Rachel Fraser on Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies

Although I have yet to read the book under review, I have some thoughts about Rachel Fraser's criticism of Sophie Grace Chappell's new book Epiphanies. All quotes from this in the Boston Review. Bits that seem extra important to me are in bold.

Chappell’s proposal for managing disagreement is what she calls “a republic of conversation.” We should explore together our various epiphanies. Only extremists—those whose epiphanies preclude such conversation—will be excluded. This, of course, is textbook political liberalism. As such, it inherits much of the dreamy unreality characteristic of liberal visions of collective life. There are particular agents with their private projects. Sometimes those agents come together. When they do, their conduct is governed only by the thinnest of requirements: be tolerant, be respectful.

This seems unfair. Chappell is not responsible for the alleged faults of other members of the same tradition or family of views. And Chappell offers, apparently, a proposal (concerning what we should do), while Fraser criticizes a “fantasy” of how our collective lives are lived.

This is a fantasy. Our collective lives are always governed by a thicket of normatively structured institutions—institutions that orient us to a particular conception of the good. [...] Arguably, it is just these thickets which enable conversation. Meaningful discourse requires an interpersonal infrastructure, which cannot be laid in a normative vacuum; it needs some lifeworld to bed into. But it seems to be within just such a vacuum—all moral content thicker than civility pumped out—that Chappell proposes we converse.

Evidence that Chappell proposes conversation in a moral vacuum? None that I can see. But, of course, I haven't read the book.

Once we start thinking of ethics as a social technology, systematicity and argument take on a different hue. It’s hard to be all that piecemeal or poetic when thinking about how to organize social institutions. We may live by our visions, but they can’t write our social policy. And some of us are doomed to live within a moral order that we disavow. This, I am inclined to think, is an unavoidable feature of human life: there could not be a form of life both neutral and meaningfully collective.

Once we do what?! Can this be a good idea? I would think that piecemeal is the only way to think about social institutions. Pretty much for reasons that Fraser gives. We are borin into a world of such institutions and they shape the way we think. We can destroy everything but only literally, only physically. We cannot imaginatively or intellectually wipe the slate clean and then think afresh from there. Wiping the slate clean removes the tools we need to think with. We are stuck with something like reflective equilibrium as the best or only option for social evaluation.

Moving on... So, to converse (meaningfully and collectively) we need a lifeworld. This will not be neutral. And so neither can we ever be. OK.

But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be articulate. In other words, you owe me an argument. The vision of the good life that our social institutions encode should be explicit and contestable. And to be explicit and contestable—well, that sounds a lot like the law, and less like art criticism (at least as Chappell conceives it). Arguments can be challenged, rather than merely traded, in a way that visions cannot. 

Couldn’t one equally say, “But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be civil, tolerant, and respectful”? And surely articulating a vision of the good life need not, and usually will not, take the form of putting forward an argument. And how contestable will a vision be that is encoded into the social institutions that enable the very conversation in which alone it can be contested? Somewhat, no doubt, but imperfectly or awkwardly, I would think, at best.

This seems like the key to the mystery here. There's an ideal (that seems visible in Fraser's thinking) of stepping back to get as clear a view as possible of social norms so that they can be critiqued and changed as desired. But there is also a recognition that we cannot do this except from within a lifeworld that is not completely separable from those norms and institutions. Which makes Chappell's view seem more correct than Fraser's. 

Wittgenstein's Philosophy in 1929

 

Florian Franken Figueiredo

The Creation of Wittgenstein

 

Table of Contents

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe

 

Introduction, Roger Teichmann
Part I: Intention
1. 'On Anscombe on Practical Knowledge and Practical Truth,' Lucy Campbell
2. 'Intention with Which,' Charles F. Capps
3. 'Intention, Knowledge and responsibility,' Rémi Clot-Goudard
4. '"Practical knowledge" and testimony, Johannes Roessler

Part II: Ethical Theory
5. 'Anscombe's Three Theses After Sixty Years: modern moral philosophy, polemic, and "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' Sophie Grace Chappell
6. 'Practical Truth, Ethical Naturalism, and the Constitution of Agency in Anscombe's Ethics,' John Hacker-Wright
7. 'Criterialism and Contextualism,' Gavin Lawrence
8. 'Anscombe on Double Effect and Intended Consequences,' Cyrille Michon
9. 'Anscombe on Ought,' Anselm Mueller

Part III: Human Life
10.'Justice and Murder: The Backstory to Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' John Berkman
11. 'Anscombe on euthanasia as murder,' David A. Jones
12. 'The Knowledge of Human Dignity,' Micah Lott
13. 'Life and Other Basic Rights in Anscombe,' Katharina Nieswandt
14. 'Anscombe: Sexual Ethics,' Duncan Richter
15. 'Linguistic idealism and human essence,' Rachael Wiseman

Part IV: The First Person
16. 'The first person, self-consciousness and action,' Valerie Aucouturier
17. 'Anscombe and Self-consciousness,' Adrian Haddock
18. 'The first person and "The First person,"' Harold Noonan

Part V: Anscombe on/and Other Philosophers
19. 'Anscombe's Wittgenstein,' Joel Backström
20. 'Anscombe and Aquinas,' John Haldane
21. 'Ethics and Action Theory: An Unhappy Divorce,' Constantine Sandis
22. 'Anscombe and Wittgenstein on Knowledge "without Observation,"' Harold Teichman

Schopenhauer on relative and absolute good

The following are selections from §65 of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation.

First, however, I wish to trace back to their real meaning those conceptions of good and bad which have been treated by the philosophical writers of the day, very extraordinarily, as simple conceptions, and thus incapable of analysis; so that the reader may not remain involved in the senseless delusion that they contain more than is actually the case, and express in and for themselves all that is here necessary. I am in a position to do this because in ethics I am no more disposed to take refuge behind the word good than formerly behind the words beautiful and true, in order that by the adding a “ness,” which at the present day is supposed to have a special [solemnity], and therefore to be of assistance in various cases, and by assuming an air of solemnity, I might induce the belief that by uttering three such words I had done more than denote three very wide and abstract, and consequently empty conceptions, of very different origin and significance. Who is there, indeed, who has made himself acquainted with the books of our own day to whom these three words, admirable as are the things to which they originally refer, have not become an aversion after he has seen for the thousandth time how those who are least capable of thinking believe that they have only to utter these three words with open mouth and the air of an intelligent sheep, in order to have spoken the greatest wisdom?

The above sounds like the kind of thing the later Wittgenstein, at least, might have agreed with. 

We now wish to discover the significance of the concept good, which can be done with very little trouble. This concept is essentially relative, and signifies the conformity of an object to any definite effort of the will. Accordingly everything that corresponds to the will in any of its expressions and fulfils its end is thought through the concept good, however different such things may be in other respects. Thus we speak of good eating, good roads, good weather, good weapons, good omens, and so on; in short, we call everything good that is just as we wish it to be; and therefore that may be good in the eyes of one man which is just the reverse in those of another. The conception of the good divides itself into two sub-species—that of the direct and present satisfaction of any volition, and that of its indirect satisfaction which has reference to the future, i.e., the agreeable and the useful.

Compare Hume: "personal merit consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others" An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 9.1

This idea of good seems very much like Wittgenstein's idea of relative goodness or goodness in the relative sense.

It follows from what has been said above, that the good is, according to its concept, ["something belonging to the relative"]; thus every good is essentially relative, for its being consists in its relation to a desiring will. Absolute good is, therefore, a contradiction in terms; highest good, summum bonum, really signifies the same thing—a final satisfaction of the will, after which no new desire could arise,—a last motive, the attainment of which would afford enduring satisfaction of the will. But, according to the investigations which have already been conducted in this Fourth Book, such a consummation is not even thinkable.

Wittgenstein might sort of agree with this, seeing as he thinks talk of anything absolutely good or good in an absolute sense is nonsense. But he does not say that goodness is essentially relative, nor that absolute good is a contradiction in terms. He focuses, rather, on what people who use such words are trying to say.

If, however, we wish to give an honorary position, as it were emeritus, to an old expression, which from custom we do not like to discard altogether, we may, metaphorically and figuratively, call the complete selfeffacement and denial of the will, the true absence of will, which alone for ever stills and silences its struggle, alone gives that contentment which can never again be disturbed, alone redeems the world, and which we shall now soon consider at the close of our whole investigation—the absolute good, the summum bonum—and regard it as the only radical cure of the disease of which all other means are only palliations or anodynes. 

Here Schopenhauer too adopts the words "absolute good" for a kind of metaphorical use. That much is a bit like Wittgenstein in the Lecture on Ethics. But Schopenhauer relates the absolute good to the denial of the will, which Wittgenstein doesn't talk about.

Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, part two

My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. 

[He doesn't really do this though, as we will see. Or he adopts it in the sense of taking it up, but he doesn't simply accept Moore's definition/explanation/account of what ethics is. Moore was associated with the Heretics and the Bloomsbury Group.]

He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good." 

[In section 2 of the first chapter of Principia Ethica Moore writes:

many ethical philosophers are disposed to accept as an adequate definition of ‘Ethics’ the statement that it deals with the question what is good or bad in human conduct. They hold that its enquiries are properly confined to ‘conduct’ or to ‘practice’; they hold that the name ‘practical philosophy’ covers all the matter with which it has to do. Now, without discussing the proper meaning of the word (for verbal questions are properly left to the writers of dictionaries and other persons interested in literature; philosophy, as we shall see, has no concern with them), I may say that I intend to use ‘Ethics’ to cover more than this—a usage, for which there is, I think, quite sufficient authority. I am using it to cover an enquiry for which, at all events, there is no other word: the general enquiry into what is good.

So Moore sees himself as taking on a broader enquiry or subject than most moral philosophers.]

Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics. 

[But Wittgenstein goes broader still.]

And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. 

[There's quite a bit going on here. Maximum clarity is aimed at by multiplying examples, not by focusing in on one thing. And there is an interesting I-you distinction: Wittgenstein seems to know what he means but he will have to work to get his audience to see what this is. This despite the fact that he began by telling them that he was using Moore's explanation, which sounds easy to understand.]

And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical—say—Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics. 

[It would be very hard to say in a precise way what the typical features of a Chinese face are, especially if we want to distinguish Chinese faces from, say, Korean or Japanese faces. Indeed, there is something inherently blurry about a composite portrait, created by adding multiple pictures on top of one another. And we are looking, Wittgenstein says, not for a single essential feature but for characteristic features of multiple expressions. Presumably what they have in common cannot be put in a single sentence, at least not by Wittgenstein. And he is the only one so far in a position to know what he has in mind.]

Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. 

[Why could he have said any of these things? Because they mean roughly the same to him? Or because they mean roughly the same to us? It seems like it's the latter. In which case, why does this need to be explained?]

I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with. 

[But didn't the audience already have a rough idea what ethics is? I suppose they now know more about what Wittgenstein means by it, how he is taking the word 'ethics' in this talk.]

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. 

[It might not matter, but it's not obvious that this would strike everyone very quickly. It is helpful that Wittgenstein points it out.]

I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other. 

[The non-ethical sense, then, can be thought of as trivial, even though it covers all facts, including facts about wars, famines, etc. Of course, 'trivial' is a technical term here, but it is not a word chosen at random. There is a fact/value distinction here that we might question.]

If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word ‘good’ here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. 

[Here 'good' is used in a factual way, which is not ethical in Wittgenstin's sense and which depends on a convention or abritrary definition.]

In fact the word ‘good’ in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. 

[I.e., this kind of use of the word 'good' is really factual, although it is still evaluative in a simple sense. That is, a very familar kind of evaluation involves seeing whether something meets a certain standard. But, Wittgenstein implies, what he means by 'ethics' is not about this.]

Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. 

[There might be some subjectivity in judgments of this kind, like the subjectivity involved in sporting and artistic competitions in which judges give marks out of ten. Wittgenstein still counts these as matters of fact.]

And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it is the right road relative to a certain goal. 

[So what has been said about 'good' also goes for 'important' and 'right'.]

Used in this way these expressions do not present any difficult or deep problems. 

