Wittgenstein, the self, and ethics.

Kelly, John C.

I

When Wittgenstein's Tractatus was published it was generally identified first with Russell's logical atomism, and later with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. However, Wittgenstein himself claimed the work had an ethical purpose. In what has become a well-known passage from a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, whose help Wittgenstein sought in trying to publish the Tractatus, he says:

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits.(1)

We also have the testimony of Paul Engelmann, who was close to Wittgenstein when the latter was writing the Tractatus, that Wittgenstein regarded the ethical implications of his account of language as the book's fundamental point.(2) Nonetheless, Wittgenstein's very brief and enigmatic remarks about the ethical dimension of that work were, for quite some time, largely ignored or dismissed.

On the other hand, after Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge and to philosophy in 1929 there is, aside from a lecture which he may or may not have delivered, no systematic, sustained discussion of ethics in his own writings. However, this has not prevented a number of philosophers from applying what they take to be the "later" Wittgenstein's techniques and views about language to ethical discourse.

The differential response of the philosophical community to the "early" and the "later" Wittgenstein, as far as ethics is concerned, is not hard to understand, given the assumption, commonplace in Anglo-American philosophy for much of this century, that ethics has to do with analyzing the meaning, and establishing the conditions for the proper application, of ethical concepts and forms of judgment. For within the Tractatus account of language there can be no ethical propositions, as Wittgenstein himself states.(3) Wittgenstein's emphasis after 1930 on the diversity of linguistic activities and associated forms of language seemed to many, however, to open up the possibility of a positive account of ethical discourse. This was a common view of the matter taken by those who read the Tractatus as a positivist work, and who saw its rejection of ethical propositions as following from a rigid and overly narrow theory of meaning. Thus it certainly seemed possible in principle to appeal to Wittgenstein's notions of a language-game and forms of life to create a sphere for ethics and other values within language.

When Wittgenstein spoke of drawing the limits of the sphere of the ethical, however, he had something rather different in mind than, for example, G. E. Moore's endeavor to define the meaning of the term "good," and to determine what sorts of things are good. I think it can be shown that Wittgenstein approached ethics in the Tractatus with two major concerns: On the one hand, he wished to delineate what it is that gives life meaning and purpose. As we know from various biographical accounts, the question of the meaning of life was an intensely personal and troubling one for Wittgenstein at this time.(4) On the other hand, Wittgenstein was also concerned with the apparently more theoretical question of how it is possible for there to be value at all in a world of contingent facts. These two questions were, however, really two sides of the same issue for him, as he in effect gave the same answer to each.(5)

Furthermore, there is reason to believe that Wittgenstein never entirely abandoned the understanding of ethics to be found in the Tractatus, despite his rejection of the metaphysics of that work, which would go some way towards explaining why he himself never attempted to discuss ethics in terms of his later views of language. But, in order to properly understand this it is necessary to look at the philosophical context in terms of which Wittgenstein approached the topic of ethics in that earlier work.

II

Wittgenstein attempted to delineate the sphere of the ethical through an analysis of the common structure of language and the world. A proposition is a picture of reality, and the reality depicted by meaningful propositions is a realm of contingent facts. The doctrine that "there is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened" has, for Wittgenstein, important implications for ethics.(6)

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it, does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that, does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.(7)

In other words, it is the very contingency of the facts which constitute the world that led Wittgenstein to see the realm of fact. devoid of value. This implies that ethics for Wittgenstein, as for Kant,(8) presupposes the existence of some sort of nonlogical necessity, as is suggested by the notion of moral obligation or the idea that ethics is concerned with what ought to be the case rather than with what simply is the case. Hence, if the facts in the world could all be other than they are, then none exists as a matter of moral necessity.

The idea that value cannot lie within the world had two very important negative implications for Wittgenstein's understanding of ethics in the Tractatus. First, as Engelmann has pointed out, Wittgenstein held that everything which is most important, to human life lies beyond the reach of science.(9) As Wittgenstein himself says in the Tractatus, "even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched."(10) Wittgenstein's point is not that empirical facts are irrelevant to our ethical concerns, which is absurd, but that their relevance is not to be explained by the facts themselves. For example, the fact that a certain medical procedure caused great suffering with few, if any, compensating benefits for human health would be a reason to oppose it on ethical grounds. The value we attach to alleviating suffering, however, is not derived from the facts of medical practice; rather, it is a value which doctors are supposed to bring to their practice and use to assess various procedures.

On the other hand, Wittgenstein's Kantian-like distinction between facts and values is paired with a very un-Kantian understanding of the relevance of philosophy to ethics; and this is the second negative consequence of his analysis of language and the world. According to Wittgenstein, philosophy is a critique of language in that it is an activity whose aim is the clarification of propositions. However, as there are no ethical propositions, philosophy has nothing to contribute to ethics.(11) Thus Wittgenstein in the Tractatus wholly rejected, in effect, the philosophical enterprise of attempting to analyze and justify ethical concepts and principles.

