Wittgenstein's Conception of Ethics: Hans Julius Schneider, Potsdam

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4 Wittgenstein’s Conception of Ethics
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6 Absolute Value and the Ineffable
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8 Hans Julius Schneider, Potsdam
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10 Abstract
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The paper tries to show that Wittgenstein’s conception of what he had called ‘the
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Ethical’ (in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics) does not have to involve the
13 stipulation of a metaphysical realm of ‘absolute value’, something that can only
14 be ‘shown’, not talked about. By arguing that important features he ascribes to
15 ‘language’ in the Tractatus are features not of ‘discursive’ languages (like natural
16 language) but features of what Nelson Goodman has characterized as notations,
the ineffability thesis becomes both plausible for notations and demonstrably
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false for discursive languages. Important insights of his later Philosophy of Lan-
18 guage are then applied to make a proposal for a positive account of his concep-
19 tion of ‘the Ethical’. Ethics in this understanding would have to articulate a pic-
20 ture of the human condition. Articulations of the intended kind are not part of
21 Psychology as a science, but are all the same rooted in experience and can there-
fore be rationally criticized as to their respective degree of adequacy (as the Psy-
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chotherapy of delusions shows). In this quite restricted sense Wittgenstein’s po-
23 sition can be seen as a moderate form of Cognitivism in a version that does not
24 involve Metaphysics in the traditional sense.
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27 1. Introduction
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29 The aim of this paper is to understand Wittgenstein’s early ideas about
30 what he called ‘the ethical’.1 For this purpose it will discuss some of
31 the differences between the two conceptions of language that he had de-
32 veloped during his life. This will involve on the one hand a look at the
33 Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics, and the question will be: Why did
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36 1 Earlier versions of this paper were read at the 2007 meeting of Societas Ethica, at
37 the University of Chicago, at Northland College (Wisconsin), at the New School
for Social Research, and at the University of Marburg. I would like to thank all my
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discussion partners at the places mentioned (and also Christoph Menke) for their
39 inspiring criticisms. Also I would like to thank Campbell Purton for correcting
40 my English. – A different GerACHTUNGREman version has been published as Schneider 2010.
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2 Hans Julius Schneider
1 he think in his early philosophy that in the field of ‘the ethical’ no mean-
2 ingful statements can be made? In an attempt to answer it, his early con-
3 ception of language will be compared to the kind of symbol systems that
4 Nelson Goodman has characterised as ‘notations’.2 What Goodman has
5 in mind here can most easily be grasped, if one thinks of our familiar mu-
6 sical notation. It is a claim of this paper, that seeing Wittgenstein’s project
7 in this light makes it very plausible that he could arrive at his conclusion
8 that about the ethical one can only be silent.
9 In a second step some points in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of
10 language will be located, points at which he himself overcomes the pic-
11 ture that had ‘held him captive’ (PI 1953: 115) in former years. The rec-
12 ognition of these changes in his view of language should on the one hand
13 help us to understand some of his earlier ideas about ‘the ethical’. And on
14 the other hand they should help us to see in which way his new, broader
15 conception of language after all does provide the possibility of using
16 meaningful language in this domain.
17 As a first sketch of the direction I will pursue here, the following
18 might be helpful: Wittgenstein’s basic move to characterise what he
19 calls ‘the ethical’ is the distinction between relative or instrumental
20 value on the one hand, and ethical value on the other. The domain of rel-
21 ative value he also characterises as that of the ‘natural world’, and for him
22 this means: it is the world as accessible to the natural sciences. As he says
23 in TLP 1922: 4.11: “The totality of true propositions is the total natural
24 science.”3 As terms for the ethical realm, on the other hand, he according-
25 ly uses the expression ‘supernatural’ (in contradistinction to ‘natural’);
26 also he speaks of ‘absolute value’ (in contradistinction to ‘relative’).
27 These are expressions that many philosophers today will find offensive
28 or at least dubious. So we will have to see whether we can find for
29 them an acceptable interpretation.
30 His question in the Lecture on Ethics (about which I will have more to
31 say later) then is the following: Is it possible to make (potentially true)
32 claims in a realm of ethics characterized as ‘supernatural’ or ‘absolute’?
33 If we are correct in assuming that his guiding picture of language at
34 the time was musical notation, this question can be restated thus: Does
35 ‘the ethical’ belong to the domain of states of affairs that can be captured
36 by a notation? When he says in the Tractatus: “Propositions cannot ex-
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39 2 Goodman 1976
40 3 “Die Gesamtheit der wahren Stze ist die gesamte Naturwissenschaft.”