[Even when judgments involve some subjectivity, they are not therefore hopelessly subjective or impossible to make or purely arbitrary, as some people sometimes seem to think.]

But this is not how ethics uses them. 

[Wittgenstein's idea of ethics is not factual or naturalistic in this kind of way.]

Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said ‘Well you play pretty badly’ and suppose I answered ‘I know, I am playing badly but I do not want to play any better’, all the other man could say would be ‘Ah then that is all right’. 

[It's a little hard to imagine this as a real conversation, but never mind. Certainly someone might say that they knew they played badly but that they didn't care, and someone else might reasonably accept this as fine. Wittgenstein played tennis badly with David Pinsent, before giving it up. See Ray Monk's biography, pp. 76-77.]

But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said ‘You are behaving like a beast’ and then I were to say ‘I know I behave badly, but then I do not want to behave any better’.

[Something a little like this happened with Wittgenstein. F. R. Leavis describes the first time he met Wittgenstein as follows. (See pp. 65-66 of “Memories of Wittgenstein” in Rush Rhees (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections Rowman and Littlefield, 1981). A young man who had been asked to sing something by Schubert nervously suggested that Wittgenstein might correct his German. Wittgenstein said that he could not do so, and left the room as soon as the young man had finished singing. On the face of it this does not sound particularly bad, but Leavis saw it as “cold brutality” (p. 65). He tells us that Wittgenstein’s declining to correct the man’s German (the way he did it, that is, more than the fact that he refused, but unfortunately Leavis reports that he cannot describe Wittgenstein’s manner) “was essentially meant to be a routing” (p. 66) and that Leavis thought that Wittgenstein left the room “triumphantly” (p. 66). Leavis caught up with Wittgenstein and told him that he had behaved disgracefully. Wittgenstein, surprised, replied that he had thought the man foolish. Leavis responded: “You may have done, you may have done, but you had no right to treat him like that. You’ve no right to treat anyone like that.” (p. 66) It was at this point that Wittgenstein said they needed to get to know each other, and they parted, Wittgenstein heading to Cambridge and Leavis going towards Grantchester. This was sometime in 1929, probably before the lecture, which was given in mid-November that year.

Wittgenstein was very much in favor of humanity, generosity, and kindness, but sometimes needed to be reminded to act accordingly. Another example from Leavis ilustrates this. On one occasion Leavis and Wittgenstein rented a canoe on a summer evening in Cambridge. Having got out and started walking, Wittgenstein wanted to go farther but Leavis pointed out that it was already about eleven o’clock, and they had still to get back to the canoe and then return it. They finally returned it “towards midnight” (p. 71). Wittgenstein paid but gave the man who had waited for them no tip. Wittgenstein was displeased when Leavis then tipped him for having waited two hours for them. Wittgenstein’s explanation was simply that he “always associate[d] the man with the boathouse.” (p. 71) He had, as it were, forgotten that, as Leavis put it to him, the man “is separable and has a life apart from it” (p. 71).

Contrast Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen “The Institutional Framework of Professional Virtue” in David Carr (ed.) Cultivating Moral Character and Virtue in Professional Practice, Routledge, 2018, pp. 124-134. Deliberative excellence (euboulia in Aristotle’s Greek) “often involves the use of imagination, to explore the variety of ways in which one’s decisions and actions might affect all concerned and to predict the reactions and feelings that these might give rise to.” (p. 128) Wittgenstein seems to have lacked this imaginative capacity, or else simply not to have cared about certain other people’s reactions and feelings, perhaps especially, or even only, when he was in someone else’s company. He seems, for instance, to have been having a good time with Leavis, which might have distracted him from proper concern for the boatman.] 

Would he then say ‘Ah, then that is all right’? 

[We might (try to) imagine soemthing like this happening in the cases Leavis describes. Wittgenstein explains his rude or thoughtless behavior by saying that the young man was foolish or that he associates the boatman with the boathouse. Might Leavis then have said "Ah, then that is all right"? Might Wittgenstein have said this to someone else in similar circumstances?]

Certainly not; he would say ‘Well, you ought to want to behave better’. 

[I think we have our answer here, although, of course, people do say all kinds of things. Decency is not inevitable.]

Here you have an absolute judgement of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative judgement. 

[The relative judgment, I take it, was that a player who does, or fails to do, certain things counts as a bad tennis player. And whether one is good or bad at tennis doesn't really matter. It depends on what you want. The absolute judgment, in contrast, does not depend on what you want. It tells you what you ought to want. And it is not a factual or objective or scientific matter what this is.]

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: every judgement of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgement of value: instead of saying ‘This is the right way to Granchester’ I could equally well have said ‘This is the way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time’; ‘This man is a good runner’ simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, and so forth.

[So we have a fact/value distinction. Stephen Mulhall points out that the name of the village is actually Grantchester (Wittgenstein has ommitted the silent 't'). Judging by the pictures on Wikipedia you would certainly be murdered if you went to Grantchester, or find yourself reliving the movie Men in some way. Perhaps appropriately, it's the setting for a popular TV detective series. Mulhall has thoughts on the significance of Wittgenstein's choice of Grantchester in the example. I have some of my own here.]

Now what I wish to contend is, that although all judgements of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgement of absolute value.

[No 'ought' from an 'is', although Wittgenstein said he had never read Hume. That wouldn't, of course, stop him from coming up with simlar ideas on his own, or picking them up from other people. And I wonder how literally we should take his claim in the first place. It was made in response to a comment about Hume's being clever rather than really philosophical. Perhaps Wittgenstein simply didn't feel that he knew Hume's work well enough to comment on that. On p. 50 of Monk's biography, David Pinsent is quoted writing that Wittgenstein "has only just started systematic reading" in philosophy. I would think that likely candidates for what he would have read include the suggested readings that Russell gives in The Problems of Philosophy. These include Hume's Enquiry. Pinsent also remarks that Wittgenstein is disgusted by the mistakes made by the great philosophers he is reading, which perhaps explains why he didn't end up reading more of the classics of the field.]

Let me explain this: suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived. 

[This sounds a bit Cartesian, but it's only part of a thought experiment or metaphor.]

And suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book. 

[All that there is to know here seems to be treated as a matter of bodily movements (perhaps including motionlessness and location?) plus human mental states. And it can all be written down. There is nothing ineffable.]

Then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgement or anything that would logically imply such a judgement. 

[If you've read the work of Elizabeth Anscombe or Philippa Foot then you might want to ask about whether the book would record debts, acts of rudeness, or judgements such as "One ought to pay one's debts" or "Rudeness is bad". Does "One ought to pay one's debts" count as an ethical judgement? Perhaps it does in one sense and not in others. If it only means that you can get in trouble if you don't pay them then it is a relative judgement. It it means you really ought to pay them regardless of any possible trouble, then it might be an ethical judgement.]

It would of course contain all relative judgements of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. 

[Does this include 2 + 2 = 4? Possibly not.]

But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. 

[Nothing would matter unless, and only insofar as, someone cared about it. And it would be arbitrary what people care about. There would be no right ot wrong caring. This is pretty much Hume's view, at least when he says that it is no more contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one's finger. We value what we value, and all that can be said in defence of a claim that something ought to be valued is that it is valued (cf. Mill).]

There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. 

[Earlier Wittgenstein distinguished the absolute/ethical sense of certain expressions from the relative/trivial sense, which is the factual one. Since propositions state facts, he seems to be assuming, they never express absolute judgements of value. In this sense they are all trivial. But this just means that they are propositions. They are not trivial in any other sense.

Except that they are, or could be. If we are using expressions in an absolute or ethical way, then "He committed murder" is very important, while "He usually drank coffee with his breakfast" is (usually) trivial. But this depends on how we (choose to) use words. And if we use words in the ethical sense, Wittgenstein is saying, then we are not speaking in propositions. Propositions express facts (or falsehoods) and facts just are not judgements of absolute importance or trivilaity.]

Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet’s words: ‘Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so!’ 

[Hamlet's words are ambiguous. In the language of facts what he says is quite true. If I think I ought to play tennis better then it is bad that I don't. If I think how I play is good enough, then that's all right. But this is to say nothing at all about good and bad in the absolute/ethical sense. In that sense, the absolute or ethical sense, things are good or bad regardless of what anyone thinks.]

But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. 

[As I hope I just explained.]

What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes of our states of mind. 

[But a state of mind is exactly one of the things that would go in the big book, so it is a fact, not a judgement of ethical value in Wittgenstein's sense.]

But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad. 

[Quite so.]

If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. 

[Cf. Hume:

Take any action allowed to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object (A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.i).]

The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone.

[As Hume implies, we don't find any vice or moral badness here (in Wittgenstein's sense) so long as we keep to objective cataloguing of facts.]

Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no ethics.

[The book of facts might record that the vicar was struck with a candlestick in the conservatory and everyone was sad about it, but it will not provide any sort of meta judgement along the lines of "And that was bad". It will, by definition of the kind of thing it is, just say what happened.]

– And now I must say that if I contemplate what ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. 

[Note how often Wittgenstein starts a sentence with "Now" or, as here, "And now." This might be just a sort of verbal tic, but it can feel as if he is always starting, or always interrupting his own attempts to move forwards.

Note also that here he switches from telling us what ethics is, or what he means by 'ethics' in this talk, to what ethics would have to be if there were to be a science of ethics. Moore was Lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge, and he refers to ethics as a science multiple times in Principia Ethica. Wittgenstein's audience, the Heretics, are generally pro-science and not very pro-religion. But, presumably, they thought of themselves as being ethical].

It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. 

[And here Wittgenstein denies that there can be any such thing as a science of ethics.]

That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime, and above all other subject matters. 

[Could there be such a book at all, just not a scientific one? Could there be a book whose subject matter was sublime, only not intrinsically so?]

I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on ethics which really was a book on ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.

[Words cannot express how words cannot express ethical value. Or they can only do so by way of a metaphor. The metaphor suggests the utter incompatibility of statements of fact with judgements of ethical value.]

– Our words, used, as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense.

[They can express facts, in other words, but not what Wittgenstein means by 'ethics'. Which also means, of course, that no one can give a talk on ethics either. They cannot, that is, give a talk, the subject matter of which would be intrinsically sublime. Perhaps they could give talk about why it is impossible to do this though.]

Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it. 

['Supernatural' here seems to mean somthing like ineffable or absolute in the sense he has been explaining. This might be irrelevant, but a teacup is a very bourgeois thing and a teacup full of water sounds completely dull and unappealing.]

– I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right etc. 

[This clarifies, I think, what "ethics is supernatural" means.]

And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. 

[Another metaphor and another indication ("before I go on") that we are in some sense not getting anywhere.]

The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. 

[This sounds straightforward and true. But is it really? It's not hard to imagine a book or talk called "The Right Road" about either religion or self-help. This is roughly what "the Dao" means. One might reject such talk as nonsense, but it isn't (in many contexts) obviously nonsense. And, indeed, having just said that "it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from" an arbitrarily predetermined goal, Wittgenstein immediately raises the question of what such talk could mean.]

Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression ‘The, absolutely, right road’. 

[Why are we considering this expression, which sounds odd and hasn't been mentioned so far? It suddenly sounds ethical or religious. It might also be worth remembering that at the beginning of his talk, Wittgenstein said that a problem he faced was that the audience was likely to see either where he is going but not how he is going to get there, or how he is proceeding but not where he is going to. So he is concerned both with "The (Right) Way" and with the right way to talk about it.]

I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. 

[It's hard to make sense of this idea. How could logical necessity come into such a state of affairs? It's hard enough to imagine some kind of psychological necessity. That is, I can imagine a world in which all human beings felt bad if they ever committed, say, murder. So we would all have to avoid committing murder or else feel bad. But it seems likely that there would be exceptions, people whose brains worked differently. And if there were a real necessity here, it would not be logical. And perhaps the bad feeling would not even count as shame. If the people had no language, for instance, could they feel shame?]

And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would, necessarily, bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. 

[This too is hard to imagine. That is, what would an absolutely good state of affairs be? Not to mention problems such as what if bringing about such a state of affairs required doing something evil?]

And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. 