While Wittgenstein's views about language and the world did undergo some major shifts after 1929, I believe that these two negative conclusions continued to dominate his thinking about ethics throughout his life. That is, Wittgenstein always seems to have believed that neither science nor philosophy had anything to offer, except perhaps confusion or moral corruption, to our concerns about such things as the meaning of life or how to be a decent human being.

What we might call the positive content of Wittgenstein's account of ethics in the Tractatus is more obscure, largely because his remarks are so brief and enigmatic, and he offers no concrete examples. However, the Notebooks 1914-1916 from which the Tractatus was developed, do contain longer, though still very abstract, discussions of ethics which help to clarify his thought on these matters.

What the Notebooks make clear is that Wittgenstein was primarily concerned, in his understanding of ethics at this time, with the question of what gives meaning to life and the world.(12) This question is problematic for Wittgenstein because, as we have seen, what happens in the world is purely contingent and thus does not manifest any kind of moral necessity. In other words, Wittgenstein is concerned to understand how there can be meaning and worth in the seemingly nihilistic world of modern science where the order of nature has been divorced from any conception of value. In this respect he is attempting to respond to the same problem, or nexus of problems, raised by what, Nietzsche refers to as "the death of God." Moreover, I think it is not insignificant that for Wittgenstein, at this time, "the meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, [we can call] God."(13) Like Kant, Wittgenstein locates value within a will which is not itself a part of the empirical world; hence for Wittgenstein this will cannot be the subject of meaningful propositions.(14) The reason that, the ethical will is transcendental for Wittgenstein is that the ordinary empirical will is simply another fact in the world, and, as such, can be neither good nor bad.

However, Wittgenstein's conception of the transcendental ethical will is very different from Kant's. For Kant, freedom, or spontaneity, is the essential attribute of the will. This shows itself in the realm of what Kant calls practical reason in the will's legislating maxims of conduct for itself; hence, the good will is distinguished from the bad will by the nature of the maxim under which a person acts. According to Wittgenstein, however, the transcendental ethical will is incapable of effecting changes in the empirical world. Wittgenstein is led to this view by his commitment to the doctrine that all the facts in the world are contingent. From this it follows that "there is no logical connexion between the will and the world."(15) Were the will capable of producing effects in the realm of facts, then those effects would be necessitated by the will, and some facts would therefore not be contingent, which is impossible. Thus "the world is independent of my will."(16)

The ethical will, according to Wittgenstein, can alter only the limits of the world, so that "the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man."(17) I think Wittgenstein's point here has to be understood in connection with his so-called solipsism.

The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that, the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.(18)

Wittgenstein is not saying that there is a plurality of worlds or worldviews corresponding to the plurality of subjects. There is a single realm of facts, and a single system of logic through which those facts can be pictured. However, for Wittgenstein the truth embedded in solipsism and idealism is that the common logical structure of thought, language, and the world requires a subject to constitute and provide the principle of unity for that structure. In this respect, his position is similar to Kant's doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception. For Kant, we inhabit a common world of experience because the structure of experience is constituted by certain a priori necessary forms of intuition and categories of the understanding. As a result, Kant's critical idealism yields a form of realism in which objects of experience exist in a common space and time, and function in accordance with the laws of causality. Similarly, Wittgenstein thinks that solipsism when properly understood also coincides with realism, for the metaphysical subject which constitutes the common logical structure of thought, language, and the world is nol an object within the world; rather, Wittgenstein characterizes it as an extensionless point that functions as a limit to the world. Hence, all that exists is the common realm of facts whose boundaries are fixed by the logical structure of language.(19)

Wittgenstein's position is that the existence of ethical meaning and value is also the result of the constituting activity of the metaphysical subject. As he says in the Notebooks, "ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic," so that "good and evil only enter through the subject. And the subject is not a part of the world, but a boundary of the world."(20) The metaphysical subject can give ethical meaning to life through the way in which it views the world as a whole. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that "to view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole - a limited whole,"(21) and in the Notebooks this idea is explicitly connected to both ethics and aesthetics.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics.(22)

For example, if we look at a physical object such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House simply as a house among other houses, it is easy to imagine altering various aspects of it without it ceasing to be a house in which people could live. Thus the ceilings could be raised and the overhang of the cantilevered roof reduced. If, however, this physical object is seen as a work of art, then each of its aspects and elements has a kind of necessity relative to the whole, in that, an alteration in the roof line, say, would turn it into a different object, and, in the judgment of most viewers, destroy its aesthetic worth.

Wittgenstein's point would seem to be that viewing the world as a limited totality is analogous to viewing it as an aesthetic object, in that contingent facts acquire a meaning, and a kind of necessity, relative to the whole. As Wittgenstein says, when we see the world sub specie aeternitatis "each thing modifies the whole logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak,"(23) and in that respect particular facts, as elements within a given totality, are no longer purely contingent.