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Wittgenstein’s Conception of Ethics 3
1 press anything higher” (TLP 1922: 6.42)4 and (a sentence I have already
2 quoted) “The totality of true propositions is the total natural science”, he
3 gives a clearly negative answer.
4 But how shall we ourselves answer these questions today? If we would
5 stick to the picture of a notation, two options present themselves with re-
6 spect to the ‘higher’. The first one might be called the ‘heroic’ option; it
7 is the one which young Wittgenstein himself took. It is expressed in the
8 famous last sentence of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
9 one must be silent.” (TLP 1922: 7)5 This means: There is this realm of
10 the ethical, but the ‘arms of language’ (so to speak) are too short to reach
11 up to it. Especially, people who do understand ‘the ethical’ will heroically
12 bite their lips and will be silent about it. But still, Wittgenstein seems to
13 think, we can ‘mean’ the higher. According to the traditional reading of
14 the Tractatus, here the distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’ comes
15 in: Perhaps we cannot really say something meaningful about the absolute
16 realm, but we can at least ‘mean’ the relevant states of affairs or entities,
17 and we can point to them or hint at them by indirect means, as he him-
18 self seems to do in parts of the Tractatus as well as in his Lecture on Ethics.
19 I myself think that this is a mystification which a critique of the notation
20 picture of language can reveal as superfluous.6
21 The second option is the ‘deflationary’ one. For the modern mind it
22 is more attractive than the heroic. Its basic idea is to leave the notation
23 picture in place as far as representations of ‘matters of fact’ are concerned,
24 but to open an additional domain of meaningful sentences, the domain
25 of norms. For a discussion of norms, the ontologically dubious realm
26 of ‘the higher’ can be dropped as unnecessary. The basic idea is that lan-
27 guage cannot only represent existing states of affairs, but also what (ac-
28 cording to our own choices) should be the case. This option is a version
29 of non-cognitivism: Ethics is not concerned with what is the case, but
30 how we should plan our future in a rational and peaceful way. And
31 such an agreement about norms can be achieved without recourse to
32 ‘the higher’ in a philosophically dubious sense.
33 I would like to explore a third possibility here, which is neither heroic
34 nor deflationary in the senses just sketched. I think that (first) we do not
35 have to be silent about the ethical, and I also think (second) that in the
36 ‘ethical’ realm in Wittgenstein’s sense there is something to learn from ex-
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4 “Stze kçnnen nichts Hçheres ausdrcken.”
39 5 “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darber muß man schweigen.”
40 6 Cf. Schneider 2004, 2005 and 2009.

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1 perience; the questions to be answered are not just matters of our own
2 choice. So the paper will argue for a modest version of cognitivism.
3 The basic strategy of the paper is to make visible in a first step the
4 extreme narrowness and indeed deeply misguiding character of Wittgen-
5 stein’s view of language as stated in the Tractatus. As an instrument to
6 achieve this, I am using Nelson Goodman’s distinction between notational
7 and discursive symbol systems.7 Contrary to the common ascription to the
8 Tractatus of a ‘picture theory’ of meaning, I think it is eye-opening to re-
9 alise that at many places in the text Wittgenstein’s model for symbolizing
10 is not a painting or drawing, but a musical score. More than once we find
11 him explicitly speaking about musical notation,8 especially in TLP 1922:
12 4.0141, where he speaks of a “general rule” with the help of which a mu-
13 sician would read off for example a symphony from the score, and where
14 he calls the rule a “law of projection”. It is this inspiration of his ideas by
15 the case of a notation, I think, that gives plausibility to the claim that sen-
16 tences about ‘the ethical’ must be nonsense. When we have understood
17 this source of plausibility, we have a better chance to also understand
18 the kind of revisions that are necessary for overcoming this narrowness.
19 Some of them are revisions Wittgenstein himself makes in his later phi-
20 losophy.
21 In order to see this clearly, we will have to discuss Wittgenstein’s early
22 intuitive ideas about ethics. Investigating them also provides a first
23 glimpse at those symbolic means that natural languages have (and that
24 were acknowledged by him at later times) but that notational symbol sys-
25 tems lack.
26 We will also see that (besides ‘being held captive’ by the notation pic-
27 ture of language) there is a second and related reason for his not coming
28 to terms with ‘the ethical’. This is his failure to distinguish descriptions of
29 so called ‘mental states’ from articulations of an experience. More exactly, it
30 is the failure to appreciate philosophically the special character of the lat-
31 ter, to provide room for such articulations in his picture of language. It
32 might be possible to formulate propositions of the first kind with help
33 of a notation; we will leave this question to Psychology. Propositions
34 of the second kind, however (which I will here call ‘articulations’), are
35 a different matter all together. They have an expressive as well as a cog-
36 nitive side, as I will try to show. To clarify some of the main character-
37 istics of these ‘articulations of experience’ means to provide some idea
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39 7 This point is elaborated in Schneider 2006.
40 8 For example in 4.011 and 4.013.

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1 of what the early Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics could have looked

2 like if he had chosen to spell it out in the light of his later ideas about
3 language.9
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6 2. The notational model in the Tractatus and the nonsense claim
7 as its obvious consequence
8
9 To briefly explain the concept of a notation in Goodman’s sense it must
10 suffice here to appeal to our familiar notation for classical music. A basic
11 requirement for a notation is that a realm of objects or things to be symbol-
12 ised must be given, and this requirement includes that it is understood
13 what counts as one ‘object’ and what counts for two objects to ‘be the
14 same’. In the case of music we may think of simple melodies, together
15 with social conventions that regulate whether a given attempt is a correct
16 instance of singing a given melody or not. A further characteristic of a
17 notation is that once it is established, it must always work in both direc-
18 tions: For the experts it must always be possible to write down the nota-
19 tion for any melody they hear, and vice versa, they must be able to sing
20 any melody correctly from a given score.
21 Three points are of particular importance for our discussion of ethics
22 and nonsense: The first point is that it is astonishing how much of what
23 Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus about language in general is quite obvi-
24 ously true about musical notation. The second point is that a notation is a
25 symbol system that is in fact very different from natural languages. For
26 the details I must refer the reader to Goodman’s Languages of Art
27 where precise definitions of the semantic requirements of both types of
28 symbol systems are given. To mention just one obvious difference: In nat-
29 ural languages it is not the case that when we move from the object to be
30 symbolised to the symbol and then go back to an object, we necessarily ar-
31 rive at the original starting point. This becomes visible if one considers
32 genera and species: From a particular raven, for example, one can
33 move to the symbol ‘bird’, but from there one can without mistake
34 move back and arrive at something different from the starting point,
35 for example at a sparrow instead of a raven. – The third and (in our con-
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9 The young Wittgenstein himself made use of ‘articulations’ and was aware of
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their special character. He says about them: “I can only appear as a person speak-
39 ing for myself.” (Waismann 1965: 16) But he sees no way to integrate this pos-
40 sibility into his picture of language.