[This seems true. But there are multiple issues or questions we might ask here. Wittgenstein seems to be focusing on the inconceivability or impossibility of an either/or: either everybody brings about the absolute good or they feel guilty for not doing so. But I can imagine neither what the absolute good might be (could it be everyone's being at one with God?--but that is an obscure idea to begin with, and if it is to be a completely describable state of affairs we would have to specify the number of people, as well as the nature of God) nor what (logically?) necessary guilt for not bringing it about would be. Does Wittgenstein see it this way too? And does this mean that the idea of the best of all possible worlds is also in trouble? Or the greatest good for the greatest number? He doesn't say.]

No state of affairs has in itself, what I would like to call, the coercive power of an absolute judge.

[So either we give up the idea of such power or we give up the idea of thinking about ethics in terms of bringing about certain states of affairs?]

– Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as ‘absolute good’, ‘absolute value’ etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to express? 

[Instead of talking about how we should act or how to think about ethics, Wittgenstein asks about what people like him mean when they use certain expressions. He is seeking to understand people, including himself, not recommend any change in language use or behavior.]

Now whenever I try to make this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation and which you would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of pleasure. 

[The point here, I take it, is not so much to identify what the expressions in question refer to but to get clear about the contexts in which they are used.]

What you would do then would be to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. 

[To think about pleasure, he suggests, we would (not should) think not about an inner feeling but about real life situations of a certain kind.]

For, bearing this situation in mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. 

[I take 'controllable' here to mean tractable. We can get a grip or handle on what we are talking about if we use an example, preferably a familiar one involving publicly accessible, concrete objects.]

One man would perhaps choose as his stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer day. 

[Walking to Grantchester, perhaps.]

Now in this situation I am if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value. 

[Wittgenstein's English slips a bit here. Presumably the situation he is in is that of wanting a good example to help him think, not that of experiensing the pleasure of taking a walk on a fine summer day. But the two might be related.]

And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. 

[His example will be of his experience. We are trying to understand what he means, after all. This is all quite personal, although he thinks there are others like him who use similar expressions, presumably in a similar way.]

(As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking) 

[Other examples would, presumably, make the same point, despite their being different and given by different people. So the matter is not entirely personal or idiosyncraic.]

I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation. 

[This again sounds a bit Cartesian or Lockean (if I am remembering my early modern philosophy correctly). It's as if ideas/memories/experiences are objects floating above the stage of an internal theatre and that, while one person cannot share their ideas with others, they can talk about the shared physical world in such a way that others call up similar ideas in their own mental theatres. But Wittgenstein isn't really getting metaphysical here. It's just an apparently harmless way of talking.]

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. 

[This seems like the kind of experience one might have on a nice walk, although instead of referring to concrete things such as country paths or sunshine he mentions only a certain psychological (spiritual?) reaction. That is, instead of saying something on the model of 'Pleasure is what I feel when I take a walk on a sunny day' he says 'The experience I am talking about is one that makes me wonder at the existence of the world.' The experience, if we take him literally, is not the wonder or wondering itself.

It is perhaps worth pausing to note how far this is from ordinary moral philosophy. One might wonder at nature and think that it is necessary that we should do much more to protect the environment, or wonder at the nature of human beings (as Hamlet and Pico della Mirandola have, for instance) and conclude that murder is a terrible evil. But this is not what Wittgenstein is doing or talking about here. It is not how the world is that is mystical but that it is. What is great, to put it crudely, is not how the world is but simply that it exists at all, in any form. Nothing follows from this about how one ought, or ought not, to behave. If I am marveling at the infinite faculties of human beings then it makes sense to think that I will not or ought not to reduce those faculties in any particular human being. But if I marvel simply at the being of whatever there happens to be, then, since nothing I do can reduce or increase the being of what there happens to be, then nothing follows about what I am likely to do or what I ought to do.

I'll try to say a bit more about this, but I'm not sure it's necessary, and I am sure it will be at least a bit crude. Consider these three kinds of necessity: logical, causal, and aesthetic. What I mean by logical necessity includes both truths like "If A then B, A, therefore B" (which has a kind of abstract purity) and truths like "If the ball crosses the line it's a goal, the ball crossed the line, therefore it's a goal" (which might involve various ceteris paribus conditions). What I mean by causal necessity includes cases that are close to the logical kind, such as "Cutting a cake causes the cake to be cut" (the act of cutting does indeed affect the cake, but without the effect the cause doesn't really count as having occurred), as well as cases that don't seem a priori or analytic in this way at all, such as "Adding chemical A to chemical B leads to a loud explosion soon afterwards." And then by aesthetic necessity I mean cases such as "This piece really needs to be played more slowly" or "What this song needs is more cowbell." 

A person who is moved by the almost godlike nature of human beings is not really illogical if they then murder someone, nor does being so moved cause one not to commit murder (necessarily), but there does seem to be some kind of contradiction between the kind of artistic sensitivity required to appreciate Hamlet's words and the kind of insensitivity (seemingly) involved in murder or any other kind of cruelty or inhumanity. Perhaps such sensitivity can be turned on and off, or operates in some areas but not all. Still, there is something shocking, wrong, about destroying, or just harming, a being that one is capable of wondering at.

If what one wonders at is existence itself then what seems wrong, or perhaps should seem wrong, is not so much particular kinds of behavior but simply unethical behavior itself. If I wonder at the universe then in some sense, it seems, I should obey the universe and its demands. And I might regard the voice of conscience as the voice of the universe, feeling that I must (as a matter of what I am calling aesthetic necessity) do whatever it demands of me. I don't mean: 

1. I must do what is aesthetically necessary

2. Obeying my conscience is aesthetically necessary

3. Therefore I must obey my conscience

Rather, I mean that one might obey one's conscience in the way (roughly) that a tailor might say, "This sleeve needs to be cut here. Therefore [snip]". This is a case of thinking in terms of aesthetic necessity, but reference to aesthetic necessity is no part of the thinking itself. If one wanted to justify such aesthetic thinking, though, then one might refer to the wonders of well made or well designed clothing. And if one wanted to justify obeying one's conscience (understood as the voice of the universe when it has a demand to make) then one might refer to the wonder that there should be a universe at all.  

Wittgenstein seems to have thought and lived in something like this way (he wrote in his wartime Notebooks that "Conscience is the voice of God"), and something along these lines seems to me to be advocated by the Bhagavad Gita (very roughly: don't think too much about what is right and wrong--you are a warrior, so fight!). It is quite different from a view such as Anscombe's, for instance, which tries to be more rational. Anscombe rejects the idea of doing whatever one's conscience dictates because one might have an evil conscience. Instead, if she wants to think about, say, sexual ethics, she is likely to start from the purpose or good of sex (as she understands it) and reason from there about what kinds of sexual activity are good and what bad. But, at least for now, we should probably return to what Wittgenstein says.]     

And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘How extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘How extraordinary that the world should exist’. 

[The concrete, tractable associate of the experience is not objects such as sunshine or trees but certain sentences.]

I will mention another experience straightaway which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. 

[Why introduce another example so quickly? Perhaps to increase the chances of people in the audience relating to what he is saying.]

I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’. 

[It's hard to say exactly what this state of mind is. One might think of Socrates' claim thta a good person cannot be harmed, which would suggest ethical self-confidence or a clear consience. Or one might think of the Capital Cities song "Safe and Sound", which suggests being happily in love. What we know for certain is that the state of mind in question inclines one to use words like these (i.e., "I am safe," etc.).]

Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to get clear about. 

[We are to consider experiences but can only do so by way of the linguistic expressions they give rise to, and which define them.]

And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense! 

[But these expressions don't make sense!]

If I say ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ I am misusing language. 

[This is debatable, but let's see where Wittgenstein goes with it.]

Let me explain this: it has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than anyone I have ever seen before, or at anything which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. 

[People would be more likely to say "Look at the size of that dog!" or (in response to "What are you looking at?") "I'm just amazed how big that dog is!" than to say "I wonder at the size of that dog". But I don't think this affects the point.]

In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. 

[We are amazed, that is, by things being this way rather than that. That is, there is a 'that' that we can easily imagine or describe.]

I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary, size, at which I should not wonder. 

[We don't, of course, only wonder at the size of the dog because we can conceive of a dog of a different size. My dog is medium sized, and I don't wonder at her size just because I can imagine a small or large sized dog. But I would not wonder at the size of even the largest (or smallest) dog unless I was aware of some contrast between its size and the kind of size I would have expected it to be.]

To say ‘I wonder at such and such being the case’ has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.

[This is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for intelligible surprise or wonder.]

In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. 

[Now we are considering amazement at something's existence, not its size.]

But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. 

[Can we imagine the world's not existing? Presumably this is not a question that invites us to try to imagine something and find out that way whether it is possible or not. Even a void would count as a world, in the sense Wittgensetin apparently means here. So the world's non-existence is simply inconceivable or, we might say, logically impossible. Whatever there is, including nothing at all (?), counts as the world. The world = all that is the case, whatever this is.]

I could, of course, wonder at the world around me being as it is. 

[Because it could have been different, in the sense that we can imagine its being different.]

If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it is clouded. 

[It is certainly possible to wonder at the weather being so nice, but I think it is also possible to wonder at the sky's being blue rather than, say, pink or green. Those seem to be conceivable possibilities, even though wonder at the sky's being blue as opposed to purple seems very different from wonder at its being blue rather than cloudy.]

But that is not what I mean. 

[So never mind all that.]

I am wondering at the sky being, whatever it is. 

[The comma suggests that we are talking about wonder at the very existence of the sky, rather than the sky's happening to be this way or that.]

One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. 

["I am wondering [or amazed] at the sky's very being, whether it is cloudy or blue" seems to mean something like "I am wondering at the sky's being blue or not blue," which sounds like wondering at a tautology.]

But then it is just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology. 

[Because the necessary condition just described is not met? Or just because of course this makes no sense? I think it's more the latter, although if someone somehow didn't see this then we might use the necessary condition to help explain it. That is, I don't think what is or isn't nonsense is supposed to require anything technical, such as the identification and application of necessary or sufficient conditions (or rules of some kind). We all know nonsense when we see/hear it, with few exceptions.] 

Now the same applies to the other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety.

[That is, I take it, talk of absolute safety is nonsense. It isn't tautological at all. It's just that there is no such thing, and perhaps we can't even imagine such a thing. Although we do seem to be able to imagine an Achilles or Superman with invulnerability. As long as the gods don't turn against them.]

We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. 

[True, although again this is one of those examples (like Augustine on time) where we feel that we know, but if we stop and think we might feel less sure.]

I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus.

[Wittgenstein gives examples rather than an account or definition of what safety is. And this example, at least, seems both obvious and questionable. What if the omnibus were going very fast and your room were on the ground floor?]

I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. 

[This is another example of an ordinary (although perhaps slightly odd) use of the word 'safe'. That is, I think people might be more likely to say 'all right' or 'not worried' than 'safe', but still, if someone says "Don't go in there, you might catch whooping cough," an intelligible reply would be "It's all right, I've had it before so I'm safe."]

‘To be safe’ essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me, and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. 

[Being pedantic, I think 'highly unlikely' might be more accurate here than 'impossible', and we might ask whether it is nonsense to say that I am immune from all physical dangers no matter what happens. Is it not, perhaps, simply false? We might also ask whether 'to be safe' has an essential meaning. I might prefer to say that 'to be safe' has an ordinary meaning (or family of meanings/uses) and that talk of 'absolute safety' or 'safety whatever happens' is extraordinary or very odd. But an ordiunary way of making this point might be to say that such talk is nonsense.]

Again this is a misuse of the word ‘safe’ as the other example was a misuse of the word ‘existence’ or ‘wondering’. 

[Says who? Well, it is an unusual or non-standard use, I think we could agree.]

Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. 

[Wittgenstein basically asserts this out of the blue. He has given just a few, debatable examples, and now makes a universal claim about both ethical and religious expressions. Perhaps his audience would have sympathized with the idea that religious expressions are nonsensical misuses of language. The group was called Heretics for a reason. Would they have said the same about ethical uses of language? Some might. They might have already been mentally prepared to agree with A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, for instance, when it came out (in 1936, years after Wittgenstein's lecture). But perhaps some of them would have been shocked at the suggestion that ethics and religion are in the same boat.]