However, the way in which the elements in an aesthetic object, such as a work of architecture, can be seen as necessary to the whole is rather different from the logical necessity we find in language. For one can look at Wright's Robie House simply as a house in which to live, and find the low ceilings and overhanging roofs not very functional; the necessity here is dependent upon our viewing the house in a certain way. In other words, our sense of the meaningfulness of an object, or the world, can come and go depending on our perspective on it. I think this is what is behind Wittgenstein's remark in the Tractatus that the ethical will alters only the limits of the world, so that "it must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole;"(24) for immediately following this same remark in the Notebooks he adds, "As if by accession or loss of meaning,"(25) whereas in the Tractatus there simply is no possibility of even thinking apart from the common logical structure of language and the world.(26)

III

Wittgenstein did not provide any examples in either the Tractatus or the Notebooks of what is involved in viewing the world as an ethically meaningful totality. However, in a lecture on the topic of ethics which he wrote, and possibly delivered, sometime within the first year after his return to Cambridge in 1929, he does throw some light on this subject.(27) For even though this lecture was written several years after the publication of the Tractatus, it still operates within the philosophical framework of the earlier work, at least as far as the topic of ethics is concerned. Wittgenstein continues to insist on a sharp and absolute dichotomy between facts and values, and to maintain that language can only express facts; furthermore, he is still wedded to the idea that ethics involves some sort of nonlogical necessity, and sees ethics as that which gives meaning to life.(28) Finally, while the metaphysical will which alters only the limits of the world seems to have disappeared in favor of ethical subjects who exist in the world, his understanding of ethics continues to presuppose the idea of a transcendental ethical subject. Hence, what we in fact have in "A Lecture on Ethics" is a more concrete discussion of the overall conception of ethics which informs Wittgenstein's earlier writings.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that the mystical, which includes ethics, makes itself manifest,(29) but he says nothing about how this might be done, whereas in "A Lecture on Ethics" he attempts to explicate his notion of absolute, unconditional ethical value by linking it to certain personal experiences.(30) I think he was led to focus on what he calls experiences of value because he wanted to emphasize that ethics, and religion as well, for that matter, had their origins in deeply felt personal responses to life and the world, and were not simply social or intellectual constructs.(31) The experience which Wittgenstein cites as paradigmatic for him in conveying the sense of absolute value is the experience of wonder at the existence of the world, which, he says, "is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle."(32)

Later in the lecture, Wittgenstein identified two other experiences which, for him, had an intrinsic, absolute value: On the one hand, there is "the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'" While, on the other hand, there is the experience of feeling guilty.(33) Significantly, Wittgenstein thinks that all three of these experiences can be interpreted in religious terms.

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. 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.(34)

Wittgenstein's religious interpretation of these experiences makes it clear that what he is talking about here is what might be called a mode of experience in which things are seen from a particular perspective. Thus in discussing what is involved in seeing a fact in the world as a miracle, he rejects the idea that science has proven that there are no miracles and says, "The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle."(35) This, of course, implies that there are, or could be, nonscientific ways of looking at a fact, but Wittgenstein is quick to point out that any attempt to articulate such an experience in words can only generate nonsense.(36) As he puts it, in the concluding paragraph of the lecture:

I now see that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.(37)

The significant phrase here is the one which Wittgenstein himself, emphasizes: "to go beyond." For in talking about ethics, or religion, we attempt to go beyond the ordinary world of facts in two different, though related, respects: On the one hand, ethics and religion, as understood by Wittgenstein, involve the attempt to characterize the world and our relationship to it as a whole. This is evident in the assertion that God created the world and its existence is a miracle. However, the experience of feeling safe in the hands of God or being under God's judgment also includes the notion of the world as a totality; for it involves seeing ourselves as creatures standing in some sort of relationship to our creator, who is distinct from his creation. On the other hand, the attempt to view the world as a limited totality with a determinate ethical or religious character presupposes a subject that is capable of constituting that vision. But as we have seen, such a subject must itself be "beyond" the world of facts.

Thus the problem with talking about ethics, conceived of in these terms, is the problem of talking about the relationship of a transcendental subject to the world viewed as a limited whole. For Wittgenstein this is not an epistemological problem, but one which has to do with the conditions that must be satisfied if a proposition is to have a determinate sense. In the Tractatus these conditions are set by the common a priori logical structure of thought, language, and the world. Thus any attempt to describe the general character of the world and one's relationship to it necessarily involves speaking from within this structure. The sort of problem this creates can be illustrated by proposition 1.1 of the Tractatus: "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." This has the appearance of a factual proposition, but, it is not; for the structure of the world is not a "super" fact, as it were, but the a priori condition for the meaningfulness of any factual proposition. No proposition could have sense if the world were not a world of facts.

However, if we ask what the a priori conditions are for the sense of propositions like 1.1, no answer is forthcoming. It was the recognition of this difficulty which led Wittgenstein to his view that the logical structure of language and the world cannot be stated, but only shown and his apparently paradoxical assertion that, the propositions of the Tractatus are elucidations which one comes to see are nonsensical.(38) Similarly, it will not be possible to describe how an ethical subject stands to the world, viewed as a totality, because neither is a fact in the world.

