
prefer one to the other? Is it simply a matter of taste?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">What is the
significance of the fact that we prefer one kind to the other? Does it make it
rational to prefer to be a member of that kind? (I would say No, but there does
seem to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> kind of contradiction
in preferring one team but choosing to join the other.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Contrary to what I
implied in question 2, are the kind, faithful people objectively foolish and
not rational at all? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">If being rational
means reasoning correctly, by what standard can we judge who reasons correctly?
Is the answer, Tolstoy-style, that we have no choice but to use the only one(s)
we know?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">And do we have only
one standard of rationality? Rules of logic (e.g. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">modus ponens</i>) can seem like rules of a game, and there are lots of
games with lots of rules. Or, ignoring that line of thought, we might think of
rationality as purely instrumental, as only about means to some
non-rationally-determined end, or, alternatively, we might think of reason as
something that can help us choose ends as well as means. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 81.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in 3pt 81pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7.<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black;">Even if there are
competing conceptions of rationality or reason, might it be the case that we
ought to try to eliminate all but one? If it is a compliment to call someone or
some decision rational, ought we to resist calling Thrasymachus rational? And,
similarly, ought we to say that beliefs we favor are rational rather than mere
matters of taste? More strongly, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can </i>we
regard what we really believe as something like a mere matter of taste? (Cf.
Cora Diamond’s “The Problem of Impiety” p. 39: “</span>If you say, “I believe
that incest is absolutely ruled out, but I don’t believe the prohibition rests
on some rational justification; it’s simply what was passed down to me,” you
are, or so it would seem, undercutting your own claim genuinely to believe that
incest is ruled out.”)<span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">And here are my answers (but I won’t offer much
justification for them here):<o:p></o:p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;"><br /></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Problem 1: No. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Truths</i>
that we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> can be expressed in
language that makes sense.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Problem 2: No. It cannot be irrational to believe
something true.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Problem 3: Tolstoy is committed to a kind of
conservatism, but we need not be. We do inherit concepts and practices, but not
in a way that is necessarily problematic politically, morally, etc. Commitment
to what we all recognize as reason is not politically (etc.) conservative.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Problem 4: I think so, yes. We should not lightly call
bad things/people rational, nor call what we embrace irrational.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 1: I think not, but I cannot say that I have
looked very hard.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 2: I don’t think it’s simply a matter of taste
which we prefer (although taste itself is not such a simple or arbitrary
thing).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 3: The answer is in the question.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 4: The kind, faithful people are foolish in one
sense (given one definition of rationality), but at least deserve better than
to be called fools. Certainly those who take advantage of their nature should
not be praised as clever or rational without qualification.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 5: The answer is in the question, more or less.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 6: We seem to have more than one standard of
rationality. That’s probably all right as long as we keep the differences clear
in our minds. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.0pt; margin: 3pt 0in; text-indent: 0.25in;">Question 7: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
word ‘rational’ should probably be used as a compliment except when it is very
clear that we are using it in some other, limited (or technical) way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-68354068226264953642021-05-06T17:47:00.001-04:002021-05-06T17:47:07.587-04:00Fears and lumps<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/11CqZd3B8B8" width="320" youtube-src-id="11CqZd3B8B8"></iframe></div><p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">[The title of this post refers to Rorty's paper "Texts and Lumps," so here's Rorty describing experiences relevant to the rest of the post. But it isn't a post about Rorty, so you don't need to watch the video to understand what follows. And you certainly don't need to have read "Texts and Lumps."]</p></blockquote><p> </p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">If you said of someone: 'She has a mind, all right, she just never has anything to say', you would probably mean that the person is so unthinkingly conventional, or so cowed and terrified of expressing any thought of their own, that there is no point in talking to them, you get no real response.<o:p></o:p></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(<a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030184919" style="font-style: italic;">Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind</a>, p. 10 ) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent;">This is a really good book, but this sentence horrifies me. There is a sense in which it's true that some people are not worth talking to, but if you think about it from the point of view of the "cowed and terrified" person... We're in "All the Lonely People" territory here, or this bit of "If You're Feeling Sinister":</span></span></p><blockquote>Hilary went to her death because she couldn't think of anything to say<br />Everybody thought that she was boring, so they never listened anyway</blockquote><p>There are interesting questions about the ethics of social interaction, because there is such a thing as trying to keep a conversation going, and so of not trying hard enough to do so. There could be a gender aspect to this too. Tracey Thorn (in <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/28/my-rocknroll-friend-by-tracey-thorn-review-lindy-morrison-go-betweens-friendship">My Rock'n'Roll Friend</a></i>) says of Lindy Morrison and the men in The Go-Betweens that:</p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">She understands and appreciates the beauty that also comes out in the songs, but living and working with their introspection and angst is draining, exasperating, she thinks it is very self-indulgent boy behaviour. A woman wouldn’t get away with it. A woman has to try harder socially. Has to placate, keep things running smoothly, not make unnecessary demands.</span></span></p></blockquote><p>Still, there does also seem to be such a thing as not being able to think of anything to say. And something like a spectrum of social awkwardness with mild, perhaps even pleasant, shyness at one end and autism at the other. Autism is one of <a href="https://blogs.uoregon.edu/autismhistoryproject/topics/autism-the-term/">Eugen Bleuler's</a> "four A's" of schizophrenia (the others being alogia, ambivalence, and affect blunting). </p><p>A comment of Wittgenstein's on schizophrenia is well known:</p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">The greatest happiness for a human being is love. Suppose you say of the schizophrenic: he does not love, he cannot love, he refuses to love – where is the difference?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">“He refuses to . . .” means: it is in his power. And <i>who</i> wants to say that?!<o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Culture and Value</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, p. 87e.)</span></p></blockquote><p>He also has this to say about his own inability to express himself (not necessarily in social situations):</p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Often I feel that there is something in me like a lump which, were it to melt, would let me cry or I would then find the right words (or perhaps even a melody). But this something (is it the heart?) in my case feels like leather & cannot melt. Or is it only that I am too much a coward to let the temperature rise sufficiently?