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1 text) most important point is the fact, that the scope of notational sys-
2 tems, the domain of what it can symbolise, is very limited, and that
3 many claims Wittgenstein makes about the limits of language are quite
4 obviously true about the limits of notational systems, but not true of
5 our discursive natural languages. For example one cannot use the musical
6 notation if the task is to explain to somebody how a musical score relates
7 to the melody that it symbolises. One can characterise any melody which
8 may come up, but one cannot describe the relationship between the mel-
9 ody and the score when all one is allowed to use is the notation itself.10
10 In the analogy Wittgenstein is working with, what I have discussed as
11 ‘the realm of melodies’ corresponds to the realm of the ‘natural world’. So
12 he can say that a notational system can ‘describe’ anything in the natural
13 world (it can ‘represent’ any ‘state of affairs’), but it cannot do anything
14 else. His most basic and most easily understood example for something
15 that cannot in this sense be ‘described’ is not an entity from a supernatur-
16 al realm, but the subject matter of logic. It is for example easy to see that
17 one cannot justify a proposed logical structure by demonstrating (with
18 help of the notation) that it fits the structure of the world. In a similar
19 way, he seems to think, also ethical statements are not descriptions or rep-
20 resentations of states of affairs, but they seem to speak about the relation
21 between the world and something ‘outside’ of it, something ‘higher’ like a
22 creator or a purpose such a creator might have for the world.
23 In so far as Wittgenstein meant to say that ethical statements are not
24 notations of ‘states of affairs’ in the natural world, he was right: They can-
25 not be formulated in the envisaged system of notation. But we still have
26 to decide what consequences we ourselves want to draw from this. Should
27 we conclude that ethical sentences are pieces of nonsense? Or should we
28 give up the idea that our natural languages basically are notational sys-
29 tems? I propose to opt for the second alternative: We should give up
30 the notation-picture of language in order to make room for the possibility
31 that Wittgenstein’s ‘ethical sentences’ are not nonsensical. Only when this
32 is worked out a little further can we discuss whether (and if so, in what
33 sense) they are about something ‘absolute’ or ‘supernatural’.
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10 “To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put our-
38
selves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.” (“Um die
39 logische Form darstellen zu kçnnen, mßten wir uns mit dem Satze außerhalb
40 der Logik aufstellen kçnnen, das heißt außerhalb der Welt.”) TLP 1922: 4.12.

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1 3. Meaning, saying, and showing; traditional and

2 resolute reading
3
4 At this point I would like to look at one of the central criticisms that ‘res-
5 olute’ readers bring forward against the standard interpretation of the say-
6 ing-showing distinction, a criticism with which I am in agreement.11 It
7 turns on the rejection of the idea that there is basically just one relation
8 between language and its objects, a relation of ‘meaning something’,
9 and that this relation is a kind of projection or mapping as we know it
10 from notational systems: We have the melodies on the one hand, and
11 we have the musical scores on the other, and we have projections leading
12 us from items in one realm to items in the other realm, and the projection
13 rules work in both directions. What (by the traditional, ‘irresolute’ read-
14 ers) is then taken to be special about the subject matter of ethics is a cer-
15 tain queerness of the entities in the ethical domain. And it is this queer-
16 ness of entities that is responsible for the inability of our symbolism to
17 represent them. We do have some knowledge of them, so we can mean
18 them and (as the resolute readers like to say, with a critical tone) we
19 can ‘gesture’ at them, but (alas!) we cannot reach them properly with
20 our language.
21 This position is unsatisfactory because it leaves unexplained the na-
22 ture of the ethical realm and leaves unanswered the question how we
23 could ever have come to know anything about its inhabitants in the
24 first place. How could we ever have managed to ‘mean’ them, – regardless
25 of whether we relate to them by means of saying or of showing? If we stick
26 to the idea that there is a basic semantic uniformity in the relation of
27 ‘meaning something’ with the two branches of either saying what we
28 mean or only showing it (depending on the either ‘normal’ or ‘queer’ na-
29 ture of the entities we try to refer to), then the epistemological accessibil-
30 ity and indeed the philosophical respectability of the things ‘shown’ re-
31 mains highly dubious. It is to be suspected that we do not have much
32 more here than a vague memory of the theological thesis that no
33 ‘name of God’ really reaches up to him. Even somebody who thinks
34 that there is something to this claim should (as a philosopher, at least)
35 be able to understand the reasons for this inaccessibility. Here Wittgen-
36 stein arrives at an impasse: There are very important things to be said
37
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40 11 Cf. Crary / Read 2000 and my review in Schneider 2003.

