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Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life
"Ethics Without Philosophy is the first full-scale attempt to relate Wittgenstein’s ethical and religious concerns to his philosophical work. The attempt is splendidly carried out. I have found it more useful in helping me to understand Wittgenstein than any other book about him which I have read." --Richard Rorty, Princeton University
- GenresPhilosophy
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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July 29, 2022
It would be quite difficult to grasp for someone who came across Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that at its core it has an ethical aim. There are certain passages that intimates us towards such a sentiment, but with all its numbered apodictic claims about how the world is all that is the case and how there are atomic facts that exist for sure the ethical part isn’t that obvious. This book ,which is so lucidly written, engages with this not so obvious ethical core and it does this by unraveling Wittgenstein’s complex philosophical theories.
There are two movements of Wittgenstein’s that are outlined here: early Wittgenstein i.e., Wittgenstein of The Tractatus and Late Wittgenstein i.e., Wittgenstein of Investigations. Sure, philosophers have made further convenient divisions, but here we stick to these two parts.
In Tractatus Wittgenstein places forth the picture theory which states that thought represents reality and only that thought which represents reality or state of affairs makes sense; the rest is nonsense. Nonsense here shouldn’t be mistaken for our common usage of it. For Wittgenstein logical facts are also nonsense since they are not facts about anything: they are part of the structure of language. Ethics and Aesthetics follows Logic here in being conditions upon which our sense making apparatus depends. And these conditions cannot be represented but can only be shown, and it is with this theory of showing that Wittgenstein escapes the absurdity that might result if his picture theory is taken to its extreme. Here as Edwards points out Wittgenstein accepts reality-as-representation.
Once the limit of thought is defined the self that views the world is placed at the boundary of the world, outside the world. From here the self can look out at its own world and here the ethical aspect is told: the self that looks out at the world can change its attitude towards the world. It cannot change the state of affairs itself but it can ‘will’ a different perspective to look at it from.
After Tractatus Wittgenstein declared that he had solved all the problems of philosophy and went off to be a school teacher in a distant German village. But soon, I guess, time played its trick of change and made Wittgenstein shift his perspective. You could violate the strict Early, Late distinction to point to a middle period here. Anyway the Late Wittgenstein came back only to in many ways challenge his own past self.
Philosophical Investigations is a critique of the reality-as-representation. It is an attack on those who take images for pictures. You could say it is more along the lines of representation-as reality: We take our representations for reality, we take our grammatical idiosyncrasies for meta-facts upon which reality itself lives. Language turns here for Wittgenstein into a set of metaphors or images. To mistake representation-as-reality is to be bewitched by language like the metaphysicians. Here Wittgenstein moves from a ‘scientific’ approach to philosophy to an ‘aesthetic’ approach: aesthetic here isn’t simply that which is beautiful but that which is rich and imaginative and ethics here is subsumed by aesthetics and aesthetics is subsumed by ethics. Philosophy as taking for granted whatever theories it purports to be representations of reality itself is questioned. The very conditions of these claims, these pictures should be seen through. The Free mind plays with different images of reality.
Edwards does a brilliant job of delineating how realism and its antithesis relativism are symptoms of the calcified representation-as-reality position. Pragmatism which could in many ways be associated with Wittgenstein falls short, since Wittgenstein acknowledges the pathos with which certain philosophical questions confront us and can’t simply be banished with a criteria of ‘whatever works’.
Towards the end in order to save Wittgenstein from certain attacks of anti-intellectualism Edwards passes a few snide remarks on Zen. But it seems to me Wittgenstein is more closely associated with Zen than Edwards might like to accept. Zen isn’t simply a resignation from thought but rather a movement into a kind of subtle attention. An attention aimed at looking at the pictures that we use to make sense of our world, decalcify them into images and let it play freely in our minds. Such a shift in sensibility is exactly what Wittgenstein wants. A sensibility that brings back wonder; and rather than end in a control of reality, it helps us acknowledge and respond to it.
There are two movements of Wittgenstein’s that are outlined here: early Wittgenstein i.e., Wittgenstein of The Tractatus and Late Wittgenstein i.e., Wittgenstein of Investigations. Sure, philosophers have made further convenient divisions, but here we stick to these two parts.
In Tractatus Wittgenstein places forth the picture theory which states that thought represents reality and only that thought which represents reality or state of affairs makes sense; the rest is nonsense. Nonsense here shouldn’t be mistaken for our common usage of it. For Wittgenstein logical facts are also nonsense since they are not facts about anything: they are part of the structure of language. Ethics and Aesthetics follows Logic here in being conditions upon which our sense making apparatus depends. And these conditions cannot be represented but can only be shown, and it is with this theory of showing that Wittgenstein escapes the absurdity that might result if his picture theory is taken to its extreme. Here as Edwards points out Wittgenstein accepts reality-as-representation.
Once the limit of thought is defined the self that views the world is placed at the boundary of the world, outside the world. From here the self can look out at its own world and here the ethical aspect is told: the self that looks out at the world can change its attitude towards the world. It cannot change the state of affairs itself but it can ‘will’ a different perspective to look at it from.
After Tractatus Wittgenstein declared that he had solved all the problems of philosophy and went off to be a school teacher in a distant German village. But soon, I guess, time played its trick of change and made Wittgenstein shift his perspective. You could violate the strict Early, Late distinction to point to a middle period here. Anyway the Late Wittgenstein came back only to in many ways challenge his own past self.
Philosophical Investigations is a critique of the reality-as-representation. It is an attack on those who take images for pictures. You could say it is more along the lines of representation-as reality: We take our representations for reality, we take our grammatical idiosyncrasies for meta-facts upon which reality itself lives. Language turns here for Wittgenstein into a set of metaphors or images. To mistake representation-as-reality is to be bewitched by language like the metaphysicians. Here Wittgenstein moves from a ‘scientific’ approach to philosophy to an ‘aesthetic’ approach: aesthetic here isn’t simply that which is beautiful but that which is rich and imaginative and ethics here is subsumed by aesthetics and aesthetics is subsumed by ethics. Philosophy as taking for granted whatever theories it purports to be representations of reality itself is questioned. The very conditions of these claims, these pictures should be seen through. The Free mind plays with different images of reality.
Edwards does a brilliant job of delineating how realism and its antithesis relativism are symptoms of the calcified representation-as-reality position. Pragmatism which could in many ways be associated with Wittgenstein falls short, since Wittgenstein acknowledges the pathos with which certain philosophical questions confront us and can’t simply be banished with a criteria of ‘whatever works’.
"No, if the metaphysical superstition is merely repressed, it will(like a neurosis) be sure to return to haunt us in some other form. Wittgenstein is not a pragmatist of any variety, because he refers the philosophical impulse to a depth, to a Pathos, that is missing in the narrative the pragmatist tells about the genesis of the tradition. For Wittgenstein, the diseased sensibility of rationality-as-representation is not an accident, nor is it a mistake; its hold on us goes much deeper than that. It is, to return to an earlier theme, nonsense, not error. And that means that the process of its eradication must cut very deep indeed."
Towards the end in order to save Wittgenstein from certain attacks of anti-intellectualism Edwards passes a few snide remarks on Zen. But it seems to me Wittgenstein is more closely associated with Zen than Edwards might like to accept. Zen isn’t simply a resignation from thought but rather a movement into a kind of subtle attention. An attention aimed at looking at the pictures that we use to make sense of our world, decalcify them into images and let it play freely in our minds. Such a shift in sensibility is exactly what Wittgenstein wants. A sensibility that brings back wonder; and rather than end in a control of reality, it helps us acknowledge and respond to it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review