<o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Public and Private Occasions</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, p. 11) </span></p></blockquote><p>It is not clear to him whether the problem is a moral one or something for which he couldn't be blamed. But, we might ask, who would <i>want</i> to say it is in his power? (Perhaps an encouraging friend. Perhaps someone who has been hurt by his silence. Or perhaps the question should be left rhetorical.)</p><p class="MsoNormal">On another occasion he seems to have thought that he had a (perhaps unrelated) inability, not a culpable failing:</p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Although I cannot <i>give</i> affection, I have a great <i>need</i> for it.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(Wittgenstein quoted by Norman Malcolm, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Portraits of Wittgenstein,</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> p. 302)</span></p></blockquote><p> <span style="letter-spacing: 0.05pt;">And he knew he was not alone in having this need: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">I wish you could live quiet, in a sense, & be in a position to be kind & <i>understanding</i> to all sorts of human beings who <i>need </i>it! Because we all need this sort of thing very badly.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Portraits of Wittgenstein</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, p. 287)</span></p></blockquote><p>As for what people who have this kind of inability (or any other, for that matter) should think, Michael Kremer (paraphrasing Augustine, I think) is excellent on this:</p><p><span style="letter-spacing: 0.05pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="letter-spacing: 0.05pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">[P]ride </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">judges that God could have, and so should have, made me better than I am, second-guessing God's wisdom and trying to replace it with human wisdom. Humility, on the other hand, is acceptance of what I am as good enough. This is combined with gratitude to the Creator for my existence, an attitude that implies the recognition that if God saw fit to create me, I must have been worth bringing into existence.</span></blockquote><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"></span><p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="letter-spacing: 0.05pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">(“The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense”, </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">pp. 48-49)</span> </p></blockquote>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-36167373918725875842021-04-30T07:35:00.000-04:002021-04-30T07:35:03.563-04:00Logic and Value in Wittgenstein's Philosophy<p><span style="background-color: white;">Peter Stiers’
“Logic and Value in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy” in </span><i>Philosophical Investigations</i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14679205/2021/44/2" title="View Volume 44, Issue 2"><span color="windowtext" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Volume <span class="val">44</span>, Issue
<span class="val">2</span></span></a> <span style="background-color: white;">April
2021 Pages 119-150 is worth reading, although I don’t know how much of it
I agree with.</span></p><p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;">Here’s the
abstract:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">In <i>Tractatus
Logico</i></span><i><span style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e; font-family: "Cambria Math","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Cambria Math";">‐</span></i><i><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Philosophicus</span></i><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"> (TLP),
Wittgenstein gave ethics the same semantic status as logic. This paper first
investigates this claim from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s lifelong
semantic framework. This reveals that ethical sentences are meaningless
expressions, which can only be used to ostensively point out conditions of
meaningfulness. Secondly, the paper assesses the implications of this
conclusion for understanding the seven cryptic remarks on value and ethics in
TLP. Using the connection between will and value in TLP and will and sentence
interpretation in <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>, it is suggested
that Wittgenstein held lifelong views on value and ethics.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">And
here are the parts that seem most questionable to me:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Asking
which ethical attitude is the right one makes no sense, because “we do not
know… how it would be determined, what sort of criteria would be used, and so
on.”</span><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phin.12292#phin12292-note-1016_note_15" title="Link to note"></a><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"> [And now another quotation from Wittgenstein:] “[S]uppose I say Christian ethics is the
right one. Then I am making a judgment of value. It amounts to <i>adopting</i> Christian
ethics. It is not like saying that one of these physical theories must be the
right one. The way in which some reality corresponds — or conflicts — with a
physical theory has no counterpart here.” (pp. 123-124)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">If
saying that Christian ethics “is the right one” makes sense, which I take
Wittgenstein to imply here, then surely it makes sense to ask which ethical
attitude is the right one? It would not make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the same kind of sense</i> that it makes to ask which physical theory
is right, for instance, but that doesn’t make it nonsense. Say I am telling
students about various ethical attitudes, views, and theories, and one of them
asks me which one is right. They <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">might</i>
be confused, but they might not be. They might mean: “which one do you live
by?” And then I might name any of them and make perfectly good sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">To be
fair to Stiers, on p. 124 he says only that “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in a way</i> [my emphasis], it makes no sense to ask whether” an
ethical sentence is true or false, right or wrong. Which is what I think he
should have said all along.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><br /></span></p><p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Here's more:</span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Now
suppose that Wittgenstein, when confronted for telling a preposterous lie,
would similarly respond that he knows he behaved badly but did not want to
behave any better. In such case, we would admonish him by saying, “you <i>ought</i> to
want to behave better.” The analogy of the circumstance of this utterance to
Moore’s insistence that his hands exist or to the chess player's holding up the
rook is clear: it is an ostensive pointing out of the rules of the game. This
demonstrates that ethical utterances do have a use and, thus, are part of the
practice in which language has its place. Like logical sentences, they are not
nonsensical because they have an unequivocal interpretation in the context of
the language</span><span style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e; font-family: "Cambria Math","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Cambria Math";">‐</span><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">game to which they belong.
(p. 128)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">I think
it’s fair to wonder here what counts as an ethical utterance. Such utterances are supposed
to have a use in a practice, so that saying something like “You should not lie”
is reminding someone of the rules of the game. I think this is one use of
sentences like that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">But
what about “Abortion is wrong” or “Abortion is not always wrong”? A person
might say either of these as a reminder to someone of what they already
believe. But that is not the only use these sentences can have. They can also
be used as part of an attempt to change someone else’s mind. Or (probably in modified form) as slogans
chanted by a group whose identity is defined partly by its stance on abortion.