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1 in the realm of ethics, it seems, but if we are honest, we can see that lan-
2 guage is an inadequate means to do so.
3 It is not to be denied that this paradox has positive sides. Thus when
4 we stress the nonsense aspect, this may be done with the respectable mo-
5 tive to highlight the difference in kind between statements in ethics and
6 statements about physical matters of fact. This difference seems to have
7 been of great importance to Wittgenstein on a personal level; he seems
8 to have feared a trivialising way of speaking about ‘the higher’. So the
9 nonsense claim defends the ethical realm from being trivialised. But a dis-
10 advantage of this strategy is that it leaves unexplained why one engages in
11 ethical talk at all.
12 Wittgenstein himself (both in his early and in his later work) clings to
13 his intuition that ethical statements are different in kind from descrip-
14 tions of physical states of affairs. While in his early philosophy he
15 seems to have seen the nonsense claim as the only way to preserve this
16 thesis of a difference in kind, in his later philosophy he makes important
17 moves to spell out a plurality of different kinds of making sense and so
18 implicitly makes room also for ‘the ethical’. So instead of declaring
19 that certain sentences are nonsense, he admits and explores different
20 ways of being meaningful. In fact, it is characteristic of his late philoso-
21 phy to insist on the many kinds of important differences in the workings
22 of language. Some of these are of a special relevance for his understanding
23 of ‘ethics’, as indicated in his Lecture.
24 As a first hint about the direction the following discussion will take,
25 here is a quote of a passage from his later work in which he discusses the
26 process of thinking and what we might mean when we call it a ‘mental’ or
27 ‘incorporeal’ process. He writes:
28
One might say ‘Thinking is an incorporeal process’ … if one were using this
29 to distinguish the grammar of the word ‘think’ from that of, say, the word
30 ‘eat’. Only that makes the difference between the meanings look too slight.
31 (It is like saying: numerals are actual, and numbers non-actual, objects.)
32 An unsuitable type of expression is a sure means of remaining in a state of
confusion. It as it were bars the way out. (PI 1953: 339)12
33
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35 12 “Man kçnnte aber sagen ‘Denken ist ein unkçrperlicher Vorgang’, wenn man da-
36 durch die Grammatik des Wortes ‘denken’ von der des Wortes ‘essen’, z. B., un-
37 terscheiden will. Nur erscheint dadurch der Unterschied der Bedeutungen zu ger-
ing. (hnlich ist es, wenn man sagt: die Zahlzeichen seien wirkliche, die Zahlen
38 nicht-wirkliche Gegenstnde.) Eine unpassende Ausdrucksweise ist ein sicheres
39 Mittel, in einer Verwirrung stecken zu bleiben. Sie verriegelt gleichsam den Aus-
40 weg aus ihr.”

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1 The important sentence here is: “Only that makes the difference between
2 the meanings look too slight.” If we apply this sentence to what we have
3 discussed so far from his Lecture on Ethics, a parallel formulation would
4 be: If we would say of ethical objects that they are ‘supernatural’ (are ‘ab-
5 solute’, are ‘objects of showing’), this way of speaking would make “the
6 difference between the meanings look too slight.” But what are ethical
7 statements about (according to the Lecture on Ethics) if not ethical objects
8 of a special (‘supernatural’) kind, the kind of things that can only be
9 shown?
10
11
12 4. Wittgenstein’s positive statements about ‘the ethical’
13
14 To answer this question we will consult his Lecture on Ethics and look for
15 Wittgenstein’s positive statements. We do so explicitly from a position
16 that does not subscribe to the notational picture of language. This
17 means that we do not demand that every (non-logical) meaningful sign
18 must stand for an object of a certain kind that makes it meaningful, – be
19 it an actual or non-actual, a natural or a supernatural object. It is an im-
20 portant aspect of the progress that Wittgenstein has made on the way to
21 his later philosophy that he discovered that there are many (and indeed
22 quite different) areas of speaking in which truth claims are made, but
23 in which a demand for presenting a ‘corresponding object’ as a condition
24 to make the corresponding sentence meaningful is not (and does not have
25 to be) met. So the idea of a basic semantic uniformity in ‘meaning some-
26 thing’, a uniformity that encompasses saying and showing, is given up in
27 his late philosophy, but (as we shall see in a moment) not yet in the Lec-
28 ture on Ethics.
29 What then are the positive statements we find in the Lecture on Ethics?
30 Two of them meet the eye: Firstly, Wittgenstein relates the problem of
31 meaning in the domain of the ethical to his own personal life, to mo-
32 ments of experience in which he himself would tend to use certain expres-
33 sions (which he later classifies as nonsense). And secondly, these expres-
34 sions, in their originally intended use, do not even purport to refer to
35 any entities, actual or non-actual, natural or supernatural (they are not
36 like reports about a contact with aliens from outer space). They function
37 in an altogether different way, a way that Wittgenstein (at the time when
38 he composed his Lecture on Ethics) could not characterise sufficiently, i. e.
39 he could not integrate their way of being meaningful into his notational
40 picture of language. This has to be accepted as a feature of his thinking at

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1 the time of the Lecture, of course, but it must not prevent us to use in-
2 sights of his late philosophy to interpret what he was trying to get at
3 in his older formulations.
4 There are two such experiences I would like to mention: Firstly mo-
5 ments of ‘wonder at the existence of the world’, and secondly, moments of
6 ‘absolute safety’. He makes it clear that the relevant words do not have their
7 well known relative sense if they are used to articulate the experiences
8 Wittgenstein has in mind. It is for example not the safety a TV-reporter
9 might feel on returning to his office in Europe after an assignment to
10 Iraq.
11 Taking our clue once more from the discussion of notational systems
12 and what they can and what they cannot be used for, we are led to see that
13 in both statements Wittgenstein does not speak of any particular objects
14 (items, entities), and not about an instrumental value such object might
15 have as related to a particular, self-set goal. But also he does not speak of
16 any supernatural beings or entities. Instead, what he is talking about
17 seems to be something like the quality of the whole of his life as he sees
18 or feels it in the experience concerned.
19 It is not difficult to see that this way of speaking about the character
20 of a totality is something that cannot be accomplished with help of a no-
21 tational system that was devised to describe nothing more than certain
22 elements and the way they are ordered. We can see this quite easily by
23 looking at the case of music again: As Goodman has correctly stated,
24 the usual Italian words like allegro or con dolcezza are not part of the mu-
25 sical notation in his strict sense. They belong to natural language, that is
26 to say, to a discursive symbol system, elements of which are traditionally
27 added to the notation proper.
28
29
30 5. Special objects versus special ways of meaning
31
32 We can now address the question whether the ways of speaking that Witt-
33 genstein used in his Lecture to explain what he means by ‘ethics’ involve
34 metaphysical commitments or not. Do expressions like ‘to wonder at the
35 existence of the world’, or ‘to experience absolute safety’, make claims about
36 the supernatural in a traditional religious or metaphysical way? From
37 what has been discussed so far, the answer is: Not necessarily. As long
38 as we do not discuss (in a literal way) a creator of the world or a super-
39 natural being the existence and benevolent character of which is the rea-
40 son for our feeling safe, no supernaturalism is involved. Again the analogy