All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. 

[They don't really. Similes are typically thought of as using words such as 'like' or 'as', whereas these words are absent from the sentences "I wonder at the existence of the world" and "I am absolutely safe." But if we attempted to explain these sentences, or others like them, we would be likely to say that the meaning of 'wonder at' and 'safe' is similar to the meaning of these words in more normal sentences. And the feelings referred to are like the feelings one has when one wonders at the size of a very big dog or feels safe from traffic when indoors.]  

Thus it seems that when we are using the word ‘right’ in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not ‘right’ in its trivial sense, it is something similar, and when we say ‘This is a good fellow’, although the word ‘good’ here does not mean what it means in the sentence ‘This is a good football player’ there seems to be some similarity. 

[Wittgenstein seems to confirm my point above that the 'nonsensical' use of words such as 'right' and 'good' involves similes, or seems to do so, at least, in the sense that we think the meaning in these cases is similar, albeit not identical, to the meaning of these words in ordinary, non-ethical cases.]

And when we say ‘This man’s life was valuable’ we do not mean it in the same sense in which we would speak of some valuable jewellery but there seems to be some sort of analogy. 

[The same point again, by the looks of it. We might hear echoes of Aristotle and Kant in this part of the lecture. Aristotle seems to think that, as there can be a good eye or a good heart (in the sense of one that pumps blood well), so there can be a good human being, one who performs well the function or functions of a human being. Wittgenstein is suggesting, as if it is simply common sense or obvious, that this is at most only like the truth in some way. Likewise, Kant talks about a good will shining like a jewel but, unlike jewelry, having a value that is absolute and priceless.] 

Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes, or allegorically. 

[Is this the start of a defense of religion to a skeptical audience? If so, it will be an odd kind of defense, since the use of certain key words in ethical expressions has been said to seem to involve "some sort of analogy," of a kind that has yet to be explored or explained. So if religion is like ethics in this regard then it is still a mysterious thing.]

For when we speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc. etc. 

[There are both believers and non-believers who talk as if God is just this kind of super-being. Non-believers tend to reject the idea as absurd and lacking in the slightest evidence, while believers sometimes mention fear of what such a being might do to us if we don't obey as a reason to "believe". The idea of trying to win God's grace is theologically debatable, and perhaps Wittgenstein chooses his words here with a skeptical audience in mind. Presumably Wittgenstein was aware, though, that not all believers think of God in this kind of way except, perhaps, metaphorically or allegorically. Indeed, that is just the view he presents here, even if it is possible to imagine atheists thinking he is presenting something like their view.] 

But this allegory also describes the experiences which I have just referred to. 

[So if (as perhaps some members of the audience might have thought) Wittgenstein is attacking religion, he is equally attacking ethics. And we are about to get Wittgenstein's view of what monotheistic religion is, at least in key parts, about.]

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. 

[Wittgenstein offers no evidence for these claims, but then they are only claims about what he believes. He is providing an interpretation of what religious believers might be talking about, which we (and they) might find more or less plausible.] 

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. 

[People often take Wittgenstein to be talking about a feeling of absolute guilt here, but he doesn't say that he means anything other than ordinary feelings of guilt. Presumably, though, he does not mean the feeling (if there is such a thing) that one gets upon being found guilty in a court of law. So there is an element of simile here after all. But I think he means feelings of what we might call moral guilt.]

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. 

[Note the word 'seems', but what Wittgenstein appears to think seems to be the case is not that we use similes in a straightforward way. That is, we don't say "I feel as if I have broken a law" or "God is like our father." Rather, we might say "I have broken the moral law" (or violated a moral right) or "God is our father." The simile comes in, and so is used, in accounts of the meaning of such expressions. The moral law is understood to be like the criminal law, the meaning of 'father' in "God is our father" is like the meaning of 'father' in "I am a father of two children." We might never give such explanations, but we might seem to rely on their availability for much ethical and religious language to be intelligible.]

But a simile must be the simile for something. 

[To say what something is we must be able to say more than just that it is a bit like something else. We ought, it seems, to be able to say in what ways it is like that thing and in what ways it is different. Perhaps we ought to be able to say what it is, not merely what it is like.]  

And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. 

[We might wonder where this 'must' comes from. Is it Wittgestein's demand? Common sense's? The important question, perhaps, is whether we accept it or find that we can do without it. (And whether any claim not to need it is, or can be, justified.] 

Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts.

[This is quick. Has he tried to identify relevant facts? Presumably, but he doesn't discuss candidates here. And are there really no such facts, or simply not enough? If I say that I feel safe in God's hands, for instance, couldn't this mean that I go into battle without a look of fear on my face, say? Or that I am less concerned about death than others, or than I usually am? I imagine that Wittgenstein thinks this kind of fact, although real in some cases, does not capture the whole meaning of expressions such as "I feel absolutely safe."]

And so, what at first appeared to be a simile, now seems to be mere nonsense.

[I don't think we are meant to understand Wittgenstein as operating with a particular theory of nonsense here. He is, after all, not delivering a technical talk. And if everything is nonsense unless one can say what it means in other words then we might seem to be stuck endlessly explaining each explanation of meaning. Either that or we could get away with nonsense by offering a supposed equivalent sentence that might also make no sense in fact. So I think that what Wittgenstein means here is something like: we thought we could say what we meant by expressions such as "absolutely the right thing to do" or "morally wrong" or "wondering at the existence of the world" but in fact it turns out we do not know what we mean by these words.]

– Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute, value. 

['Value' here means something like importance. A feeling of wonder at the existence of the world is doubtless very pleasant, but feeling guilty isn't. Both seem to have a special kind of value, though, and (because?) both are connected with the sense that life has meaning. These are not just curiosities to be noted in one's diary or fun experiences or hang-ups to be got over.]

But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable. 

[Two things to think about here. First, are they experiences? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein talks about an experience that is no experience. (For more on this see Michael Kremer.) That seems to be the kind of thing he has in mind here. Secondly, it seems as though it is not so much the experiences themselves that are important but rather their meaning. This is not confined to a limited place and time but, rather, runs through one's whole life, or at least can do so. And yet, in response to this suggestion, one might want to say No, it is not that these experiences are important because they make such a difference in some people's lives. To those who have and care about the experiences in question it is the other way around. They are given a huge role in one's life because of the intrinsic meaning or importance that they have. But, Wittgenstein seems to be asking, how can this be?]  

And so from what I have said some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute value. 

[The answer to that question ("How can this be?") is that it cannot. The idea does not make sense. Although Wittgenstein does not simply assert that it is nonsense. He says that if we accept what he said some minutes ago then we have to accept that it is nonsense. Perhaps--he hasn't yet ruled this out--if we went back we could change something and not be committed to counting this as nonsense.]

And here I have arrived at the main point of this paper: it is the paradox that an experience, a fact should seem to have absolute value. 

[If Wittgenstein has a thesis, perhaps this is it. Although he implied at the beginning that the lecture might be helpful even to people who disagree with him. So making this point might not be his primary goal. Or, at least, getting others to accept the point might not be his primary goal. But what is the point? Note that he says not that it is a paradox that a fact should seem to have absolute value: it is the paradox. So there is something especially important, or especially paradoxical, about this paradox, it would seem. And yet it barely seems to be a paradox at all. Why shouldn't a fact seem to have absolute value even if it doesn't, or can't, have such value? I would think that it is because what we are talking about both seems to be an experience, an event in the world, and seems to be something otherworldly, of a different order of significance.] 

And I will make my point still more acute by saying ‘it is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural value’. 

[Why does Wittgenstein want to make the point more acute? Presumably he thinks there really is something odd here and he wants to make sure we see it. To help with this he switches from talking about absolute value to talking about supernatural value. This sounds much more metaphysical or philosophically (ontologically) dubious than talk about absolute value. Perhaps especially to the particular people he was addressing in this talk.]

Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this paradox: let me first consider again our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way: we all know, what in ordinary life would be called a miracle. 

[Wittgenstein himself, apparently, is not a happy mystic. He is inclined to try to dispel the paradox. In order to do so, if he were to act on this inclination, he would dig a little deeper, perhaps in an attempt to undermine it. But in doing so he starts talking about miracles, which might not sound promising to religious skeptics. Unless he is going to say something like what Hume says.]

It obviously is simply an event the like of which we have never yet seen. 

[This is neither Hume's definition nor anything remotely technical. It is a plain account (although still debatable) of the ordinary meaning of the word.]

Now suppose such an event happened. 

[OK, we might think, but where is this going?]

Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion head and began to roar. 

[This example fits the description of "an event the like of which we have never yet seen." It's tempting to speculate about the particular choice of example. Is there any connection with Wittgenstein's late remark that if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand it? Is the reference to roaring anything to do with the motto of the Tractatus? I think for now it is better not to be side-tracked by such questions.] 

Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. 

[We might imagine more complicated or surreal things, but I think this claim is true.]

Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. 

[This sounds about right, although it also sounds a little shocking. I think this is because when simply hearing the case described we remain in the not-yet-recovered-from-our-surprise stage while the cold, scientific approach is being described. It's easy enough to imagine a scientist being brought to the scene and saying that, ideally, the patient would be surgically investigated but that, of course, that's out of the question because it would not only hurt but seriously, perhaps fatally, injure him.]

And where would the miracle have got to? 

[This is surprising too. Isn't something either a miracle or not a miracle? How could the response of human beings make a difference to that?]

For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science, which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. 

[Once again Wittgenstein offers no argument beyond an appeal to what is (allegedly) clear. But I think he is right. The case no longer feels like a miracle when it is being investigated scientifically. Indeed, perhaps it can be said that it no longer feels like a miracle once we have recovered from our surprise. Because our surprise involved, or perhaps simply was, a sense of wonder or amazement. The scientific outlook, the naturalistic, factual view or conception of things is simply not the wondering or amazed view of things. Which is not to say that scientists are never amazed. But scientific amazement (Wittgenstein seems to think) is different from religious or ethical amazement. An important idea here might be that of piety. A pious person (and I think multiple attitudes or forms of behavior might reasonably be called pious, so this is just one example) might wonder at human life in such a way that contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment all seem unthinkable. An impious person might find human life fascinating and beautiful, and in this sense experience wonder, but see nothing wrong at all with any such things so long as, for example, utility is maximized. (And, to repeat or clarify, I think someone might have no objection to contraception, and might favor legal abortion and euthanasia, while still having a sense of (what I am calling) piety that makes them oppose the death penalty and perhaps some acts (depending on the exact circumstances) of abortion and euthanasia.) The difference I am trying to get at between pious wonder and impious wonder is, roughly, that the former connects with a sense that there are some things we must not (or perhaps must) do, while the latter does not. An ‘impious’ scientist might marvel at the frog he is cutting up or at the atoms he intends to split. A scientist might also cut up frogs or split atoms but there will be some things that she won’t do, and her sense that these things are not to be done will connect, or be part of, her sense that the things not to be damaged or interfered with are amazing or, perhaps, miraculous. I don’t mean to suggest that piety is right-wing and impiety is left-wing.       

Also worth noting here is Wittgenstein's pointing out that it is possible to mean more than one thing by the term 'miraculous.'] 

This shows that it is absurd to say ‘Science has proved that there are no miracles’. 

[This seems questionable, but much depends on the meanings of words. For instance, if 'miracle' means simply 'event of a kind that we have never seen before' then science doesn't really seem to disprove the existence of miracles, although much might depend on what we count as a kind of event. This seems to relate to talk about laws of nature, which could bring us back to Hume on miracles. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by some supernatural agent. Science understood as, at least in part, empirical investigation surely cannot disprove the possibility of such an event. Nor, I would think, can it really prove (although it depends what we mean by 'prove') that such an event has never happened. Even events that appear to be regular might be miraculous in a way that we can't detect. Science should perhaps be understood as a way to investigate the world that includes the assumption that there has to be a rational explanation for everything. This rules out the possibility of miracles a priori. Which might be fine, but it shouldn't be mistaken for proof.]