Or, no doubt, in other ways too (as examples in a blog post, say). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">And
then there are similar-looking sentences that aren’t a reminder of anything,
such as “In this paper I shall argue that robots have moral rights.” Even if
one agrees with this thesis, it isn’t part of a practice (except the practice
of doing applied ethics). The kind of robot that might be thought to have rights either doesn't exist yet or doesn't play a big enough part in enough people's lives for there to be a practice of recognizing their rights. But I wouldn’t call the thesis statement about robots' rights nonsense for this reason. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Stiers again:</span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">“we
cannot understand someone who does not subscribe to the truth of these ethical
sentences.” (p. 129)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="volume-issue" style="background: white; line-height: 13.15pt; margin-bottom: 3.75pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 3.75pt; margin: 3.75pt 0.25in 3.75pt 0in; tab-stops: 6.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">I think
this is probably true of certain ethical utterances. If someone said that
murder is OK I would wonder what they meant. But students have a tendency to
say things like “Technically murder can be right” when they mean that war or
capital punishment can be justified. So I wouldn’t rush to call even the claim
that “murder is OK” nonsense without some further clarification. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">And surely we can understand people who disagree with us on
abortion or robot rights, even if we don’t always do so. A nice example of this
kind of thing is </span>Brandon Boulware on coming to accept his daughter’s
being trans:<span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="color: #767676; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h60YLGDJ6n0" width="320" youtube-src-id="h60YLGDJ6n0"></iframe></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">
He certainly seems as though he can understand people who
don’t share his view. (Which is not to claim, of course, that he can understand
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal; text-align: left;">all</i><span style="text-align: left;"> of them. Some of them might have
very different views or ways of viewing things.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Last one:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">Just as the logical insight inherent in a tautology is <i>recognized</i> by
someone who knows language, the ethical aspect in ostensively uttered ethical
propositions is recognized by someone who already has these practical insights.
Thus, ethics, as well as logic, is ineffable. Moreover, all “moral” discussions
must be of the form of an ostensive collision between forms of life. (p. 132)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in; tab-stops: 6.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">I think
I want to question the word ‘already’ here. Say I am witnessing an event where
pro-choice and pro-life protestors are waving signs and shouting slogans.
Imagine I am undecided about the ethics of abortion, or pro-life but with some
doubts. Now someone shouts “A woman has the right to control her own body!” And
I think, “You know what? That’s right! She does.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in; tab-stops: 6.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">I doubt
this happens often, but doesn’t it seem possible? The pro-choice way of framing
the issue invites me to see it a certain way, and when I try out this way of
looking at it, suddenly I seem to see clearly. (It could go the other way, too,
of course, with the pro-life view, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a</i>
pro-life view, seeming to make sense of the whole issue to someone.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in; tab-stops: 6.25in;"><span face=""Arial","sans-serif"" style="background: white; color: #1c1d1e;">I’m not
sure I would call this a collision of forms of life. But perhaps it’s good to
think of the abortion debate as a struggle within our form of life.</span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-87842300721766548042021-04-23T07:39:00.006-04:002021-04-23T07:39:43.085-04:00The Significance of the Tractatus<p>Blimey, this looks good:</p><p><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #212121; font-family: "Britannic Bold", sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 14pt;"><b>teorema</b> </span><b style="color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 14pt;">Vol. XL/2, Spring 2021</span></b></p><p align="center" class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></b></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 14pt;"> Table of Contents</span></b></p><p align="center" class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></b></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 13pt;">The Significance of the <i>Tractatus</i></span></b><b><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 13pt;"></span></i></b></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 13pt;">Guest Editor: </span></b><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">José Luis Zalabardo</span></b><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 13pt;"></span></b></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a name="x__Hlk69997332" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span></a><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> <b>J. L. Zalabardo</b>, </span><i><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">Introduction</span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871309" id="LPlnk754579" previewinformation="1" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871309</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> <b>J. Gombin</b>, </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">Simplicity and Independence in Wittgenstein’s </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">Tractatus</span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> </span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871310" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871310</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> <b>N. M. Mabaquiao, Jr</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">, <i>Wittgenstein’s </i>Objects<i> and Theory of </i></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">Names in the</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> Tractatus</span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871311" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871311</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">G. Nir</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Are Rules of Inference Superfluous? Wittgenstein vs. </i></span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">Frege and Russell</span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871312" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871312</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">J. A. Forero</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">and <b>M. J. Frápolli</b>, <i>Show Me. On Tractarian Non-Representationalism</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871313" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871313</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> <b>O. Kuusela</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Wittgenstein’s Grundgedanke as the Key to the </i>Tractatus<i></i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871314" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871314</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">A. I. Segatto</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Judgment, Nonsense and the Unity of the Proposition: Revisiting Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Russell</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871315" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871315</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">E. Pérez-Navarro</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Fregean Themes in the </i>Tractatus<i>; Context </i></span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">Compositionality and Nonsense</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871316" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871316</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">V. Sanfélix</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, Tractatus<i> 5.6-5.621</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 5pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871317" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871317</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">J. Fairhurst</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>The Ethical Significance of the </i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871318" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871318</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">R. Henriques</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>The </i>Tractatus<i> as an ‘Exercise in Kierkegaardian Irony</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871319" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871319</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> <b>C. Diamond</b></span><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Wittgenstein’s ‘Unbearable Conflict’</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871320" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871320</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="DE" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> <b>M. Kremer</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Cora Diamond on</i> “<i>Wittgenstein’s ‘Unbearable Conflict’”</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871321" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871321</a> </span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Garamond, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">•</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;"> <b>C. Diamond</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt;">, <i>Reply to Michael Kremer</i></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 4pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> <a href="https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871322" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871322</a></span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria, serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 9pt;"> oooo00oooo</span></b></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Britannic Bold", sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont;"> </span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 11.75pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Britannic Bold", sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont;">teorema</span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont;"> </span></b><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;">is pleased to announce that its contents from 1971 to the current issue (included) are available for FREE DOWNLOAD through the Internet website <</span></b><b><u><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"><a href="http://www.unioviedo.es/Teorema" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">www.unioviedo.es/Teorema</span></a>></span></u></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"></span></p><p class="x_MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 11.75pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;">Hard copies</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;">can be obtained by annual subscription (three issues a year), or purchased individually, from the Spanish publishers KRK </span><b><u><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"><a href="http://www.krkediciones.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #0563c1;" target="_blank">http://www.krkediciones.com</a></span></u></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif, serif, EmojiFont;"></span></p><div><b><u><br /></u></b></div>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-49968915846805984112021-03-11T07:49:00.000-05:002021-03-11T07:49:11.366-05:00Moral Philosophy and Moral Life<p>Review of <i><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/moral-philosophy-and-moral-life-9780198866695?q=moral%20philosophy&lang=en&cc=us#" target="_blank">Moral Philosophy and Moral Life</a></i> by Anne-Marie Søndergaard
Christensen, Oxford University Press, 2020</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">I
was hoping that someone would ask me to review this book, but they didn’t, so
I’m just reviewing it for my own sake. If I read a book without writing about
it, it tends to go in one ear and out the other. I’d like this one to stay in
my head.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Roughly
speaking, the book is a kind of synthesis of all the best work </span><span style="background-color: white;">(e.g. by Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond)</span><span style="background-color: white;"> that has been done
in the last seventy years or so on what moral philosophy (aka ethics) is and
should be. This makes it
sound like a compilation, which in a way it is, but only in the sense that the
great pyramids are piles of rocks. Christensen seems to have read everything
worth reading on the subject (which is a lot), understood it all (which is
rare), and seen how best to fit it all together, including where to make
necessary cuts, additions and adjustments. Respect for Christensen (and myself)
requires critical engagement with her ideas and arguments, so I’ll try not
simply to agree with everything she says, but I can’t muster much disagreement.