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1 to music and the limits of musical notation may be of help. A notational

2 system represents ‘sounds standing in particular relations’. But we can
3 think of a music teacher who says: ‘You should play this melody as if
4 you would express a compliment to someone or as if you would meet
5 somebody and make a bow with your tune!’ In such utterances something
6 is said about the character of the melody as a whole, something additional
7 to what the notation says or any notation could say. But this does not in-
8 volve an additional (‘supernatural’) tone with some very peculiar charac-
9 teristics which miraculously would exclude it from being represented in
10 the normal notational way.
11 So the suggestion here is that at the heart of what Wittgenstein thinks
12 ethics is all about are judgements – convincing or not so convincing, ad-
13 equate or not so adequate – about the whole of a life or of an episode
14 considered as related to such a whole. In Aristotelian language: Ethics
15 is about the Good Life. If this is correct, Wittgenstein’s term ‘absolute’
16 in his expression ‘absolute value’ does not refer to something outside
17 our human world, in the sense of an extra entity, apart from those we
18 know and normally speak about. Instead, it can be read as signalling
19 the kind of non-relativity that results from a consideration of a whole.
20 Likewise I propose that the term ‘supernatural’ in this context does not
21 point to something outside the world (like its creator), but to something
22 outside the realm of what the symbol systems of the natural sciences can
23 reach. A number of other expressions Wittgenstein uses to hint at what he
24 takes to be the province of ethics support this interpretation, namely the
25 expressions “meaning of life”, “the right way of living” (LE 1965: 5) and
26 (in the Tractatus) his characterisation of the mystical as “Feeling the world
27 as a limited whole” (TLP 1922: 6.45).13 All of these expressions cannot
28 be understood as working properly inside a notational system. But this
29 would render them nonsense only if we would restrict our view to the
30 semantic capacities of notational systems, and this is exactly what I pro-
31 pose we should not do.
32 The view that Wittgenstein derives his nonsense claim from a too re-
33 stricted, namely a ‘notational’ picture of language is supported when we
34 find him imagining an interlocutor who wants to save the contested ex-
35 pressions by saying that these ways of talking are not to be taken literally
36 but must instead be understood as similes. The answer he gives to this im-
37 agined objection is revealing: If indeed the expressions were similes, he
38 says, one would have to be able to say for what these similes stand
39
40 13 “Das Gefhl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische.”

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1 proxy, what it is that they make a statement about in an indirect way. But
2 giving such a reformulation, he goes on to say, would necessarily refer us
3 to a ‘state of affairs’. But this in turn would mean that we would have left
4 the realm of the ethical and would be concerned with nothing but ‘mat-
5 ters of fact’ (cf. LE 1965: 10).
6 Again we can observe that this objection (against the imagined inter-
7 locutor) holds good only if the notational paradigm is taken for granted.
8 Only with this premise in place does it follow that for a simile to be
9 meaningful there must in all cases be a ‘something’ (in the sense of a con-
10 figuration of entities) the speaker is understood to be referring to, even if
11 he does so in an indirect manner, not literally. This is by no means an
12 uncommon way of understanding non-literal language. For example in
13 her interesting book about metaphor and religious language Janet Martin
14 Soskice had given her first working definition of metaphor in the follow-
15 ing words: “…metaphor is that figure of speech whereby we speak about
16 one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.”14 Literally
17 read this definition claims that we have two ‘things’ here, one that we are
18 ‘really’ speaking about and one that is only ‘suggested’ by the particular
19 figurative words chosen. If this were so, any metaphor (and any simile)
20 could in principle be substituted by a literal expression which would
21 speak (as Wittgenstein says) about a ‘state of affairs’. But the result of
22 such a substitution (just because it speaks of a ‘state of affairs’) would
23 miss the intended ethical meaning, as Wittgenstein had correctly ob-
24 served. But again: This holds good only if we stick to the premise that
25 in all meaningful talk there must be ‘things’ talked about. If we give
26 up this ‘notational’ premise, we can see that in some analogical or figura-
27 tive ways of speaking we will find expressions that do not stand for any
28 entities that we would be ‘really’ speaking about. We seem to speak ‘about
29 nothing’, but what we say still makes sense.
30 It should be noted that in questioning the position that in every
31 meaningful sentence there must be some ‘thing’ or ‘object’ the speaker
32 is speaking about, the intended denial is concerned with a substantial,
33 not with what one could call a ‘formal’ or ‘grammatical’ understanding
34 of the expression ‘object’. So it is not disputed here that every correctly
35 formed English sentence must have a subject expression. For example,
36 the legitimacy of the ‘it’ in the sentence ‘it is raining’ is not denied.
37 The point is not about syntax (or ‘surface grammar’), the concern is to
38
39
40 14 Soskice 1985: 15.