In a word, ethics is transcendental, as Wittgenstein stated in the Tractatus; and it is transcendental in exactly the same way that logic is transcendental.(39) Both are transcendental not only in the sense that they are not among the facts in the world, but also in the Kantian sense of providing the conditions for the possibility of certain experiences. Logic constitutes that logical space which makes it possible for us to picture facts to ourselves in propositions. Without logical space there would be no facts, as every fact is simply one logical possibility.(40) In a similar way, viewing the world as a totality, as when it is experienced as a miracle created by God, constitutes the "ethical space" in which value and meaning can enter into life. For without a unifying perspective on life and the world there are only ethically neutral contingent facts.

However, as has already been noted, there is an important difference between logic and ethics as understood by Wittgenstein: the idealism, or solipsism, of the metaphysical subject which constitutes the logical structure of the world yields a kind of realism because each subject constitutes the same logical space. Or to put it another way: in the case of logic there is, in effect, only one metaphysical subject constituting a single common domain of facts. The situation is otherwise with ethics. Wittgenstein's remark that "the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man"(41) implies that there is not a single "ethical space," and hence, not a common domain of values. Nor is it simply a matter of there being a difference between those who do and those who do not view the world as an ethically meaningful totality. For even among the former, there are an apparently indefinite number of diverse ethical perspectives. To take one example, the view of the world as a miracle created by God has generated very different and sometimes conflicting ethical values, even within the Christian tradition.

Hence, the conception of a metaphysical subject constituting an "ethical space" through viewing the world as a unified totality does not yield a form of ethical realism. Instead we have an apparently irreducible plurality of ethical worlds corresponding to the plurality of moral wills. I think Wittgenstein acknowledges this in his recognition in "A Lecture on Ethics" that the experience of what he refers to as absolute value is an entirely personal matter which can vary from person to person.(42) Thus the ethical subject of the Tractatus is analogous to one of Leibniz's windowless monads which views the universe from its own unique perspective without, of course, there being any provision for a preestablished harmony between these various perspectives. For Wittgenstein's ethical self is disconnected from the common public world not only in that it cannot produce effects in that world, but also in that its moral perspective is essentially private because there is no common concept constituting the ethical apart from that of unity itself.

IV

After writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about the way in which the structure of language is constituted altered significantly. As early as the period of "A Lecture on Ethics," he had come to think that it is not possible to give a single general account of factual propositions because there are a number of different systems of such propositions.(43) And within a very short time he also recognized that certain uses of language do not describe facts at all.(44) The Tractatus view of logic as constituting the structure of language gave way to the idea of diverse domains of language, which Wittgenstein in the 1930s began to refer to as language-games, each with its own distinct grammar.

Now I think it is clear that in the later writings, the concept of "grammar" takes over the constituting function played by the concept of "logic" in the Tractatus. In the Investigations he says "Grammar tells what kind of object anything is," and this idea is obviously related to his view that his investigation is a grammatical one directed towards the possibilities of phenomena.(45) However, unlike the logic of the Tractatus, the grammar of a language-game is not a priori necessary. Our concepts could be other than they are, and we could have very different language-games.(46)

As a result, the emphasis on grammar is connected with what Wittgenstein sometimes referred to as the "anthropological method" in philosophy.(47) What this method involved was the examination of the use of words in concrete situations by real, or imaginary, linguistic communities. In particular, Wittgenstein tended to focus on situations where children are learning their native language through being taught by their elders, because, on his view, the primary use of a word is clearest in this sort of context.(48) Wittgenstein concluded from examining such situations that we learn and use our language in conjunction with certain actions and practices: words and activities are systematically intertwined, such that the former cannot be understood apart from the latter.

One important consequence of Wittgenstein's adoption of the so-called anthropological method was that the concept of a metaphysical subject, which constitutes, a priori, the logical structure of thought, language, and the world, disappears from his writings. In its place he introduced the idea of a linguistic community which constitutes the grammar of our assertions through common training in shared activities. Thus the change in rhetoric from the first person singular of the Tractatus to the first person plural of the later writings marks an important metaphysical shift.

Concurrent with these changes, Wittgenstein began to focus on what came to be called philosophical psychology. His major emphasis in this area was on the way in which the self expresses itself in various common linguistic practices. Wittgenstein attempts to connect so-called inner stales and occurrences with specific language-games in such a way that it is the public grammar of, say, "pain," "fear," or "intending" which determines what counts as being in pain, or frightened, or having a particular intention. Hence, Wittgenstein seems to have moved from a conception of the self as a detached spectator to one in which the self is seen as a participant in the larger community, such that the self is constituted, at least in part, by its very participation in that community. Consequently, the entire picture of the relationship of the self to both the natural and the human world appeared altered, and the door seemed to be open to a new account of ethics.