In what follows I’ll try to provide a sense of what the book is about by
questing, Quixote-style, for something to take issue with. Or, to put it
perhaps less absurdly, I will try to apply some Cartesian acid of doubt and see
what remains. The bottom line is that it is very acid-resistant. The second to
bottom line is that I am going to get very nit-picky at times, but you should
remember if you read on that my attempts to find fault all fail. In short, it’s
a very good book indeed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">The
nature of the work is reflected in the cover, which shows what I think is <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/egon-schiele/house-with-shingles-1915" target="_blank">EgonSchiele’s “House with Shingles”</a>. The house looks as though it has been added to
over time, perhaps by different owners, so that there is a sense of the work of
construction’s having been done collectively and not all at once. It is a large
and appealing house. Similarly, Christensen’s work brings together ideas and
arguments from various philosophers, mostly from recent years but going back as
far as Aristotle. She combines them to create a capacious and attractive
account of what moral philosophy should be, and how it can relate to our moral
lives. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Christensen’s
goal, which is in some ways more modest than her title might suggest, is “to
present <i>a suggestion</i> for a renewed conception of moral philosophy
that is valuable in its own right and may also influence debates about the role
of moral theories and moral philosophy in relation to our moral lives.” (p. 3) What
her book is responding to, without necessarily claiming to provide a complete
response, is: “The challenge […] to present a substantial alternative that can
replace the twentieth-century view of moral philosophy as a theory-developing
science. “ (p. 6)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Instead
of telling us what to do, or providing some sort of mechanism for producing such
instruction, moral philosophy should be descriptive, she argues. This might
seem disappointingly unhelpful, but she offers a nice description of how moral
philosophy could be useful even while being purely descriptive and (in some
sense) leaving everything as it is: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">philosophy
works on our attention, to give us a clearer view of moral life but also to
bring us to notice what we tend to overlook, or what we have never before
noticed as being of moral importance. Moral philosophy aids our orientation in
moral life in a way that is somewhat similar to the way that for example maps,
roads signs, aerial photographs and written descriptions may help our
orientation in a landscape, and a descriptive approach is in this way meant to
enable an understanding of moral life that reveals its many different features
and their vital importance to us. (p. 10)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Later
she says that “there are at least three ways in which descriptive moral
philosophy is practical, namely in furthering our moral orientation, our moral
attention, and our moral development” (p. 201) Such description is not neutral,
as might be thought. It is itself a moral task, requiring a sense of what
matters to moral thinking and moral life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Her
argument for rejecting the idea of moral philosophy as (nothing but) normative
theory begins with the fact that both Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe posed
serious challenges to this conception of moral philosophy in the 1950s (specifically
Murdoch’s “Vision and Choice” in 1956 and Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” in
1958). Summarizing what she sees as the key points of these papers, at least as
far as her immediate project goes, Christensen notes that:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">both
Murdoch and Anscombe criticise contemporary moral philosophers for being unduly
generalising, for reacting to the lack of an authoritative moral framework by
seeking a foundation where no foundation is available and for simply dressing
up their own favourite moral prejudices and conventions as moral theories.