The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. 

[We have, Wittgenstein suggests, two (or more) ways of looking at facts. And these are not just ways of looking but of thinking and responding to them. Science has proved to be a very productive way to look at things, but this does not make it the only good way to look at them, or the best way, or the right way in some absolute (evaluative and yet somehow neutral) sense.] 

For, imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. 

[Here the question of what it means for a fact to be miraculous in the absolute sense is hard to avoid. If the ceiling of the room opened up to reveal a crowd of flying beings with trumpets and a large, bearded head bellowing "Behold! I turn thy head into a lion's!" and then someone gets a lion head and begins to roar, how could this not be miraculous in every possible sense? One answer is that there could be a scientific explanation even for these phenomena. Perhaps we only seem to see these events when in fact we are dreaming or hallucinating. Or perhaps the beings we see are not God and angels but aliens. Or they could be holograms. Hume argues that it is always wiser to believe that there is an explanation of this kind than to believe that one has witnessed a genuine miracle. But we need to read on to see whether this is the argument that Wittgenstein is concerned with.]  

For we see now that we have been using the word ‘miracle’ in a relative and an absolute sense. 

[Do we see this? A relative sense would be purely factual, a miracle being basically a highly unusual event. Science can handle those easily enough. An absolute miracle, or miracle in the absolute sense, would be something else. I'm not quite sure exactly what it would be, but perhaps an event that everyone would regard as miraculous, as not explicable by science, or else feel guilty for not regarding that way.]

And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. 

[We are moving quite quickly here, or not in the direction one might expect if one thinks about miracles primarily in Humean terms. But I think the idea is relatively simple and familiar. Wondering at the existence of the world, in the relevant sense of wondering, is not having questions that science might answer. It is wondering in a way to which such questions are irrelevant. It is closer to awe than curiosity.]  

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. 

[How would the existence of language (or anything else, for that matter) be the right expression for something? Does the existence of language express anything? Surely only uses of language express anything. Do propositions just by themselves express anything? I would think it depends what we count as a proposition and as expressing something. For instance, we might disagree about whether a computer-generated sentence really says anything, as we might disagree about something that looks like a sentence that is only the result of the wind or the sea moving sticks around on a beach. But perhaps the existence of language itself, which is a marvelous thing, might be thought to mirror the marvelous existence of the world.] 

But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times. 

[A miracle in the absolute sense, I suggested above, is something like an event that everyone would regard as miraculous with a kind of necessity. So then we surely couldn't, or wouldn't, regard it as a miracle sometimes but not all the time. And yet we might only be struck occasionally by how wonderful the existence of language, of meaning, is.] 

For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. 

[So thinking of the existence of language as the best or right expression of the miracle of the existence of the world will not do. It doesn't do what we want it to do.]

– Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. 

[This seems unlikely, but people have thought something like the suggestion that follows.] 

You will say: well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we do not mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is, that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. 

[If we use words in a certain way, one might think, then they do have a meaning after all. This meaning simply is their use. If we say that an experience has "absolute value" then it does have such value. (Not if just anyone says such a thing now and again, but if this were an established way of speaking, that is.) All that would remain would be to explain or describe exactly what this means. That is the kind of work that philosophers do all the time. There is no excuse to declare something nonsense just because it isn't immediately obvious what the right account to offer is. So we might think.]

– Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by ‘absolute value’, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. 

[Wittgenstein rejects this suggestion. It is not, he implies, that the right account has not yet been found. Rather, any account that made sense of talk of 'absolute value', etc. is wrong precisely because it makes sense of such talk.]

That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. 

[It might sound strange to claim to know that no significant description would ever be good, but, as we shall see, Wittgenstein is talking about what he wants, and it is not strange for him to know that.]

For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. 

[The point of choosing the expressions that attracted him when thinking about the experiences he has in mind was precisely that they "go beyond the world." So would just any nonsense do equally well? Perhaps. On the one hand, as an exclamation of amazement almost any words might do, as long as they were exclaimed in the right tone. For instance, imagine someone saying something when an amazing event occurs. In their amazement they might repeat whatever it was they just said but in a dazed way that trails off. It doesn’t really matter what the words are that they are repeating. And perhaps, even though the existence of the world is not an amazing event, being struck by the miracle of existence might happen suddenly and result in reacting as if to a miraculous event. On the other hand, the way we know we are talking about the same experience each time is that it gives rise to the same kind of expression.]  

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 might sound like a big claim. How does he know what other people were trying to do? But presumably he means ethics or religion in the particular sense, or of the particular kind, that he is talking about here.]

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. 

[Hopeless because nonsense will never make sense, and because nonsense is exactly what the people in question want to speak. It's interesting that Wittgenstein uses the word 'absolutely' again here, to describe the hopelessness of talk of 'absolute value' and the like. I'm not sure that this is at all significant though.] 

– 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. 

[Perhaps ethics in some other sense could be a kind of science, but this isn't what interests Wittgenstein. (And he would have opposed any attempt to make ethics a science.) It is not, I think, the fact that it springs from a desire that means ethics can be no science. After all, astronomy is a science, and it might spring from the desire to know more about the heavens above. It is rather that the language we characteristically reach for to talk about such things is nonsensical. Consider, for instance, Matthew 13: 45-46: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it." This is the kind of thing people say, but the kingdom of heaven is surely not exactly like a pearl of great price. It is priceless (if it is anything at all). There can be no science of such things as value beyond measure.] 

What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. 

[Whether this is true depends on what we count as knowledge, I would think. We do talk about knowing right from wrong, and sometimes call people who do evil ignorant. But we don't mean that ethics is a science. I'm not sure whether Wittgenstein would consider such ways of talking (potentially) misleading or simply wrong.]  

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. 

[The nonsense we are concerned with here is not ridiculous nonsense. Indeed, if it is not scientific then, we might think, so much the worse for science. Not that science is somehow incorrect, but it is far from being the most important thing there is.]

Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, part one

[Wittgenstein gives the following no title, although I think it was listed as "Ethics" in the Heretics' (see below) schedule of events. As Stephen Mulhall points out, it is really more of a talk than a lecture. The audience was the Heretics. They were a pro-science, humanist organization led by C. K. Ogden. The text of the lecture and much more can be found here. Other readings I recommend include Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen "Wittgenstein and Ethics" in Marie McGinn & Oskari Kuusela (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press (2011) and Stephen Mulhall "The Road to Grantchester: Composite Photography, Physiognomy and Privative Recasting in the Composition of Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”", in J. Beale and R. Rowland (eds.), Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy, New York: Routledge, forthcoming. I also have a relevant paper forthcoming called "The Good, the Divine, and the Supernatural". What follows is Wittgenstein's text, in red, and my comments, in black. There are two versions of the text, and I think what I have here is the first paragraph of one and the second of the other. I need to fix that, although the two versions are similar. My comments are pretty rough, but perhaps a useful starting point for something.]

Ladies and Gentlemen. 

Before I begin to speak about my subject proper let me make a few introductory remarks. 

[The immediately following, then, is not really part of the talk proper.]

I feel I shall have great difficulties in communicating my thoughts to you and I think some of them may be diminished by mentioning them to you beforehand. 

[Some but not all? Cf. Notebooks 1914-1916: "My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression," 8th March 1915]

The first one, which almost I need not mention, is, that English is not my native tongue and my expression therefore often lacks that precision and subtlety which would be desirable if one talks about a difficult subject. 

[So is he going to be talking about a difficult subject or not? Will precision and subtlety be called for?]

All I can do is to ask you to make my task easier by trying to get at my meaning in spite of the faults which I will constantly be committing against the English grammar. 

[Is Wittgenstein "committing faults against the English grammar" here deliberately? He doesn't make that many mistakes in the rest of the talk. Also, note that here he distinguihses undertsanding his meaning from understanding the meaning of the words he uses to express it.]

The second difficulty I will mention is this, that probably many of you come up to this lecture of mine with slightly wrong expectations. 

[Here he does call the talk a lecture, so maybe the standard title is justified after all. Why "come up," I wonder? The talk was given in an upstairs room, so that might be why.]

And to set you right in this point I will say a few words about the reason for choosing the subject I have chosen: when your former secretary honoured me by asking me to read a paper to your society, my first thought was that I would certainly do it and my second thought was that if I was to have the opportunity to speak you I should speak about something which I am keen on communicating to you and that I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. 

[Wittgensetin did not give many public talks, so it's interesting that he was so eager to give this one. Was he unusually enthusiastic just then about communicating something? I argue that he was (based on ideas from Cora Diamond and Michael Kremer in the paper mentioned above. Also note, although only as a curiosity (I don't think there is any philosophical significance to this) how good Wittgenstein's English is here.]

I call this a misuse for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not an hour’s paper. 

[So he will not be talking about something scientific or technical.]

Another alternative would have been to give you what is called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you do not understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. 

[What he intends to say will not be superficial and will, he expects, be understood by at least some of the audience.]

I rejected these alternatives and decided to talk to you about a subject which seems to me to be of general importance, hoping that it may help to clear up your thoughts about this subject (even if you should entirely disagree with what I will say about it).

[How will it help clear up people's thoughts even if they disagree entirely with what he says? Presumably his aim is not, or not only, to defend some kind of thesis. He wants clarify things.]

My third and last difficulty is one which, in fact, adheres to most lengthy philosophical lectures and it is this, that the hearer is incapable of seeing both the road he is lead and the goal which it leads to. 

[This is not going to be a lengthy philosophical lecture by normal standards, and it apparantly will not be very technical, so why the difficulty?]

That is to say: he either thinks ‘I understand all he says, but what on earth is he driving at’ or else he thinks ‘I see what he is driving at, but how on earth is he going to get there’. 

[The first horn of the dilemma is, I think, a problem that Wittgenstein felt people often had with his later philosophical work. The second is a problem less often associated with Wittgenstein's work, but here perhaps he means that people won't see what he says as proving anything.]

All I can do is, again, to ask you to be patient and to hope that in the end you may see both the way and where it leads to. 

[We need to be patient, so virtue is called for, and we might not see the way until we have reached its end. Which is a puzzling idea. Apparently he cannot tell us now what his conclusion will be. Perhaps this is because he is not defending a thesis, or not only doing that.] 

I will now begin. 

[All that came before was one paragraph, which is, it seems, not really part of the lecture itself. The rest of the lecture is all one paragraph, and constitutes, if anything does, the actual lecture.]

Moralism

Stephen Mulhall says that:

Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., Cora Diamond on Ethics, p. 184]

Mulhall’s words might suggest that vitality is a non-moral value, which in turn might lead one to think that it is, after all, a value, and so could perhaps be added to a list of virtues, or some such thing. This would go against his point about unruliness and the importance of being open to it, however. His point, I take it, is not that there are various values, some moral and some not, but that Wilson’s vitality is a radically different kind of good from moral values. Hence Mulhall’s reference to “turbulent heterogeneity”. We can write lists of heterogeneous values or virtues, but doing so might obscure just how different some are from others. There is something mysterious about Wilson’s vitality, as Diamond emphasizes. Or perhaps the mystery concerns not so much his vitality itself as what is good about this vitality. Why should it seem good that the “currents of life run very strong in him” (Diamond, p. 210)? Not, surely, because such currents are beneficial to social animals. It’s more mysterious than that, although connected with more obviously normal virtue such as Wilson’s allegedly never complaining about his lot.

Diamond begins with a kind of Rawlsian idea from D. A. J. Richards, according to which “we would accept, in an appropriately defined ‘original position’, a moral principle about mutual love ‘requiring that people should not show personal affection and love to others on the basis of arbitrary physical characteristics alone, but rather on the basis of traits of personality and character related to acting on moral principles.’” (Quoted in Diamond, p. 198) Bernard Williams calls this “righteous absurdity” and Rai Gaita calls it moralistic. It is less obviously terrible to me, but I think I see the objection. I take Richards’ point to be motivated by the thought that who someone is, what they are like as a person, should matter in romantic and sexual attraction, not only what the shape or color of their body is, as if they were an object (and as if, perhaps, a robot might be just as good). This does not seem objectionably moralistic to me.