However, as I noted at the outset, Wittgenstein himself did not apply his "anthropological method" to the topic of ethics, and in fact was virtually silent on this subject in his philosophical writings after "A Lecture on Ethics." I think a conversation that Wittgenstein had with Rush Rhees in 1942 about ethics throws some light on his silence. This conversation began with Wittgenstein's remark that "it was strange that; you could find books on ethics in which there is no mention of a genuine ethical or moral problem."(49) Wittgenstein then went on to discuss the problem, suggested by Rhees, of the man who had concluded that he has to choose between leaving his wife or abandoning his work in cancer research. Rhees' example is under-described, in that we are not told what the man's attitude is towards his wife or his work, and why he thinks it necessary to choose between them. However, I think Wittgenstein treats it as a genuine ethical problem because it can be filled in, in various ways, so as to illustrate how, in ordinary life, people can have conflicting commitments and ideals without there being any obvious way to resolve the conflict. For example, the man may find his work so demanding that he cannot give his marriage the time and attention it deserves, or his relationship with his wife may distract him from his commitments to his research.

According to Wittgenstein,

whatever he finally does, the way things then turn out may affect his attitude. He may say, "Well, thank God I left her: it was better all around." Or maybe, "Thank God I stuck to her." Or he may not be able to say "thank God" at all, but just the opposite. I want to say that this is the solution of an ethical problem.

Wittgenstein then immediately adds:

Or rather; it is so with regard to the man who does not have an ethics. If he has, say, the Christian ethics, then he may say it is absolutely clear: he has got to stick to her come what may. And then his problem is different. It is: how to make the best of this situation, what he should do in order to be a decent husband in these greatly altered circumstances, and so forth. The question 'Should I leave her or not?' is not a problem here.(50)

One of the more obvious features of this example is that the facts are not ethically neutral, even for someone who, in Wittgenstein's words, "does not have an ethics." On the one hand, being married involves certain ethical responsibilities and obligations, while, on the other, a career in cancer research is directed towards the good of human health. The responsibilities and obligations of marriage are connected with the fact that marriage is an institution whose participants commit themselves to certain norms and goods, such as faithfulness and mutual well-being. Thus the concept of "marriage" would appear to be one of those ordinary concepts in which facts and values are systematically interconnected because of the existence of a shared practice.(51)

Health, on the other hand, might be called a natural good, in that its existence as a good does not depend on the prior existence of some specific practice or social institution in the way in which, for example, the value of marital fidelity, as a good, depends on the prior existence of the institution of marriage. However, the goodness of health becomes apparent, philosophically, from the perspective which Wittgenstein began to emphasize after 1930. That is, if we think of ourselves as simply, or primarily, metaphysical subjects who constitute the structure of the world of facts, then the health of a body, including our own, will appear to be just another contingent fact towards which we can take up various ethical attitudes. To someone to whom life, however, is a matter of engagement with the world, including the human world, the good of health, for himself and others, is a given, as it is a necessary precondition for successful participation in most human practices. Thus Wittgenstein's "anthropological method" leads, when consistently applied, to a rejection of the rigid and absolute dichotomy between facts and values found in the Tractatus, and to a recognition of how, in a human community, facts come to be systematically intertwined with values.

On Wittgenstein's view, however, this intertwining of facts and values underdetermines anything that could be called a "solution" to the ethical problem in Rhees' example. For the "solution," as he understands it, lies in a retrospective shift, in the man's attitude towards his situation, regardless of the choice he has made. Thus the man may thank God that he stayed with his wife or left her, or "he may not be able to say 'thank God' at all, but just the opposite."(52) Each of these possible responses can be a "solution" to the ethical problem in that the conflict has been resolved, for better or worse, in the man's own mind. For to thank God that one has made a certain decision, or to bitterly regret it, is to have moved beyond the original uncertainty about what, to do, and in that respect to no longer find the situation problematic. As Wittgenstein had said years earlier in the Tractatus: "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem."(53)

I think Wittgenstein's conception of what constitutes a solution for the man who "does not have an ethics" has to be understood in conjunction with the fact that he never even suggests that this problem arises as a result of a misunderstanding of, or confusion about, our ordinary ethical concepts. The problem exists because the pursuit of a good associated with one activity comes into conflict, in the life of an individual, with the obligations of another practice so that clarifying the grammar of the relevant ethical concepts will not resolve or eliminate this problem; it will only heighten it. Because we are talking about a conflict between the values of disparate practices, each with its own distinct grammar, there is no common concept or practice to which the man can appeal to solve, resolve, or dissolve this problem. Thus we might say that, for Wittgenstein, a part of the grammar of the concept of "solution" when applied to ethical problems is that it involves a shift in attitude on the part of the subject, rather than the realization of some determinate end.

There are obvious affinities between the idea that the solution to an ethical problem is a matter of a retrospective change in one's attitude towards that problem, and the idea found in the Tractatus, and "A Lecture on Ethics," that ethics has to do not with what one accomplishes in the world, but with one's overall attitude to that world. However, Wittgenstein's notion of the solution to an ethical problem is also faithful, I think, to certain phenomena of ordinary life. The problem confronting the man who believes he has to choose between his marriage and his career is, in effect, the question of what sort of life he is to live and what kind of person he is to become. For many people this question does not have a predetermined answer, as they discover the sort of life they wish to live, and the kind of person they want to become, through living. Thus for such people the ethical meaning and significance of certain decisions and choices in their lives only becomes clear to them after the fact. In these cases, concepts like "the right decision," "the best decision," or "a good decision" can only be applied retrospectively, and different people confronted by the same or a similar problem may well resolve it differently.