These criticisms have resounded through moral philosophy since the two
pioneering articles were published (p. 19)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">The
fact that criticisms have been made does not mean much on its own, of course,
but the response has not been sufficiently impressive. Martha Nussbaum’s
defence of moral theory, or moral philosophy as moral theory, for instance, fails
to address some criticisms of moral theory, instead focusing on what would
amount to criticisms only of bad theory. Or so Christensen argues. For
instance, Nussbaum mentions the criticism that moral theory offers crude
guidance, which Christensen seems to take to mean that theory allegedly gives
bad advice, which it sort of does, but I think maybe Nussbaum’s idea, or the
idea she is trying to capture and defend theory against, is that theory gives
overly simple or insufficiently nuanced advice, such as never lie or always
return weapons you have borrowed to their legal owner. Some critics of moral
theory think it is in the nature of a moral theory that it will always be
liable to problems of this sort, which involve undesirable inflexibility in
response to the details of particular circumstances. In this sense, allegedly,
even the best moral theory—not only a bad one—will give crude advice. (Whereas
Christensen writes that: “Nussbaum says that moral theory is criticised for
giving ‘crude guidance’, but it seems unlikely that this point would be raised
by theory-critics; it is rather a point of criticism that a proponent of one
theory would raise against another, different and competing theory” (p.33.)) So
it is possible that Christensen has misconstrued Nussbaum’s point here—though
also possible that she hasn’t (it might just as well be me who is misconstruing
Christensen)—but Christensen has much more to say against Nussbaum’s defence of
theory, and she takes up (and defends) precisely this kind of concern about
inflexibility later in the book. In other words, if she is wrong here then it
doesn’t matter in the end. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">The
strongest pro-theory kind of view “allows theory to require revisions in our
moral understanding if such an understanding does not correspond to the
theory’s requirements” (p. 37) Against this view, Christensen draws on the work
of Bernard Williams, who:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">opposes
the strong view of the authority of moral theory on the grounds that we cannot
provide a universally justified foundation of theory that would authorise a
revision of our moral convictions, to which he adds the stronger point that the
aim of moral thought is not to live up to certain theoretical requirements, for
example that of internal consistency, but to allow us to build a framework for
a liveable life. (p. 37)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">To
this she adds a point from Julia Annas: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">we should
be very sceptical of any conception of morality according to which what is
required of us morally is that we should act or think in accordance with
standards imposed on us from outside. This idea is problematic because it
misconstrues a basic feature of the moral, namely that we always ourselves bear
responsibility for making our own judgements, and thus it seems likely to
impede the development of our own abilities of moral discernment, judgement,
and critique. (p. 37)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">I
wasn’t immediately sure that I agreed with Annas about this. It’s true that we
are responsible for making our own judgments, but must we be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very</i> skeptical of conceptions of
morality that see standards as being imposed on us from outside? For instance,
as being commanded by God? Or as being required by what we might call the
nature of things? Where, for instance, does the idea come from that I must not
thwart your will for the sake of my own? Perhaps ‘nowhere’ is the right answer
(we shouldn’t be looking for a place if we want to understand the source of
ethics), but ‘from our community’ or ‘from your reality as a fellow being’ seem
like reasonable attempts at an answer. Christensen shows considerable sympathy
for the former of these answers (‘from our community’), at least, so once again
I don’t think I’m seriously disagreeing with her here. A lot probably depends
on exactly what meaning, or what weight, we put on the words ‘standards’ and
‘imposed’. To the extent that I adopt a standard, I don’t get to use the excuse
that it was imposed on me by my parents or society (or God). And, even more in
Annas’s and Christensen’s favor, Annas is talking about the kind of moral
theory that offers a decision procedure to tell you what to do. (See <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289283376_Intelligent_Virtue" target="_blank">Annas p.33, here</a>.</span><span style="background: white;">) So it’s a particular kind of standard imposed from
outside that she is arguing against (or a particular sense of ‘outside’, one
enabling the shifting of blame or shirking of responsibility, that is
problematic), and this is the very kind of thing that Christensen is arguing
against too. So, once again, there is nothing to disagree with here after all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Another
point I wondered about is Christensen’s use of Lars Hertzberg’s argument against
moral expertise: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">a moral
question—Hertzberg’s example is that of a woman considering whether she should
have an abortion—is always a question for a particular person in a particular
situation, and the answer will always have to consider this context. In the
example, the woman’s answer will have to take into account her specific moral
commitments and her particular situation, and her decision should be shaped by
the way she relates to this type of moral question as well as her commitments
and values. This also means that even if the woman finds that she has reached
the right decision about what to do, we will find it understandable if she is
still reluctant to claim that her reasons are valid or authoritative for other
women facing a similar choice. Even if another person finds that the woman’s
decision is the right one, she may still not be able to make the same decision,
to integrate it into her own life, to live that kind of life. (p. 39)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">I
agree that, “Because of the normative character of moral questions, the answers
to such questions are to be judged by <i>moral</i> standards, for
example whether our answers express something that we are seriously committed
to and that we have integrated into our moral lives.” (p. 39). And the idea
that a moral question is always a particular question for a particular person
sounds right. But can’t we, nevertheless, oppose all actions of a certain kind
(slavery, torture, etc.)? At least in advance of finding ourselves in some
especially terrible situation that makes us question even our most basic moral
commitments? For instance, isn’t it possibly commendable for someone to be
committed to the Ten Commandments in a way that resists adding anything to them
about context? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Take
the examples of being committed never to lie and being committed never to
discriminate against a member of a disadvantaged minority on the grounds of
race. (See, e.g., <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=8tjmC-a_HL4C&pg=PT212&lpg=PT212&dq=roger+teichmann+gypsies&source=bl&ots=sPXmk4RgZs&sig=ACfU3U3iTV8G2cvq0nBzsnTdN1ts2_g_Dg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD7_u-o6bvAhVIGVkFHaLABoQQ6AEwAHoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=roger%20teichmann%20gypsies&f=false" target="_blank">Roger Teichmann here</a>.) </span><span style="background: white;">It is true that exactly what one does will always
take into account the particular situation one is in. How could it not? But if
we were to add words like “always taking the specific context into account” to
these commitments the effect would seem to be either nothing at all (in which
case why add them?) or else a dilution of the commitment itself, as if an
excuse for breaching it were being built in. Which is not to say that either
Hertzberg or Christensen is wrong, but it is to say something about how I think
their points ought to be taken. We need to contextualize contextualization,
perhaps, or at least not take arguments for considering things in context out
of the context in which those arguments occur. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">With
that in mind, maybe I should address the original example of abortion. I have
introduced other examples because I agree with Hertzberg and Christensen when
it comes to abortion. But I think this means that I disagree <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">morally</i> with pro-life people on this issue,
not that they are missing some general, purely philosophical, point about the
importance of context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Still,
I agree with Hertzberg’s and Christensen’s larger point that, “The idea of
moral expertise seems attractive to us, because it allows us to engage in a
form of <i>moral escapism</i> by offering us a way in which we can
avoid confronting our fundamental moral responsibility for our decisions.” (p.