It's really the reference to moral principles, and perhaps just to principles, that spoils things. Without the word ‘principles’ Richards might be taken to be saying only that personality and/or character should matter and that it shouldn’t be only bad or immoral aspects of someone’s personality that attract one to them. Love based on shared racism would not be good, for instance. Another problem with the idea of moral principles here is the initial question that Richards sems to be asking: “What moral principle about mutual love would be most acceptable?” Must we have a moral principle for this? Does everything have to be governed by moral principles?

Things change if the “personal affection and love” in question includes the love between siblings or between a parent and a child. If Richards is saying that no one should love their family members just because they are their family members then that seems moralistic. Or if he would object to love between the last two people on earth just because they were the last two people on earth then that seems obnoxious too. But, as I say, I think it is really the mention of “moral principles” that turns what might be a good thought into a bad one.

It's interesting to relate this to what Amia Srinivasan has to say about the “right to sex.” To what extent are we responsible for who we find attractive? To what extent can we try to change? As Srinivasan says: “[S]imply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial.” [Note the word ‘simply’ here. Srinivasan does think it’s true that no one is required to have sex with anyone else.] Personal preferences, she says, are never just personal. That might be going too far—a preference for people with long arms or eyes of two different colors might be purely idiosyncratic, I would think, but her point is that common preferences are often either racist or approximately as bad as racist preferences. A certain kind of rejection of Richards’ idea might obscure this problem.

Srinivasan is eager to avoid any coercion, going farther than I might in that direction. She says, for instance, that “As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred.” Maybe this is true, as a matter of politics. But if a middle-aged or older man prefers women much younger than himself and insists that they be white and blonde, must we treat this as sacred? Better left alone maybe, although if a close friend or one of his children wanted to suggest to him that there could be something dodgy about his taste in women then I don’t think I would object.

What Srinivasan is really concerned about is not this, though. Instead she wants us to explore, both in thought and practice, I think, the space between a moralizing dictation of politically correct sexual preferences, on the one hand, and a complacent conservatism about existing prejudices, on the other.

Openness to the turbulent heterogeneity and unruliness of the world and its various goods is necessary for such exploration to go well. Without it the exploration (and the thinking it involves) either won’t happen at all or else it will take the form of guilt-driven relationships (possibly only imaginary ones) that one has been convinced one ought to enjoy. What we need, it seems, is neither moralism nor complacency but a willingness to see what is there to be found.

More in response to Hamilton's review

Hamilton writes that:

Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…

Christensen is less preachy, it seems to me, than this might make her sound. As the back cover says, what she is doing is “to present an understanding of descriptive moral philosophy,” which is not the same thing as “telling us that we have to” engage in such a project. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that “adequate moral attention” (Christensen p. 88) is not desirable. The overcoming of “egoistic tendencies to wishful thinking” (Christensen p. 89, paraphrasing Murdoch) is necessary for an “accurate understanding of moral life,” Christensen says (p. 89). It is not something that she presents as a categorical imperative. Her focus is on what we will need to see things adequately, accurately, and “in their proper perspective” (Hannah Arendt, quoted on p. 90), as well as how we can understand “what will best serve the other person” (K. E. Løgstrup, quoted on p. 90). Hamilton seems to object not so much to the goal of seeing things accurately and in the right perspective—how could he object to that?—as to the emphasis on helping others. But Christensen’s focus is much more on the former than the latter, and she is detailing what we need if we want to do these things far more than she is recommending that we do them. Perhaps the objection is that she presupposes that we want to help others, but it’s hardly unreasonable for a book on moral philosophy and moral life to assume that its readers want to be moral. Or perhaps it’s the very reasonableness of the project that annoys Hamilton, but I find that I cannot imagine philosophy that doesn’t aim at being either reasonable or rational. And rationality without reasonableness seems worse than the kind of work that Christensen is doing and recommending to her readers.

It is also relevant that Christensen talks about exploring “different ways of living and thinking” (p. 90), so she is not committed to an exclusive concern with comfortable lives, even if she is perhaps writing primarily for (or talking to) people who live such lives. Hamilton’s examples of people who do not lead such lives reminded me of Hobart Wilson, whose story is told and discussed in Cora Diamond’s “Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions.” Implicit in Christensen’s work, it seems to me, is the suggestion that we find out about lives such as his, and bring appreciation of them into our lives. None of us knows Wilson, who died in 1981, but we can know the version of his life told by Chip Brown. Of this person, Stephen Mulhall writes:

Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., Cora Diamond on Ethics, p. 184]

Mulhall’s reaction is exactly the kind of thing, I take it, that Christensen is trying to encourage and enable us to have. She isn’t writing for people like Wilson, as far as I can see, but then he would hardly be likely to read a work of philosophy at all, even if it were written in a very different style. Is she perhaps guilty of writing without awareness of non-moral values? Well, maybe. Given the title of her book, naturally she focuses on moral values. But I don’t see that she rules out the existence of other values. Indeed, as I say, she provides very thoughtful and insightful advice on how to attend not to morality but to reality in precisely the kind of way that might best make one aware of non-moral values. So the criticism really seems to come down to the fact that Christensen did not write some other book on a different subject. And that just isn’t really a criticism that can be taken seriously except as an invitation to write another book. Which is no criticism at all. 

Hamilton v. Christensen

Christopher Hamilton’s review of Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen’s Moral Philosophy and Moral Life is provoking, and not just of thought. It feels like violence. Thinking about what he means and why I disagree is therapeutic, though, so I keep doing it. And it might be useful to me in other ways, since Christensen’s project (if that’s the word) seems so close to my own. If she is badly wrong then so am I, so I’d better pay attention to criticisms of her work. Hamilton’s criticisms are strange ones though: that Christensen is too right, and .... nothing. Let me explain.

She is too right in the sense that “Most of the positions for which [her book] argues [are] so obvious that they hardly seem worth arguing for.” They are worth arguing for, however, Hamilton concedes, because so many moral philosophers take a very different view. “To that extent, Christensen’s book assembles a set of helpful reminders.” So, what she says is certainly correct (according to Hamilton) and yet underappreciated. What she offers are helpful reminders, and in this she is successful. This all suggests that her book was after all well worth writing.

Her work is largely one of synthesis, Hamilton suggests, of the work of people such as Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and Wittgenstein. But it isn’t only that (as I have tried to show in my review of the book) and this isn’t such an easy feat to achieve, as Christensen’s critical discussions of authors she only mostly agrees with shows.

Her work might not persuade the unsympathetic, Hamilton notes, but this is very rare anyway, as Hamilton also notes. So can Christensen be criticized for this? She still might persuade some people, and her work is anyway useful to the rest of us (as a set of reminders, for instance) if we pay attention to it in the right way.

Having criticized the book for being, in effect, too right, Hamilton goes on to say that Christensen’s correct views bring up two big problems. One of these is obscure and has several parts, so I will start with the other: Christensen’s style. Hamilton’s complaint is that “her style is that of mainstream analytic philosophy.” This is, allegedly, bourgeois and conventional. Would it be better if Christensen wrote in some unique style of her own? Well, maybe. It’s impossible to judge without knowing what the style in question might be. More to the point, if her goal is to try to persuade other analytic philosophers to be more receptive to the kind of ideas that she is promoting, then it makes sense to try to speak to them in their own language. And if her goal is to remind analytic philosophers of a certain persuasion of things they already believe about moral life and moral philosophy then, again, the language of analytic philosophy seems apt. It seems as though Christensen is being criticized for not having written a different book, rather than for having written the one she has written. “I don’t wish to be unfair,” Hamilton writes, but I think he is being so. Its not being something else is not really a criticism of Christensen’s book at all.

What of the other criticism, which I think also amounts to nothing? Hamilton begins to explain the problem he sees by mentioning egoism, but his concern is a bit obscure to me. Here is part of what he says:

Christensen’s writing expresses her own moral outlook, as she grants. Fine. But the issue is what that outlook is. Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…

The problem, I take it, is that egoism is good, actually. Hamilton writes: “I doubt that anyone would fall in love without a big dose of wishful thinking, and you certainly revel in your own self when you do fall in love.” What is the wishful thinking here? That the person one loves will love one back? Unrequited love still happens. Or is it that the person one loves is better, more lovable, than a neutral observer might recognize? But then that doesn’t seem egoistic. Or perhaps the wishful thinking is optimism about the future of the relationship, but (as the case of unrequited love shows) falling in love is not the same thing as being in a relationship. Maybe marriage involves wishful thinking, but it needn’t involve the kind of fantasy that people reject when they reject wishful thinking. People joke that second marriages are a triumph of hope over experience, but surely one can enter a second marriage knowing quite well what some of the dangers are and what it might take to make the marriage work. So I disagree with Hamilton about wishful thinking here. I also disagree with him about egoism.

Murdoch’s view of love is that it is the opposite of egoistic:

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (“The Sublime and the Good” p. 51)

This seems true to me, although of course one could argue about it. It seems much more plausible than Hamilton’s counterclaim, which he seems to think is simply obvious. (Although, to be fair, he has limited room to defend his claims in a book review.)

Do you revel in your self when you fall in love? I don’t think you do if the love is unrequited. And if it’s requited, don’t you revel more in the object of your love or the love that you share itself? The word ‘certainly’ certainly does not belong in that claim (“you certainly revel in your own self when you fall in love”), which I think is more likely to be false than true.

Perhaps there is egoism in love of one’s children, but I think, if there is, it is largely unconscious. My immediate reaction to his reference to the “obvious egoism that attaches parents to their children” is: you’ve obviously never had children! I don’t intend to check whether this gut reaction matches the facts. The point is rather that Hamilton’s claim about an allegedly obvious truth strikes me as obviously, or at least apparently, false. Raising young children is largely a matter of dealing with sleeplessness, excretion, and tedium. There is also something else, but rather than egoism I would say it is a sense of amazement that what started as a quantum of slime is slowly exploding in visible stages, achieving its own being. Wonder at this is tattooed into you (if you are lucky) over the years, and can spread into a sense of wonder at every living creature. (Although in the case of human beings, the delight is often more potential than actual.)

Hamilton is probably right that egoism is involved in writing books, but is this enough to show that egoism is not so bad? I would think that books written out of mere vanity are likely to be much worse than those written by people who feel that they have something to say and cannot resist saying it.

In the course of this discussion Hamilton brings up Christensen’s reference to twin dangers involved in moral philosophy, namely those of deflecting from unacceptable or uncomfortable thoughts and reshaping them into something more bearable. He agrees, but thinks that a relevant (and problematic for Christensen?) example is the unpalatable truth that you can’t have virtue without vice. I don’t think this is a problem for Christensen, though, because I don’t think she denies it, and, more to the point, I don’t think it’s true. Obviously, it’s at least rare for anyone to have no vice, but must we think it is impossible? And even if it is impossible in practice, can’t perfect virtue be a reasonable or useful goal? When raising children, for instance, can’t we aim to encourage the development of as much virtue as possible, without trying to develop any vice? Even if we accept that they are bound to end up at least a bit vicious. And can’t we try to minimize the vice in our own character? And aren’t some people clearly more virtuous than others? I see no reason at all to believe that everyone must for some reason have an equal balance of virtue and vice (if that is the idea) so that every apparent improvement brings some hidden decline with it. But this also seems almost entirely irrelevant to what Christensen talks about in her book.

Something seems to be eating at Hamilton, but I haven’t yet put my finger on what it is, so let’s keep looking. It’s clear, he says,

that what Christensen has in mind is a world of denizens of materially comfortable, politically stable social worlds whose main concern is with family, career etc. – in other words, the bourgeois world she and her readers inhabit. In such a context, where we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern, such a view of morality perhaps makes sense. But we are all limited in our sensitivity and it’s just as well: if I were now truly morally discerning of the world, I’d be utterly overwhelmed by the monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering of it all. Of course, this is not what Christensen has in mind. But that’s my point.

Is it really so clear that the “world of denizens” of comfortable worlds is what Christensen has in mind? If so, why? I don’t think she explicitly says that this is what she is talking about. If it’s obvious nevertheless that she is doing so, I would think that this is because the context in which she is writing and we are reading makes it clear that she is thinking primarily of the “world she and her readers inhabit.” But what’s wrong with writing about the world we live in? It doesn’t preclude others writing about other actual or possible worlds. 