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1 avoid reifications at places where language does not serve to describe con-
2 stellations of objects.
3 As I understand the late Wittgenstein, he has arrived at this conclu-
4 sion himself and has expressed it in a number of quite different contexts.
5 One is the problem of the meaning of mathematical expressions. For his
6 understanding of ‘ethics’, however, it is more interesting to see how he
7 struggled with the workings of expressions for our mental life, for exam-
8 ple with the grammar of such a simple term as ‘pain’ (or simple articula-
9 tions like ‘ouch!’). Unfortunately, however, he never took up ethics again
10 in any extensive way. Although the experience of having pain may at a
11 first glance seem far from the subject matter of ethics, I think it provides
12 a useful bridge for a return to Wittgenstein’s early struggle to get clear
13 about expressions for articulating the existential experiences he alludes
14 to in his Lecture on Ethics. Looking into his Philosophical Investigations
15 we find him saying, in his typical dialogical style:
16
‘But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour
17 accompanied by pain and pain behaviour without any pain?’ – Admit it?
18 What greater difference could there be! – ‘And yet you again and again
19 reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.’ – Not at all. It
20 is not a something, but not a nothing either! (PI 1953: 304)
21 And a few lines later he adds as a general lesson:
22
The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that
23
language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to
24 convey thoughts – which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or any-
25 thing else you please. (ibid.)15
26
The last sentence can be read as an explicit disavowal of the notation pic-
27
ture that had ‘held him captive’ when he wrote his first book (PI 1953:
28
115). A person expressing her pain is not using a notation to indicate that
29
a certain object has appeared in one of her sensual fields. Put more gen-
30
erally: The language we use to articulate the human experience of pain
31
(but also of wonder at the existence of the world, or of a feeling of abso-
32
33
34 15 “‘Aber du wirst doch zugeben, dass ein Unterschied ist, zwischen Schmerzbeneh-
35 men mit Schmerzen und Schmerzbenehmen ohne Schmerzen.’ Zugeben? Welch-
36 er Unterschied kçnnte grçßer sein! – ‘Und doch gelangst du immer wieder zum
37 Ergebnis, die Empfindung selbst sei ein Nichts.’ – Nicht doch. Sie ist kein Etwas,
aber auch nicht ein Nichts! … Das Paradox verschwindet nur dann, wenn wir
38 radikal mit der Idee brechen, die Sprache funktioniere immer auf eine Weise,
39 diene immer dem gleichen Zweck: Gedanken zu bertragen – seien diese nun
40 Gedanken ber Huser, Schmerzen, Gut und Bçse, oder was immer.”

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1 lute safety) does not consist of elements of a notation, with the help of
2 which we take note of the appearance of a number of objects in certain
3 constellations. We can put this claim in sharper profile when we consider
4 how Wittgenstein arrives (in the Lecture on Ethics) at the conclusion that
5 any successful attempt to find a meaningful sentence that would in some
6 way seem to fit his existential experiences would necessarily miss the eth-
7 ical point intended because it could not be anything else but a statement
8 of a ‘state of affairs’.
9
10
11 6. ‘Experience’, ‘mental states’, and ‘articulation’
12
13 Wittgenstein makes a curious move in the Lecture on Ethics that has not
14 been mentioned so far. As a kind of introduction to his explanation of
15 what kind of personal situations he would think of when asked to explain
16 the subject matter of ethics, he says that when he would now proceed to
17 talk about those, his audience would be “…in the situation in which you
18 would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of
19 pleasure” (LE 1965: 7). Does he mean to indicate that the subject matter
20 of ethics is a certain feeling of pleasure, to be handled in a special field of
21 psychology?
22 This is hardly plausible. Other formulations in the Lecture clearly in-
23 dicate the great existential weight that the subject has for him, and this
24 attitude to his subject matter is upheld until the very last words: After
25 having come to the conclusion that attempts to formulate ethical senten-
26 ces result in nonsense, he nevertheless says about these sentences they
27 would be “…a document of a tendency in the human mind which I per-
28 sonally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule
29 it.” (LE 1965: 12) This formulation clearly speaks against the interpreta-
30 tion that ethics is concerned with a type of pleasure. The correct reading
31 then could be that all he wants to compare at this point are the epistemo-
32 logical situations of speaking of experiences of pleasure on the one hand
33 and speaking of the particular existential experiences concerning the
34 whole of his life on the other. They are similar insofar in both cases
35 the speaker must ask the members of his audience to remember episodes
36 of their own experience; these they have to recall in order to understand
37 him.
38 Clearly this later reading is to be preferred. But still we find a level in
39 the text of his Lecture on which he is tempted to treat both cases as sim-
40 ilar, namely as being concerned with ‘psychology’. And this tendency is an