39) And since the example of the woman wondering about having an abortion was
brought up precisely in order to support this idea about moral expertise, I
don’t think I count as really disagreeing with what Christensen is saying here
at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">She
has more to say about general moral principles later in the book: “Even if
general principles play a role in coming to the right moral understanding of a
situation and thus to the right moral decision, the application of moral
principles will always rely on some form of judgement of the particular case at
hand.” (p. 77) It is clear that she does not at all deny that general
principles have a role to play. Her point is much more that they alone are not
enough. And that seems right.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">But
this is a difficult kind of truth to handle without doing damage, I think, so I
want to say a bit more about it. (I don’t think I will be contradicting
Christensen here, but the discussion might show what she is doing in a non-obvious
and therefore possibly useful light.) What she says about general moral
principles makes me think of two examples from Elizabeth Anscombe. One is her
saying that “if someone really thinks, <em>in advance</em>, that it is
open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of
the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue
with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” (“Modern Moral Philosophy”) The other is
the story that Rosalind Hurtshouse relates about Anscombe describing a
real-life case of a woman hiding Jewish people from the Nazis when the SS came
to the door. “Clearly, she must not lie,” Anscombe says, shockingly. (The woman
feigned madness so as to embarrass the young SS officer, thereby saving her
guests and avoiding the sin of lying. See my <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NutAS3DkLH4C&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=%22Rosalind+Hursthouse+tells+an+interesting+story%22&source=bl&ots=R_9oKCE3PI&sig=ACfU3U0PulycySAWM28q5KOkshpqTUplfA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjry-6cpabvAhU3GFkFHZwKCREQ6AEwAHoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Rosalind%20Hursthouse%20tells%20an%20interesting%20story%22&f=false" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy</i> pp. 21-22</a> for more.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">So
does Christensen come too close to showing a corrupt mind by saying that “the
application of moral principles will always rely on some form of judgement of
the particular case at hand”? Does her saying this somehow undermine, if only a
little bit, the impressive force of Anscombe’s “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clearly</i>, she must not lie”? (In saying that I think there is
impressive force in what Anscombe says I don’t mean that I agree with her. For
better or worse, it isn’t clear to me that one must not lie to the SS in those
circumstances. But I certainly don’t want to rule out a view like Anscombe’s as
somehow illegitimate either morally or philosophically.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Anscombe’s
idea seems to be that a morally healthy mind will not only be guided by certain
principles, such as “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “it is disgraceful
to choose an unjust action” (another example from “Modern Moral Philosophy”),
but also that it will rely on such ideas as what we might call primary guides.
A person with such a mind will not only find that general principles <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">play a role</i> in their moral thinking,
albeit one that is informed by personal judgments about particular cases. These
principles will likely be the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">first
things</i> that come to mind when she faces a moral problem, and they will be
regarded as beyond doubt. They are authoritative, understood as either the
literal command of God or at least something analogous to it. Any suggestion
that the agent’s own judgment might play a role or that the details of each
situation will need to be taken into account, however true the suggestion might
be, could be regarded as likely to have a corrupting influence, if only on the
philosophically unsophisticated. The uneducated and the insufficiently ethical
might be best kept away from any suggestion that God’s commandments are not
enough to guarantee right action. This is the kind of truth that Averroes
thought best kept to philosophers. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">But
philosophers are the audience that Christensen is addressing, so I think she is
not guilty of the charge of corruption that I am considering here. In fact,
Anscombe’s story about how to deal with the SS without lying might be exactly
the kind of imaginative thinking in context that Christensen is pointing to
when she says that “the application of moral principles will always rely on
some form of judgement of the particular case at hand”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">The
point of this detour, apart from helping me think things through, is to bring
out the fact that Christensen’s work itself needs to be understood in a certain
context and as an intervention in, or contribution to, a particular debate
rather than as a flat statement of a-contextual truths. Her skepticism about
general principles is skepticism about over-emphasis on the importance of
general principles in moral philosophy. It is not primarily about the use of
such principles in moral life. And to the extent that it is about such use (I
don’t know her views on this), Christensen would admit that this is a moral
view of hers, not something that is delivered up by neutral, objective,
impartial philosophical reasoning. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Let’s
move on to see if there is anything else one might reasonably disagree with. Christensen
says that, “According to Kant, theory has authority over our moral commitments
only insofar it explicates what we in fact <i>already adhere to</i>. This
means that moral theory cannot test or correct moral practice” (p. 40) But if a
theory designed to explicate what we already adhere to finds—or rather,
reveals, to our satisfaction—one of our commitments to be out of step with the
others, couldn’t this at least suggest that we might reconsider that one
commitment? Isn’t this part of the idea of reflective equilibrium, which Christensen
endorses early in the book? It turns out that the answer is Yes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">On
reflective equilibrium, she goes on to say: “the method of reflective
equilibrium is not a method for awarding any kind of impersonal authority to
anything, instead, it must begin from authorities I already recognise, and it
only awards the result the authority that I reached this result by a process of
reflection (a process of reflection that other people might or might not
acknowledge to be authoritative for them)” (p. 42) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seems right to me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Another
question I had concerns this claim, in chapter 4: “For moral reasoning to be
successful, we need a comprehensive understanding of the good life of human
beings, as stressed by Aristotle and McDowell…” (p. 89) Maybe we need some
vague idea of the good life in order to engage in moral reasoning, but do we
really need a comprehensive understanding? Well, to answer my own question,
what do we (want to) mean by ‘successful’? And by ‘moral reasoning’? What about
the person who does not go in for philosophy but thinks that it cannot be
anything but shameful to prefer an unjust course of action to a just one? He
will therefore do what (he believes) is just, even if it might have bad
consequences. Whether this counts as successful will depend at least in part on
whether we agree with his choice of action. Which will depend on us and on the
particular situation he is in. But we might also say that this does not count
as moral reasoning, because he in a sense rejects the idea of reasoning about
what to do in this (kind of) case. He does think a bit, but perhaps not enough
for what he does to count as moral reasoning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Once
again, I think there will only seem to be a problem here—if there does seem to
be a problem—if we take this quotation out of context. What Christensen is
doing is making a list of features that the ideal moral reasoner will have. The
list includes an understanding of the good life for a human being, the ability
to perceive without prejudice or selfishness, and imagination. She does not
imply that no one could ever think well about a given ethical question unless
they had all of these desirable qualities to the highest possible degree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">She
has a lot more to say about all this, though, and it is worth looking at some
of it here:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">We require
of sound and reflective moral reasoning that it arises from a coherent
understanding of how to live to which the person in question is implicitly or
explicitly committed. It is however important not to confuse the criteria
for consistency with those of coherence. Where consistency requires
generalisation and complete uniformity, coherence can allow for gradations and
context-dependence, and moral reasoning can involve descriptions, <a name="p93"></a>narratives, metaphors, exemplary experiences, and so on, as that which
establishes the coherence of a view of life. The criteria for sound moral
reflection are not formal or theoretical, but rather themselves moral, and
standards not just of the coherence but also of the sensitivity and
conscientiousness of the judgements which flow from this form of reflection.