On the other hand, as Wittgenstein points out, there are people who bring an overall ethical perspective to bear on situations of the sort described by Rhees. For them the nature of the problem will be different because they have already decided, as it were, what sort of life to live and what kind of person to be. That is, from their perspective, the ethical meaning and significance of their decision is not something that may be discovered after the fact; they already know the nature of the choice confronting them. Thus if the man in Rhees' example were a Christian, his problem, on Wittgenstein's understanding of Christianity, would be one of being a good husband after having abandoned his career in cancer research, as leaving his wife is simply not an option.

Hence, when Wittgenstein spoke of an ethics in his conversation with Rhees, what, he appeared to have in mind was not a shared social practice, but an individual interpretive perspective which is brought to one's social practices. This interpretation is supported by the other example of an ethics which he mentions in this conversation. After describing the Christian's response to the problem confronting the man who has to choose between his wife and his career, Wittgenstein says:

Suppose I view his problem with a different ethics - perhaps Nietzsche's - and I say "No, it is not clear that he must stick to her; on the contrary, . . . and so forth."(54)

I would suggest that what, makes Christianity, or the views of a Nietzsche, a kind of ethics for Wittgenstein is that each embodies a particular stance or attitude towards life. For like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, he saw Christianity as primarily a matter of inwardness and spirituality, rather than one of doctrine.(55) Hence, I believe that when Wittgenstein juxtaposes the response of a Nietzschean with that of a Christian to the ethical problem raised in Rhees' example, he is deliberately contrasting two rather different personal orientations towards life.(56)

It would seem, then, that by the 1940s Wittgenstein had given up the idea of ethics as an unutterable attitude towards life and the world, and had come to recognize that ethical assertions do play some sort of role in language. This does not mean that he regarded such assertions as entirely unproblematic. For example, in his conversation with Rhees, Wittgenstein claimed that it does not make sense to ask whether a particular ethics is right or not, as it is not clear what sort of criteria would be relevant to answering this question.(57) Rhees tells us that. Wittgenstein came back to the question of the "right ethics" in 1945, and reports that he, Wittgenstein, had the following to say.

Or suppose someone says "One of the ethical systems must be the right one - or nearer to the right one." Well, suppose I say Christian ethics is the right one. Then I am making a judgment of value. It amounts to adopting 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.(58)

Wittgenstein normally chose his words with care. One does not adopt a language-game; indeed, it is more accurate to say that one is adopted into a linguistic practice through something like a process of initiation. This, and the fact that members of the same linguistic community can have differing ethics, or none at all, is further evidence thai Wittgenstein continued to think of ethics as a personal perspective which exists outside of the shared frameworks of our ordinary language. What this implies is that the agreement about ethical matters which one finds among Christians, for example, is not based on the necessities of a common grammar. Rather, it would seem to be more like an agreement in felt response, such as can be found among those who share a sense of humor or the same taste in music, for which words are a very inadequate mode of expression.

A measure of Wittgenstein's perplexity about these matters is provided by some of his remarks about religious belief recorded in his Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. In that discussion Wittgenstein considers the differences between the person who believes that whatever happens to him is a divine reward or punishment, and the person who rejects such a belief. According to Wittgenstein, these are entirely different ways of thinking with different pictures, such that the nonbeliever cannot even contradict the believer; for even though the former may understand the latter's words, he does not have the thoughts that go with those words. Thus Wittgenstein concludes "my normal technique of language leaves me. I don't know whether to say they understand one another or not."(59) In short, the person who believes in divine judgment sees the world differently from the person who does not, such that, even though they speak the same language, it is not clear whether they share common criteria of meaning for the concepts with which they express their differing beliefs.

The distance between the admonition in the Tractatus that we pass over religion and other matters pertaining to value in silence,(60) and the observation that "my normal technique of language leaves me" in discussing religious differences is not very great. For each involves a recognition of the fact that questions about religious belief fall outside of the domain of any public realm of discourse. Thus I think it is clear that even after the adoption of his so-called anthropological method, Wittgenstein continued to regard certain forms of expression, such as those involving religious and ethical conviction, as inherently problematic in regard to both their truth and their meaning.(61)

V

Like Kant, Wittgenstein seems always to have held that mutual intelligibility, and the possibility of agreement in judgment, rests on a shared framework through which we constitute the structure of thought and experience. The primary difference between the Tractatus and the writings after 1930, on this issue, is that Wittgenstein came to see that there can be a plurality of constituting linguistic structures which can change over time, and be different for different peoples. The corollary to this view is that there is no standard of intelligibility and agreement apart from that which is provided by a shared linguistic framework. Thus Wittgenstein consistently refused to attempt to ground meaning in anything external to language, such as nature or experience.