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1 additional cause for those of his steps that lead him into paradox. This
2 becomes visible when he speaks of ‘states of mind’. The context is the fol-
3 lowing. Wittgenstein imagines an omniscient person who “…knew all the
4 movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also
5 knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived” (LE 1965:
6 6). He imagines that all this would be written down in a big book and
7 then claims “…that this book would contain nothing that we would
8 call an ethical judgement or anything that would logically imply such a
9 judgement.” (ibid.) He goes on by considering Hamlet’s words “Nothing
10 is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” and reads it as the pro-
11 posal “that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us,
12 are attributes to our states of mind.”
13 And now he makes a decisive but problematic step, when against this
14 he retorts: “But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by
15 that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.”
16 (ibid.) If we want to move beyond the perspective of the young Wittgen-
17 stein and leave the notational picture of language behind us, the decisive
18 question now is: What would it mean to speak about a state of mind ‘so
19 far as we do NOT mean by that a fact which we can describe’? What
20 would an articulation of an experience be if it would not be a description
21 of a fact? Is there room in our language for such articulations, even if there
22 is no room for them in notational systems of the kind Wittgenstein has
23 taken language to be in his earlier years?
24 In his later philosophy he himself sees it as a mistake to treat articu-
25 lations of an experience of the kind considered as if they were descriptions
26 of ‘states of affairs’. We have already mentioned the simple case of pain and
27 have quoted his statement that what is ‘talked about’ in this case “is not a
28 something, but not a nothing either!”
29 At another passage in the Philosophical Investigations, he imagines a
30 case in which he would silently beckon to a person in a crowd in order
31 to make him or her come to him. He imagines that he would be misun-
32 derstood by some other person thinking that she would be the one ad-
33 dressed, and that he would correct this by using the words: “I meant
34 him”. And now he asks: “Am I remembering a process or state? –
35 When did it begin, what was its course; etc.?” (PI 1953: 661)16 For
36 the young Wittgenstein, referring to a process or state was the only option
37 he could think of for giving a meaningful account of an experience, but
38
39 16 “Ich erinnere mich, ihn gemeint zu haben. Erinnere ich mich eines Vorgangs oder
40 Zustands? – Wann fing er an; wie verlief er; etc.?”

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1 this kind of reference (as he had correctly observed) would destroy the
2 intended character of the utterance (in the context we are concerned
3 with: its ethical character). When he wrote the Investigations, his answer
4 is more complex. He says: “One can now say that the words ‘I wanted N
5 to come to me’ describe the state of my mind at that time; and again one
6 may not say so.” (PI 1953: 662)17 In the German original we have ‘Zu-
7 stand meiner Seele’ (literally: state of my soul), so the wording signals a
8 distance from the idea of ‘mental states’ as (ethically irrelevant) ‘states of
9 affairs’ (not to mention ‘brain states’). This distance is stressed, and the
10 new approach is at least hinted at in the following paragraph in which
11 Wittgenstein approaches a field of discussion that was to become prom-
12 inent only much later: narrativity.
13
If I say ‘I meant him’ very likely a picture comes to my mind, perhaps of how
14 I looked at him, etc.; but the picture is only like an illustration to a story.
15 From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all;
16 only when one knows the story does one know the significance of the pic-
17 ture. (PI 1953: 663)18
18 We had asked above what articulating a ‘state of mind’ would be if it
19 would not be describing a fact. The description of a fact (Wittgenstein
20 had said in the Lecture) is ethically irrelevant. In his later philosophy
21 the idea of a notation for ‘states of mind’ is given up, and the first
22 steps to an alternative reading for ‘articulations of the inner’ (in a
23 broad sense, not restricted to ‘the ethical’) are proposed, along the follow-
24 ing lines: They are now seen as moves in ongoing social exchanges, they
25 involve telling stories the significance of which is negotiated in the proc-
26 ess. The entities that seem to be involved in such articulations are now
27 seen as ‘grammatical fictions’ (PI 1953: 307), as results of the means
28 of expression on a syntactical level, not as objects of science. (PI 1953:
29 656)19 What we can take from these as yet sketchy hints and considera-
30 tions is that describing or representing states of affairs is not the only
31
32
17 “Man kann nun sagen, die Worte ‘ich wollte, N. solle zu mir kommen’ beschrei-
33 ben den damaligen Zustand meiner Seele, und kann es auch wieder nicht sagen.”
34 18 “Wenn ich sage ‘Ich meinte ihn’, da mag mir wohl ein Bild vorschweben, etwa
35 davon, wie ich ihn ansah, etc.; aber das Bild ist nur wie eine Illustration zu
36 einer Geschichte. Aus ihr allein wre meistens gar nichts zu erschließen; erst
37 wenn man die Geschichte kennt, weiß man, was es mit dem Bild soll.”
19 “Look on the language-game as the primary thing. And look on the feelings, etc.,
38 as you look on a way of regarding the language-game, as interpretation.” – “Sieh
39 auf das Sprachspiel als das Primre! Und auf die Gefhle, etc. als auf eine Be-
40 trachtungsweise, eine Deutung, des Sprachspiels!”

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1 function of language. Instead, we see some types of simple first person

2 utterances ‘about the inner’ (like those ‘about’ pain or about what we
3 had meant) which are not descriptions but (to use my preferred technical
4 term) ‘articulations’ of the speaker’s understanding of her situation, of her
5 place in a story.
6 If we take this as a possible way to think about these matters, it seems
7 plausible to understand talk about an experience of absolute value (deci-
8 sive for Wittgenstein for the realm of ethics in his sense) as being of the
9 same general kind. Such talk then would not be a description of some-
10 thing, but rather an articulation in the discussed sense, only on a much
11 larger scale, encompassing a particular view of what is traditionally called
12 ‘the human condition’. Something like this had emerged above when we
13 tried to interpret the expression ‘absolute value’. For this reason the term
14 ‘mental state’ (and even the label ‘philosophy of psychology’) is mislead-
15 ing for what Wittgenstein is doing in his later philosophy because these
16 words carry Cartesian connotations. What he was interested in rather
17 were those parts of our ‘mental’ vocabulary that are not to be understood
18 by seeing what ‘facts’ or ‘states of affairs’ in the Tractatus sense are being
19 described by them; they do not refer to a ‘something’, neither a physical
20 nor a ‘psychological’ something. Accepting these as meaningful in the in-
21 dicated sense means to leave the notational picture behind.
22
23
24 7. Conclusion: Cognitivism and ineffability
25
26 According to the view now emerging, ‘the ethical’ is not only a matter of
27 deciding what we want, of setting norms for states of affairs to be brought
28 about, but also a matter of experience, of how things are. It is Aristotelian
29 in a broad sense; it is a modest version of ‘cognitivism’, one that does not
30 presuppose any simple or complex ethical ‘entities’, but that still holds
31 that our ethical views of our situation as a whole and our conceptions
32 of a good life are matters of experience. All one needs here is to see
33 that articulations of experience (in the sense taken by Wittgenstein to
34 be characteristic of ethics) allow a classification as more or less ‘adequate’
35 (not as ‘true’ or ‘false’ in the sense of simple factual statements).
36 As a model for such a grading of adequacy we can think of psycho-
37 therapy. We all know that it is possible to deceive oneself about one’s real
38 situation and surely we all aim at not deceiving ourselves, but at seeing
39 our (and generally: seeing the human) condition as it really is, to the
40 best of our current understanding. And it is often possible to distinguish