Moreover, as these criteria concern a person’s ‘understanding of how to live a
moral life’, they also allow for considerable individual variety with regard to
what is given weight in moral reflection...</span> (pp. 92-93) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">My first reaction to this is to
ask, do we require this? That sounds a bit demanding. But then “arises from” allows
for some wiggle room. And to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">implicitly</i>
committed to an understanding of how to live also allows for some
interpretative maneuvering or difference of understanding. There’s something
slightly mercurial here, but I think maybe she’s right, and that getting the
truth right here just does inevitably involve a kind of oscillating movement
that might seem deceptive to unsympathetic or insufficiently careful readers.
We do require coherent understanding of some kind, at least in the sense that
incoherence and misunderstanding are certainly undesirable. What might seem
evasive is perhaps just a recognition of what exactly this means—partly, of how
little it means. It isn’t nothing, but it doesn’t involve the onerous
commitment that it might sound as though it brings. As Christensen says, the
criteria are themselves moral, so they are no more demanding than morality
itself. And there isn’t some neutral, objective thing called philosophy that
dictates what they are or ought to be <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">This subtle, dialectical motion
between something that sounds rigorous or demanding and recognition of
flexibility and variety is something that Christensen is explicit about, and it
is reflected in the way she writes. She often uses the first person singular,
but she also uses the plural, and often writes in an impersonal way (e.g. “<span style="background: white;">The work done in this chapter is in line with this
criticism, but the main aim is to move beyond criticism and provide a sketch
of <i>how and to what extent</i> particular features of our moral
lives take on moral importance,” p. 103). This could no doubt be solely for the
sake of variety, but it also reflects what she calls “the Wittgensteinian idea that
moral philosophy develops in a movement back and forth between the general and
theoretical on the one hand and the particular and concrete on the other” (p.
105). There is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> work, there is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> work, and there is Christensen’s
work, each of which is the same project, but seen from different points of
view. The reader is invited to join in, as happens in Plato’s, Descartes’s, and
Wittgenstein’s work, albeit with little chance of going off in a different
direction. That’s books for you, of course, but it’s also because the argument
is a very strong current to swim against. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Even
so, surely I disagree with Christensen when she disagrees with me? Here’s where
that happens:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in 8pt;"><span style="background: white;">In a
conversation with the Vienna circle, Wittgenstein commented on his own ‘A Lecture
on Ethics’: ‘At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I
think that this is something very essential. Here is nothing to be stated
anymore; all I can do is to step forward as an individual and speak in the
first person’ (WVC 117). Some interpreters have taken this remark as a
rejection of the possibility of doing philosophical work with regard to the
moral, but this conclusion is premature.<sup>[footnote]</sup> What
Wittgenstein is saying is rather that when we <i>leave</i> moral
philosophy, that is, the philosophical activity of trying to describe morally
relevant ways of talking, which he is doing for most of the lecture, it is
important to change perspective from the third to the first person, because we
then turn to an exploration of actual moral importance that is tied to the
positions of actual human beings. (p. 112)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background-color: white;">The
footnote mentions me as an example of such an interpreter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">In
my defence, when Wittgenstein engages in the philosophical activity of trying
to describe morally relevant ways of talking he concludes that it can’t be
done, or perhaps rather that morally relevant ways of talking are all
nonsensical. To try to talk ethics is to talk nonsense, he says, and to talk
about ethics is to point this out. He might be wrong, and his later self might
have disagreed with what he said here, but I don’t think the author of the
Lecture on Ethics thought there was anything more to be said about ethics.