Seen from this perspective, the fact-value dichotomy of the Tractatus is simply a special case of what, for Wittgenstein, is the more fundamental distinction between propositions which have a clear, determinate, public sense, because they fall within a shared domain of meaning, on the one hand, and putative propositions which lie outside such a domain, on the other. The shift from the idea of a single constituting system of logic to multiple language-games, each with its own distinct: grammar, does not create a public space for ethics, because, by its very nature, a language-game cannot encompass what Wittgenstein understands as ethics. Within a language-game all meaning is local, in that concepts acquire a sense through being linked to particular shared activities and situations. But Wittgenstein, early and late, always seems to have thought of ethics, not as an assortment of disconnected goods, rights, and obligations, but as a global vision which gives meaning to life. Hence, ethics continued to remain outside of any shared constituting framework. This meant that ethics could not be shown either, since showing, like saying, requires a common structure.

Wittgenstein's understanding of ethics is not simply idiosyncratic or a vestige of the "bad" metaphysics of the Tractatus. People do see their lives as having a unity, the most basic form of which is that of a narrative of the journey from birth to death. And while our understanding of the structure of this narrative typically changes we live our lives, it is nonetheless a narrative with a structure. Furthermore, ethical problems such as the one in Rhees' example lead us naturally, and perhaps inevitably, to think about our lives as a whole. For as I pointed out earlier, such problems raise the question of what sort of life to lead and what kind of person to become. Hence, I think that Wittgenstein's intuition that ethics involves the attempt to make sense of life as a whole reflects a fundamental truth about ourselves as ethical beings.

If we turn, however, to our ordinary, everyday, ethical concepts in the attempt to give our lives a structural unity, we face a dilemma: On the one hand, those concepts, such as "promise," "marriage," "courage," or "treachery," which do have a reasonably clear and determinate public meaning, have this characteristic because their use is limited to specific kinds of activities and situations. A catalog of the various goods, norms, and ideals found in our common practices does not in itself, however, constitute a unitary conception of life. The problem is not that such values can sometimes conflict; for conflict in ethical values may well be unavoidable no matter what sort of vision of life one may have. Rather, the problem is that the public meaning of those ethical concepts which are linked to particular practices does not determine how their associated values are to be integrated into a particular individual's life. For example, there is nothing in the concept of "marriage" which determines when, if ever, the goods and ideals of that institution are to be sacrificed to the values of some other practice.

On the other hand, the more abstract and generic everyday ethical concepts, such as "good," "right," or "moral," which typically are appealed to in the attempt to develop an integrated ethical perspective, are not linked to particular practices in such a way that the nature of the practice itself determines how they are to be applied. Thus the fact that the man in Rhees' example is married does not determine whether or not it would be right for him to divorce his wife in order to continue his career in cancer research. In other words, something like the traditional fact-value dichotomy opens up between what Bernard Williams has called "thick" ethical concepts, which are embedded in local practices, on the one hand, and higher order global ethical concepts, on the other, when we find ourselves confronted with what Wittgenstein refers to as an ethical problem.(62)

The classic Socratic approach to this state of affairs involves the attempt to develop a unified account of the human good through a process of dialectic, whereby the ordinary understanding of local ethical concepts is analyzed, criticized, modified, and sometimes rejected altogether. However, as I noted at the outset, Wittgenstein consistently disavowed this approach, presumably because such a process necessarily involves moving beyond at least some of the aspects of our shared linguistic framework, with the consequent danger of a slide into nonsense and, perhaps, moral corruption.

Wittgenstein's own understanding of ethics as a personal perspective which one brings to bear on one's practices opens up the possibility of altering, or discarding, our everyday ethical values in a way scarcely dreamed of in a Platonic dialogue. In one of his conversations with Rhees, for example, when the latter mentioned Goering's remark "Recht ist das, was uns gefallt" ("Right is that which is pleasing to us"), Wittgenstein replied "even that is a kind of ethics."(63) For given Wittgenstein's understanding of language and ethics, there really is no way to mediate between the personal vision of a Tolstoy, a Nietzsche, or a Goering, and those values embedded in our common practices. In other words, Wittgenstein's own personal belief in the value of a life of service and simple productive labor was just that: a personal belief; it is not entailed by his philosophical appeal to the ordinary and the everyday as a means of clarifying the grammar of our linguistic practices.

Hence, I think it is clear that Wittgenstein was no more able to integrate the ethical subject into the common public world after the development of his later views about language than he had been in the Tractatus and "A Lecture on Ethics." The reason is the same in both cases. The ethical subject, as understood by Wittgenstein, is not constituted by the shared linguistic structure, or structures, which create the conditions for the possibility of intersubjective agreement. In this respect, the subject through which ethics enters the world remained transcendental for Wittgenstein.

University of Nevada, Reno

1 Georg Henrik von Wright, "The Origin of the Tractatus," in Wittgenstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 83.

2 Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmuller (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 97-111.

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 6.42. In references to the Tractatus I am following the usual practice of identifying citations by Wittgenstein's own system of numbered paragraphs.

4 Wittgenstein's personal struggles at the time of the composition of the Tractatus are well-chronicled in the recent biographies by Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig: 1889-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990).