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1 better from worse pictures of our situations, for example to identify and
2 criticise ideologies. It is this possibility to distinguish between the quali-
3 ties of versions of rendering ‘the whole of life’ that is responsible for our
4 feeling that there is a cognitive side to ‘ethics’ in Wittgenstein’s special
5 sense, a cognitive side, moreover, that does not need any supernatural,
6 transcendent objects. What Wittgenstein has called ‘the ethical’ thus is
7 close to religion as well as to aesthetics.20 It involves a conception of
8 the whole of a good human life, and this conception informs any partic-
9 ular ethical judgement.
10 Let me close with a remark about the ineffability thesis and the idea
11 of ‘showing’: Is there not a grain of truth in the statement that in ethics
12 (and also in other departments of speaking about the ‘higher’) there are
13 limits to what language can do? The answer is: Yes, there are limits to
14 what language can do, but in a quite general sense that includes not
15 only its higher, but also its rather trivial departments.
16 To understand what someone is saying one has to be at home in the
17 relevant language games and this often means that one had occasion in
18 one’s own experience to make use of them. To a person who has never
19 experienced pain, no words or sentences will be a substitute for such
20 an experience. And someone who has never looked at the whole of her
21 life and has never tried to distinguish her childish from her justified
22 fears and hopes, the superficial good from the less superficial, – to
23 such a person language alone would not be of much help. But this is
24 the case also in quite trivial matters, such as the expressions for the vari-
25 eties of kinds of cheese or wine. Without practical experience you will
26 never understand what the shopkeeper of the Delicatessen is trying to
27 tell you.
28
29
30
Bibliography
31
Alice Crary, Rupert Read (eds.): The New Wittgenstein, London / New York
32 2000.
33 Borsche, Tilman (ed.): Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie. Von Platon bis Noam
34 Chomsky, Mnchen 1996, 55 – 70.
35 Goodman, Nelson: Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, In-
dianapolis 1976.
36
37
20 Both points are obvious in the Lecture on Ethics. – Cf. also TLP 1922: 6.421: “It
38
is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aes-
39 thetics are one.)” – “Es ist klar, dass sich die Ethik nicht aussprechen lßt. Die
40 Ethik ist transcendental. (Ethik und sthetik sind Eins.)”

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1 Schneider, Hans Julius: “Arten von Unsinn?”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Phi-
2 losophie 51 (2003) 876 – 881.
3
–: “Das Unsagbare und das Unsgliche: Grenzen im Bereich der Wissensfor-
men”, in: Wolfram Hogrebe (ed.): Grenzen und Grenzberschreitungen.
4 XIX. Deutscher Kongress fr Philosophie (Bonn 2002), Berlin 2004,
5 770 – 783.
6 –: “Metaphor and the Limits of Language”, in: Marta Helena de Freitas, Nuno
7 Venturinha (eds.): A Expressao do Indizivel: Estudos sobre Filosofia e Psico-
8
logia, Brasilia D.F. 2005, 269 – 292 (ebenfalls in: George Allan, Merle F.
Allshouse (Hrsg.): Nature, Truth and Value: Exploring the Thinking of
9 Frederick Ferr, Lanham 2005, 127 – 142).
10 –: “Satz – Bild – Wirklichkeit. Vom Notationssystem zur Autonomie der Gram-
11 matik im ‘Big Typescript’”, in: Stefan Majetschak (ed.): Wittgensteins ‘große
12 Maschinenschrift’. Untersuchungen zum philosophischen Ort des Big Type-
13
scripts (TS 213) im Werk Ludwig Wittgensteins, Frankfurt a. M. / Bern u. a.
2006, 79 – 98.
14 –: “Das Unmçgliche, das Undenkbare, das Unsagbare, – Schritte zum Wunder-
15 baren?”, in: Ingolf U. Dalferth, Philipp Stoellger, Andreas Hunziker (eds.):
16 Unmçglichkeiten. Zur Phnomenologie und Hermeneutik eines modalen
17 Grenzbegriffs, Tbingen 2009, 215 – 232.
18
–: “Stze kçnnen nichts Hçheres ausdrcken. Das ‘Ethische’ und die Grenzen der
Sprache beim frhen Wittgenstein”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie
19 58 (2010).
20 Soskice, Janet Martin: Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford 1985.
21 Waismann, Friedrich: “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein”, in: Philosophical Re-
22 view 74 (1965), 12 – 16.
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Wittgenstein's Conception of Ethics: Hans Julius Schneider, Potsdam

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1 of what the early Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics could have looked

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1 3. Meaning, saying, and showing; traditional and

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1 to music and the limits of musical notation may be of help. A notational

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1 function of language. Instead, we see some types of simple first person

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