There’s no sense in that lecture that if only he had more time he could say a
lot more. At least it doesn’t seem so to me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">But
I agree with the last sentence quoted above. He has been doing moral philosophy
for most of the lecture, diagnosing ethical talk (or whatever we want to call
it) as nonsense. And then he talks in the first person. He does not consider
this to be doing philosophy. Perhaps he should, but he doesn’t. So then I think
the disagreement is that I have said that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing</i>
can be said about ethics, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no</i>
moral philosophy can be done, according to the author of the Lecture on Ethics,
and Christensen is pointing out that the lecture itself is surely intended to
be a work of moral philosophy. And I think I have to agree with that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Most
of her argument is presented by way of other people’s views, carefully
explained and quoted, (she even presents some of her own ideas by way of a
discussion of Oskari Kuusela’s similar thinking), but she also offers
criticisms of her own of people she largely disagrees with (e.g. Onora O’Neill
and Martha Nussbaum on theory) and people she mostly agrees with (e.g. Margaret
Urban Walker).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">One
of the people she mostly, but not entirely, agrees with is Raimond Gaita. In a
discussion about how a slave owner might some to see a slave as fully human
(rightly correcting Gaita’s apparent overlooking of this possibility),
Christensen says that the slave owner’s wife might become jealous (the owner
has raped the slave) and her jealousy could “open the slave owner’s eyes to how
the slave is indeed an intelligible object of love and thus an intelligible
object of jealousy” (p. 164). The idea seems to be that the slave owner thinks
something like: if my wife is jealous of the slave I have been raping then that
slave must be an intelligible object of love. This does seem possible. And that
is all that Christensen claims. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">But,
if I can respond to what I think she might seem to be implying, I don’t think
the possibility of jealousy necessarily implies the possibility of love. The
slave owner and his wife might agree that of course he could never love the
slave, and yet the slave owner’s wife might still feel jealous. She might dimly
sense some possibility of love even while denying this possibility. Or she
might think that some feeling that is not quite love could exist between them,
this feeling being too close to real love for her comfort. Still, as I say, to
say this is not to contradict what Christensen actually says. And it pales into
complete insignificance against the achievement of improving on work as good as
Gaita’s. (Stanley Cavell gets similar treatment too.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background: white;">Christensen
says at the end of the book that she feels unable to summarize what she has
done in it, and I sympathize. It’s a very careful thinking through of a large
body of already very thoughtful work, a thinking through that combines
synthesis, criticism, and construction. It’s very hard to disagree with any of
it, but it also isn’t really the kind of thing you can just agree with and then
leave behind. It’s a work that delivers not results so much (e.g. proven theories)
as a clearer vision of what moral philosophy ought to be, what it means to live
a moral life, and how the two relate to each other. Agreeing with it means
henceforth going on in a certain kind of way when one does ethics and attempts
to live ethically. We’ll see how that goes.</span></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-6523021847079794572021-03-02T18:12:00.002-05:002021-03-02T18:12:31.613-05:00Links<p>If you like podcasts, here are some that look very good (on Raimond Gaita, Veena Das, Cora Diamond and James Conant, for instance): <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/231047">Philosophy Voiced</a> </p><p>And James Conant has a new book out, which is <a href="https://metapsychology.net/index.php/book-review/the-logical-alien-conant-and-his-critics/?fbclid=IwAR3cM7aIejjPWdeNHg6oEj-iM7qsDGMAd1wDdAxlahnk54XcSRWhm6dcAkY">reviewed here by Rosanna Wannberg</a>.</p><p>Finally, here's the very nicely designed website of the <a href="https://seoulphilosophy.wordpress.com/">Seoul Philosophy Club</a>, which has stuff (quotes, thoughts) on Wittgenstein, Cavell, and many others. </p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-64060203053871732732021-02-23T18:02:00.000-05:002021-02-23T18:02:12.277-05:00Wittgenstein in Mumbles<p>James Klagge drew my attention to this <a href="https://collections.swansea.ac.uk/s/swansea-2020/page/wittgenstein-in-swansea?fbclid=IwAR3d93nIpEEpwVvHQveFcCrC8DjGV5MIIQFznvopgyARS9wQm5PHaXH6HIU">essay on Wittgenstein's time in Swansea</a>. I don't think I knew that Wittgenstein lived in Mumbles (at <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/10+Langland+Rd,+The+Mumbles,+Swansea+SA3+4LX,+UK/@51.5736867,-4.0085977,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x486e8b78ad946179:0x65d2393aebb1aa4!8m2!3d51.5736867!4d-4.006409">10 Langland Road</a>, which is just over half a mile from <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/20+Devon+Pl,+The+Mumbles,+Swansea+SA3+4DR,+UK/@51.573483,-3.9971686,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x486e8b761dd79fff:0x32d4b3349e05a73d!8m2!3d51.573483!4d-3.9949799">where I used to live</a> when I studied at Swansea). It's one of the New York Times' <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/travel/places-to-visit-vacation.html">52 places to love in 2021</a> (the first one listed, so you won't have to scroll too much if you click on the link).</p><p>My mother also once lived <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/dir/81+East+Rd,+Cambridge+CB1+1BT,+UK/57+Cromwell+Rd,+Cambridge+CB1+3EG,+UK/@52.2060535,0.138532,16z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x47d8708e9ce9c845:0xbabfbc81ed90696c!2m2!1d0.1365266!2d52.2069836!1m5!1m1!1s0x47d87062c2f1c061:0xa6e5214df6d47b60!2m2!1d0.1466093!2d52.2029774!3e2">about half a mile from Wittgenstein</a> (as the crow flies). In 1938 he lived at 81 East Road, Cambridge and she was a baby, living at 57 Cromwell Road. Apart from the fact that he wrote this nine years earlier, she could have inspired this thought:</p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #292929; letter-spacing: -0.063px;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #292929; letter-spacing: -0.063px;">Anyone who listens to a child’s cry and understands what he hears will know that it harbors dormant psychic forces, terrible forces, different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain, and lust for destruction.</span> </span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The famous picture of Wittgenstein below was taken at the Mumbles train shelter (not, I think, in Mumbles, but at the station nearest the university on the line that ran between Swansea and Mumbles). At least, the article linked to above says it was taken<span style="font-family: inherit;"> "<span style="background-color: white; color: #000011;">in the, now demolished, Mumbles Train shelter on Swansea promenade, at the bottom of Brynmill Lane."</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #000011; font-family: Literata, serif; font-size: 23px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #000011;">My guess is that the shelter was at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swansea_and_Mumbles_Railway#Stations">Brynmill station</a>. So this is Wittgenstein by the seaside.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlisZieYvQaWHEmCZsesjZ9X_dcUAZl7XClU0271v5AXZETWdQOMNIV-kWU4foBT9gm7Z6EgVnv0o7BulIOZuBvY7_fzdhm7LEby1u6d6kR9SwXygP8KWKK9oftMy8b-bH8j7fx8vuaOc/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="800" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlisZieYvQaWHEmCZsesjZ9X_dcUAZl7XClU0271v5AXZETWdQOMNIV-kWU4foBT9gm7Z6EgVnv0o7BulIOZuBvY7_fzdhm7LEby1u6d6kR9SwXygP8KWKK9oftMy8b-bH8j7fx8vuaOc/" width="320" /></a></div><p></p></span><p></p>Duncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-25131713369169920672021-02-15T21:40:00.003-05:002021-02-15T21:40:46.043-05:0030% cheaper book<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The new book is out today. 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