5 The way in which very personal and theoretical philosophical issues were systematically intertwined for Wittgenstein is illustrated by Russell's story of the occasion when he asked Wittgenstein, who was lost in thought, "Are you thinking about logic or about your sins?" and Wittgenstein replied, "Both." Bertrand Russell, "Philosophers and Idiots," The Listener (February 1955): 247.

6 Tractatus, 4.021, 5.135, 6.37.

7 Ibid., 6.41.

8 It has often been asserted that Wittgenstein's views about ethics, and values generally, in the Tractatus were derived from Schopenhauer; see G. E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 12; and Brian Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 286-315. But it is Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in ethics, whereby the self, rather than, say, nature or God, is seen as the source of value, which sets the fundamental problems in ethics for both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. Thus even though the extent of Wittgenstein's first hand knowledge of Kant's writings is unclear, I think it is more useful to explicate his views on ethics in terms of their similarities with, and differences from, those of Kant.

9 Engelmann, Letters, 97.

10 Tractatus, 6.52.

11 Tractatus, 4.0031, 4.112, 6.42.

12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 72-3. Wittgenstein makes the same point in his introductory remarks in "A Lecture on Ethics," Philosophical Review, no. 74 (1965): 5, where he is attempting to characterize in general terms the nature of ethics.

13 Notebooks, 73.

14 Tractatus, 6.423.

15 Ibid., 6.374.

16 Ibid., 6.373, 6.374.

17 Ibid., 6.43.

18 Ibid., 5.62.

19 Tractatus, 5.631-41.

20 Notebooks, 77, 79.

21 Tractatus, 6.45.

22 Notebooks, 83.

23 Notebooks, 83.

24 Tractatus, 6.43.

25 Notebooks, 73.

26 Tractatus, 3.03.

27 This lecture was published as "A Lecture on Ethics" (hereafter "Ethics"), Philosophical Review no. 74 (January 1965): 3-12.

28 "Ethics," 5-7.

29 Tractatus, 6.522.

30 In the lecture, Wittgenstein contrasts absolute with relative value. The latter involves a predetermined standard, as when we say that this is a good chair, and mean by "good" that the chair comes up to a certain standard of excellence for chairs. Thus such judgments are relative to a predetermined standard and, on Wittgenstein's view, are simply disguised statements of fact. As such they do not express what he regards as ethical value. See "Ethics," 5-6.

31 This is indicated, I think, by his closing remarks in the lecture: "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. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. 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"; "Ethics," 12.

32 "Ethics," 11. Similar sentiments are to be found in both the Tractatus (6.44) and the Notebooks (86) which is indicative, I believe, of their continuity with "A Lecture on Ethics."

33 "Ethics," 8, 10.

34 Ibid., 10.

35 Ibid., 11.

36 Ibid., 11, 8.

37 "Ethics," 11-12.

38 Tractatus, 6.54.

39 Ibid., 6.421, 6.13.

40 Ibid., 2.0121.

41 Ibid., 6.43.

42 "Ethics," 8.

43 Rush Rhees, "Some Developments in Wittgenstein's View of Ethics," Philosophical Review no. 74 (January 1965): 19.

44 Friedrich Waismann, "Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein," trans. Max Black, Philosophical Reviews; no. 74 (January 1965): 16.

45 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: The McMillan Company, 1958), Part 1, 373, 90. I am following the usual convention of referencing material from Part 1 of the Investigations by paragraph number, and material from Part 2 by page number.

46 Investigations, Part 2, 230.

47 Rhees, "Developments," 25.

48 "One thing we always do when discussing a word is to ask how we were taught it. Doing this on the one hand destroys a variety of misconceptions, on the other hand gives you a primitive language in which the word is used. Although this language is not what you talk when you are twenty, you get a rough approximation of what kind of language game is going to be played"; (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett; [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 1-2).

49 Rhees, "Developments," 21.

50 Rhees, "Developments," 23.

51 Bernard Williams has referred to ethical concepts which "seem to express a union of fact and value" as "thick ethical concepts"; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 129.

52 Rhees, "Developments," 23.

53 Tractatus, 6.521.

54 Rhees, "Developments," 23.

55 Wittgenstein's understanding of Christianity m inner spiritual terms is exemplified in his Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 31-3.

56 Wittgenstein did read some of Nietzsche's writings, including The Anti-Christ, during World War I, and did see them as representing a psychological or spiritual alternative to Christianity, which for him at that time was "the only sure way to happiness"; Monk, The Duty of Genius, 121.

57 Rhees, "Developments," 23.

58 Rhees, "Developments," 24.

59 Lectures and Conversations, 55.

60 Tractatus, 7.

61 In a conversation with Waismann, Wittgenstein once said: "Obviously the essence of religion can have nothing to do with the fact that speech occurs - or rather; if speech does occur this itself is a component of religious behavior and not a theory. Therefore, nothing turns on whether the words are true, false, or nonsensical"; Waismann, "Notes," 16.

62 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 129. One of the major themes of Williams' work seems to be that we can dispense with what I am referring to as global ethical concepts altogether, which I think is doubtful if we are to have a unitary conception of the good life.

63 Rhees, "Developments," 25.