In this context, a view of morality such as Christensen’s “perhaps makes sense,” Hamilton says. He blesses with faint criticism (or praises with faint damnation). After all, this is our context. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine any other type of context for human life than one in which “we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” People close to death might not care much about what others think of them, but children in school care about this sort of thing, adults in prison care about it too, and so does just about anyone who lives in a society. So to concede that in almost any situation other than a desert island, a death camp, or a hospice “such a view of morality perhaps makes sense” is to concede much more than the grudgingness of the concession lets on. 

“We are all limited in our sensitivity” Hamilton rightly says. But some are more limited than others. And it is because of this limitation that all of us “are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” In other words, the world Christensen writes about (allegedly) is the one we all (or almost all) live in, for reasons that Hamilton well recognizes. So what is his complaint? That she doesn’t also address the “monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering” of the world? Or that she doesn’t address the difficulty of acknowledging all this? It seems reasonable not to address every issue in one book. It also seems to me that the only way to become more sensitive to the evils of the world is to do so in just the kind of way that Christensen recommends and to do so gradually (which is probably inevitable anyway, if it happens at all), so as not to be overwhelmed in the way that Hamilton seemingly has in mind. UPDATE: On second thoughts, presumably Hamilton is concerned about people who would be better off becoming, if anything, less sensitive to the evils of the world. I think they might benefit from becoming more sensitive to other, better things. Reduced sensitivity in general seems like a recipe for evil, unhappiness, or boredom.   

So far I cannot see what the criticism of something other than her allegedly too normal writing style is meant to be. Here, perhaps, is a better idea of what Hamilton is trying to get at. This, he says, is “a problem with Christensen’s book: she sees only people. Where is there discussion of the man who needs to become less sensitive so that he can lead his own life?” Some well known and obviously terrible men come to mind, but Hamilton gives the following examples:

the man who stakes his all on being a musician of the first rank and, failing this, finds his life empty and pointless and breaks his own hands (Larry Malik)? Or the person who needs conflict with others to feel that he is alive (Thomas Bernhard)? Or the woman who wants constantly to test herself in extreme situations (Elise Wortley)? Or the man who needs to consume others so that he can paint (Francis Bacon)?

The fact that Christensen does not say much about such cases doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Her book does not tell us how to live, so it does not tell us not to be like any of these people. It’s about the relation between philosophy and life. It doesn’t say “Don’t be a tortured artist” or “Don’t read Nietzsche.” It certainly doesn’t say “Have no passion!” or “Conform!” One thing it does suggest is, in the spirit of Murdoch, paying attention to the reality of individual people. I think this would best be done in the case of the people named by Hamilton by considering each one individually rather than trying, as I am almost tempted to do, to say something about the value of passion or individuality. In that way what is good and what is bad in each of these lives could be brought out without damage or falsification. But that isn’t something that Christensen could be expected to do in her book, and it isn’t something that the book suggests in any way ought not to be done. 

Hamilton’s remaining criticism concerns the value of reading literature. Having complained that her agreement with Murdoch (among others, such as Cora Diamond) is too obviously correct, only to then reject utterly Murdoch’s very well known views on love, Hamilton now rejects Christensen’s agreement with Diamond on the potential value of literature for moral life. Literature doesn’t always promote morality, and people often fail to learn anything at all from it. But this does not contradict the claim of people such as Diamond that we can learn from it and can become better people as a result. And this is what Christensen says. So, as I have hinted already, I think Hamilton’s second criticism is a complaint that the book talks about its own subject matter and not something else. But that is to criticize it for nothing at all.

I began by mentioning my anger, but I don’t mean only to bash what Hamilton says. I strongly disagree with him, but I would read a book on the issues he brings up. That just wouldn’t be Christensen’s book (which, of course, is Hamilton’s point, but I think this point is irrelevant as criticism of Christensen).   

Niklas Forsberg on language and political extremism

This is a really interesting (if depressing) paper about politically motivated manipulation of language. Here's the abstract:

This article takes off from Wittgenstein’s observation that “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, §65), and Murdoch’s related observation that “We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable” (Murdoch 2003, 260). I want to show that these two sentences contain an accurate observation about how our uses of words, and more importantly, how shifts in our uses of words, partake in transforming the moral landscape itself. Taking these two lessons to heart enables us to see more clearly that political and moral changes in public opinion are not simply rooted in people changing their opinions but must be traced back to conceptual changes that a community has “accepted”, as it were, unwarily. I discuss two examples of how the undercurrent of language has been altered with rather massive effects on the more familiar and visible level of “moral discourse”: the alt-right movement in Sweden, and political election strategies in Sweden.

The Wittgenstein Initiative and the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project

 This is well worth looking at:

The Wittgenstein Initiative is a Vienna-based international forum that aspires to make present in the city of his birth Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest thinkers and most remarkable individuals of the 20th century. We aim to demonstrate Wittgenstein’s present-day relevance in various areas of public and private life and bring his cultural legacy to the general public.

As is this: 

The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project provides complete, well-formatted, downloadable, free books: the German or English originals are available as well as translations in multiple languages, some of which were purpose-made by our team.

 

 

Picture of me

 

British Wittgenstein Society TLP Centenary Lecture

This was not a lecture but three short presentations and a discussion, involving James Klagge, Richard Barnett, and me. You can watch it here.

More links and free stuff

The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project aims "to make available as many of Wittgenstein's works as possible free of charge and with a free licence". Find out more here. 

And there is news here about a forthcoming Wittgenstein symposium in Croatia, along with some other material about Wittgenstein (e.g. a short video and a blog post). 

Both look like sites worth checking in on from time to time.

Free readings on the Tractatus

Mauro Luiz Engelman's Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus is available to download for free until July 13th here. 

And Joshua Eisenthal's article-length review of Jose Zalabardo's Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein's Tractatus is here.

Foolish peasants

 I

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Konstantin Levin tries to introduce various reforms to improve the productivity and profitability of his country estate, but the peasants are too stuck in their ways, either unable or unwilling to learn new methods, and the reforms don’t work. Levin also tries to rationalize or make sense of his life with a similar lack of success. Tolstoy seems to see the two projects and their failure as related. In Chapter 10 of the last part of the novel he writes of Levin that:

He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire men under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate of wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable. Selling straw to the peasants in times of scarcity of provender was what he might do, even though he felt sorry for them; but the tavern and the pothouse must be put down, though they were a source of income. Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields; and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a punishment.

To Pyotr, who was paying a money-lender ten per cent. a month, he must lend a sum of money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears. It was impossible to overlook the bailiff’s not having mown the meadows and letting the hay spoil; and it was equally impossible to mow those acres where a young copse had been planted. It was impossible to excuse a laborer who had gone home in the busy season because his father was dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must subtract from his pay those costly months of idleness. But it was impossible not to allow monthly rations to the old servants who were of no use for anything.

Levin knew that when he got home he must first of all go to his wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for three hours to see him could wait a little longer. He knew too that, regardless of all the pleasure he felt in taking a swarm, he must forego that pleasure, and leave the old man to see to the bees alone, while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to the bee-house.

Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far from trying to prove that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk about it.

Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing what he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying down his own individual definite path in life.

Levin is here close to suicide, so his situation is hardly ideal, but a solution to all his problems (a solution other than suicide) seems to be close at hand. Reasoning and thinking, looking for answers and wondering whether what he is doing is right or wrong, is the source of his problems. Not thinking about such things but simply getting on with his work in the traditional way appears to be the answer.

In the next chapter, a conversation with a peasant named Fyodor, who contrasts those who live for their bellies with those who live for their souls, fills Levin with excitement:

The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.

He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt and are always agreed.

“And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!

“Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects.

“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

“And yet I know it, and we all know it.

“What could be a greater miracle than that?

“Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. “What have I discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?

“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.

“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?—Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride,” he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.

“And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”

 

This, apparently, is what Tolstoy thought at the time is the meaning of life. Reason leads to Schopenhauerian despair, although not necessarily to wrong living. A consistent rational thinker would rob, lie, and kill. An inconsistent, hypocritical one, will behave well but feel suicidal or as if life is meaningless, and will ignore truths that they have known their whole lives. A consistent, honest person will, instead, live irrationally and love their neighbor. This is not arbitrary irrationality. It is rule-governed and time-tested. But it is incomprehensible and expressible only in senseless words.

Problems:

1.      Can truths that we all know really be inexpressible in language that makes sense?

2.      Can it really be irrational to believe such truths?

3.      A worry that some people have about the idea that one cannot rationally decide what is the best way to live but that one should, nevertheless, throw oneself into something wholeheartedly is that this will lead to people becoming Nazis or joining ISIS. Tolstoy avoids this problem but perhaps does so at the cost of committing himself to a very conservative (though not in the sense that Nazis are very conservative) position.

4.      Relatedly, does Tolstoy implicitly compliment Thrasymachus too much by suggesting that his view is indeed the rational one to take?

 

II

In the story “Die klugen Leute” by the brothers Grimm (translated as “Wise Folks,” although I would say “Clever People”) invites a mixed reaction to some simple country folks. (Link: https://www.grimmstories.com/language.php?grimm=104&l=en&r=de) One of them agrees to sell three cows on credit, security for which is offered in the form of one cow’s being left with her until the buyer returns with the money. This makes sense to the woman, so she accepts the deal. Of course, the buyer has no intention of coming back, so he gets two cows for free.

In the next episode of the story, the woman’s husband pretends to have fallen from heaven and cons a woman into giving him money to pass on to her husband there. Of course, he intends only to keep the money for himself. When this second woman’s son rides out to find the man and ask him about heaven, he pretends to be someone else and persuades the boy to give him his horse so that he can ride after the man from heaven. In this way he gets a free horse as well as the money. But, the story concludes, “you no doubt prefer the simple folks.”

Two kinds of people are contrasted in this story. The first kind is self-interested men who are cunning and cruel. They are happy to lie and cheat in order to get what they want. The main character, who is one such man, threatens his wife with a beating if she does anything foolish. When he gets both money and a horse for free he ‘rewards’ her by postponing the beating. He is not likeable at all, but he does appear to be genuinely happy at his success. He is not troubled by guilt.

The other kind of person is the two women and the boy. They sincerely believe in heaven, and are very trusting of other people. They are also kind. Not only do they not threaten to beat people, the second woman even stands in her cart so as not to flatten the straw in it, which, she believes, would make it heavier for the cattle that pull the cart. They engage in a kind of reasoning, but it is a nonsensical kind of reasoning (a denser pile of straw is not heavier than a loose one, and a cow is no security at all (let alone sufficient in the circumstances) when, until he pays, the man leaving it is not its owner. Like the first kind of person, these people are happy. They lose out in terms of property, but their faith means that they do not know they have lost out. The second woman and her son, for instance, believe that their money and their horse have gone to someone they love in heaven. As the story says, we certainly prefer such people to the cruel cynics.

Everyone would, presumably, like to have plenty of the trusting people around. They will not cheat you, and, if you want to, you can easily cheat them. You have much to gain and nothing much to lose from their presence. Unless you marry one and they give your cows away. But you wouldn’t prefer to marry someone who beats you. Probably you would prefer to marry someone of the trusting kind, if you really had to choose between these two types of person.

Which kind of person would you rather be yourself though? It’s natural to resist the choice as overly simple, but it’s also hard to imagine what a cross between the two would be. Most of us probably are some sort of cross between the two, but it’s hard to imagine how one could be such a thing without inconsistency. That is, we are all a bit selfish and a bit altruistic, sometimes trusting and sometimes cynical, but this looks like having a self-contradictory nature rather than anything that presents a real third alternative. It is a bit of both, not evidence of another option altogether.

Questions:

1.      Is there a third alternative after all that we might find if we looked harder?

2.      If both types are happy and even use their own kind of reasoning (so that, in some sense, perhaps, neither is more rational than the other), is there any reason to prefer one to the other? Is it simply a matter of taste?

3.      What is the significance of the fact that we prefer one kind to the other? Does it make it rational to prefer to be a member of that kind? (I would say No, but there does seem to be some kind of contradiction in preferring one team but choosing to join the other.)

4.      Contrary to what I implied in question 2, are the kind, faithful people objectively foolish and not rational at all?

5.      If being rational means reasoning correctly, by what standard can we judge who reasons correctly? Is the answer, Tolstoy-style, that we have no choice but to use the only one(s) we know?

6.      And do we have only one standard of rationality? Rules of logic (e.g. modus ponens) can seem like rules of a game, and there are lots of games with lots of rules. Or, ignoring that line of thought, we might think of rationality as purely instrumental, as only about means to some non-rationally-determined end, or, alternatively, we might think of reason as something that can help us choose ends as well as means.

7.      Even if there are competing conceptions of rationality or reason, might it be the case that we ought to try to eliminate all but one. If it is a compliment to call someone or some decision rational, ought we to resist calling Thrasymachus rational? And, similarly, ought we to say that beliefs we favor are rational rather than mere matters of taste? More strongly, can we regard what we really believe as something like a mere matter of taste? (Cf. Cora Diamond’s “The Problem of Impiety” p. 39: “If you say, “I believe that incest is absolutely ruled out, but I don’t believe the prohibition rests on some rational justification; it’s simply what was passed down to me,” you are, or so it would seem, undercutting your own claim genuinely to believe that incest is ruled out.”)

 

III

Wittgenstein mentions the “Klugen Leute” when he talks about the people he imagines selling wood in an unconventional way (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics I §150 of the 1964 edition). The discussion begins conventionally enough. Wittgenstein says in §141 that what he is doing is offering “remarks on the natural history of man” and then, in §142, talks about teaching mathematics as part of various techniques for accomplishing practical tasks: sharing out nuts, building a house, selling piles of logs. If people only multiply or add in these specific circumstances, and think of their calculations only as part of the process of doing these specific things, are they not really calculating? Presumably they are, even though their practice looks different from ours (in which, for instance, we learn times tables in school).

Things start to get weirder in §147, when Wittgenstein starts to ask questions about right and wrong (or right and more right):

These people—we should say—sell timber by cubic measure—but are they right in doing so? Wouldn’t it be more correct to sell it by weight—or by the time that it took to fell the timber—or by the labour of felling measured by the age and strength of the woodsman? And why should they not hand it over for a price which is independent of all this: each buyer pays the same however much he takes (they have found it possible to live like that). And is there anything to be said against simply giving the wood away?

There is an interesting shift here. The idea of selling wood by weight rather than volume does seem more correct, albeit perhaps unnecessary given the (I assume) more or less regular density of wood that might be sold in this way for firewood or small construction projects. If it weighs more, after all, there is more wood. But then, on second thoughts, what is the wood for? If it’s for burning, does dense wood burn as well? If it’s for construction, don’t the dimensions of each piece matter more than its weight? So the goals of the buyer come into play. As does the behavior of wood under various circumstances (e.g. how well does it burn when dense?, how much might it shrink or expand when left lying around waiting to be sold?, how much difference in cost might such things make?, and so on). It also matters a lot what people care about. Why weigh instead of measuring if measuring is easier and no one cares about the small difference in price that might result if we weighed instead?

But then people care about things other than cost and what can be done with the wood. They care about justice, for instance. And they have different ideas about what justice requires. There is certainly no easy way to choose between these as long as all are practicable. Wittgenstein is careful to bring in Tolstoy’s test of time: they have found it possible to live like that.

Having raised the question of justice Wittgenstein immediately abandons it:

Very well; but what if they piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles?

And what if they even justified this with the words: “Of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more”?

This does not seem just or practical to us, but, given that we have different ideas about the most just or most practical or most accurate way to sell wood, why shouldn’t we be open to other ways of doing it? Well, we aren’t (it seems). Perhaps we have the answer to question 5 above here. We might not be able to say why, but these people are behaving irrationally. It is at this point, in §150, that Wittgenstein comments: “(A society that dealt this way would perhaps remind us of the “Clever People” in the fairy tale.)”

In what way might it remind us of them? Presumably in the sense that they engage in a kind of reasoning, or appear to do so, but not one that makes sense to us. Or rather, they appear not to do what we call reasoning, but to engage in a kind of parody or pseudo-version of it. They are, we might say, fools. (And Wittgenstein says in §149 that he would try to show them that you don’t necessarily buy more wood if you buy wood spread out over a bigger area. So his point is not that their way is just as good as ours. He disagrees with them.)

But if they do remind us of the clever people then we might ask whether we are like the amoral men in that story. We might wonder, in particular, if there is something we are missing. Or if we can justify our way of doing things, show it to be better than theirs and not simply the one we are used to. And here “their way of doing things” would include not only how they sell wood but also how they reject our attempts to convert them to our way of thinking about how they sell wood. Obvious considerations would be whether they seem to be happy, and whether their society functions. But if they are just as happy as us and their society just as functional (as far as this can be measured, given their apparent folly) then we don’t seem to be able to say much except “How strange!” We might even wonder if they are morally or spiritually better than us, as people sometimes wonder about people from other cultures, although I doubt we could say anything to justify any such suspicion.

 

IV

Above I posed four problems and seven questions. Here are the problems:

1.      Can truths that we all know really be inexpressible in language that makes sense?

2.      Can it really be irrational to believe such truths?

3.      A worry that some people have about the idea that one cannot rationally decide what is the best way to live but that one should, nevertheless, throw oneself into something wholeheartedly is that this will lead to people becoming Nazis or joining ISIS. Tolstoy avoids this problem but perhaps does so at the cost of committing himself to a very conservative (though not in the sense that Nazis are very conservative) position.

4.      Relatedly, does Tolstoy implicitly compliment Thrasymachus too much by suggesting that his view is indeed the rational one to take?

 

Here are the questions:

1.      Is there a third alternative after all that we might find if we looked harder?

2.      If both types are happy and even use their own kind of reasoning (so that, in some sense, perhaps, neither is more rational than the other), is there any reason to prefer one to the other? Is it simply a matter of taste?

3.      What is the significance of the fact that we prefer one kind to the other? Does it make it rational to prefer to be a member of that kind? (I would say No, but there does seem to be some kind of contradiction in preferring one team but choosing to join the other.)

4.      Contrary to what I implied in question 2, are the kind, faithful people objectively foolish and not rational at all?

5.      If being rational means reasoning correctly, by what standard can we judge who reasons correctly? Is the answer, Tolstoy-style, that we have no choice but to use the only one(s) we know?

6.      And do we have only one standard of rationality? Rules of logic (e.g. modus ponens) can seem like rules of a game, and there are lots of games with lots of rules. Or, ignoring that line of thought, we might think of rationality as purely instrumental, as only about means to some non-rationally-determined end, or, alternatively, we might think of reason as something that can help us choose ends as well as means.

7.      Even if there are competing conceptions of rationality or reason, might it be the case that we ought to try to eliminate all but one? If it is a compliment to call someone or some decision rational, ought we to resist calling Thrasymachus rational? And, similarly, ought we to say that beliefs we favor are rational rather than mere matters of taste? More strongly, can we regard what we really believe as something like a mere matter of taste? (Cf. Cora Diamond’s “The Problem of Impiety” p. 39: “If you say, “I believe that incest is absolutely ruled out, but I don’t believe the prohibition rests on some rational justification; it’s simply what was passed down to me,” you are, or so it would seem, undercutting your own claim genuinely to believe that incest is ruled out.”)

 

And here are my answers (but I won’t offer much justification for them here):

Problem 1: No. Truths that we know can be expressed in language that makes sense.

Problem 2: No. It cannot be irrational to believe something true.

Problem 3: Tolstoy is committed to a kind of conservatism, but we need not be. We do inherit concepts and practices, but not in a way that is necessarily problematic politically, morally, etc. Commitment to what we all recognize as reason is not politically (etc.) conservative.

Problem 4: I think so, yes. We should not lightly call bad things/people rational, nor call what we embrace irrational.

Question 1: I think not, but I cannot say that I have looked very hard.

Question 2: I don’t think it’s simply a matter of taste which we prefer (although taste itself is not such a simple or arbitrary thing).

Question 3: The answer is in the question.

Question 4: The kind, faithful people are foolish in one sense (given one definition of rationality), but at least deserve better than to be called fools. Certainly those who take advantage of their nature should not be praised as clever or rational without qualification.

Question 5: The answer is in the question, more or less.

Question 6: We seem to have more than one standard of rationality. That’s probably all right as long as we keep the differences clear in our minds.

Question 7:  The word ‘rational’ should probably be used as a compliment except when it is very clear that we are using it in some other, limited (or technical) way. 

Fears and lumps

[The title of this post refers to Rorty's paper "Texts and Lumps," so here's Rorty describing experiences relevant to the rest of the post. But it isn't a post about Rorty, so you don't need to watch the video to understand what follows. And you certainly don't need to have read "Texts and Lumps."]

 

If you said of someone: 'She has a mind, all right, she just never has anything to say', you would probably mean that the person is so unthinkingly conventional, or so cowed and terrified of expressing any thought of their own, that there is no point in talking to them, you get no real response.

(Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, p. 10 )  

This is a really good book, but this sentence horrifies me. There is a sense in which it's true that some people are not worth talking to, but if you think about it from the point of view of the "cowed and terrified" person... We're in "All the Lonely People" territory here, or this bit of "If You're Feeling Sinister":

Hilary went to her death because she couldn't think of anything to say
Everybody thought that she was boring, so they never listened anyway

There are interesting questions about the ethics of social interaction, because there is such a thing as trying to keep a conversation going, and so of not trying hard enough to do so. There could be a gender aspect to this too. Tracey Thorn (in My Rock'n'Roll Friend) says of Lindy Morrison and the men in The Go-Betweens that:

She understands and appreciates the beauty that also comes out in the songs, but living and working with their introspection and angst is draining, exasperating, she thinks it is very self-indulgent boy behaviour. A woman wouldn’t get away with it. A woman has to try harder socially. Has to placate, keep things running smoothly, not make unnecessary demands.

Still, there does also seem to be such a thing as not being able to think of anything to say. And something like a spectrum of social awkwardness with mild, perhaps even pleasant, shyness at one end and autism at the other. Autism is one of Eugen Bleuler's "four A's" of schizophrenia (the others being alogia, ambivalence, and affect blunting). 

A comment of Wittgenstein's on schizophrenia is well known:

The greatest happiness for a human being is love. Suppose you say of the schizophrenic: he does not love, he cannot love, he refuses to love – where is the difference?

“He refuses to . . .” means: it is in his power. And who wants to say that?!

(Culture and Value, p. 87e.)

He also has this to say about his own inability to express himself (not necessarily in social situations):

Often I feel that there is something in me like a lump which, were it to melt, would let me cry or I would then find the right words (or perhaps even a melody). But this something (is it the heart?) in my case feels like leather & cannot melt. Or is it only that I am too much a coward to let the temperature rise sufficiently?

(Public and Private Occasions, p. 11)   

It is not clear to him whether the problem is a moral one or something for which he couldn't be blamed. But, we might ask, who would want to say it is in his power? (Perhaps an encouraging friend. Perhaps someone who has been hurt by his silence. Or perhaps the question should be left rhetorical.)

On another occasion he seems to have thought that he had a (perhaps unrelated) inability, not a culpable failing:

Although I cannot give affection, I have a great need for it.

(Wittgenstein quoted by Norman Malcolm, Portraits of Wittgenstein, p. 302)

 And he knew he was not alone in having this need: 

I wish you could live quiet, in a sense, & be in a position to be kind & understanding to all sorts of human beings who need it! Because we all need this sort of thing very badly.

(Portraits of Wittgenstein, p. 287)

As for what people who have this kind of inability (or any other, for that matter) should think, Michael Kremer (paraphrasing Augustine, I think) is excellent on this:

[P]ride judges that God could have, and so should have, made me better than I am, second-guessing God's wisdom and trying to replace it with human wisdom. Humility, on the other hand, is acceptance of what I am as good enough. This is combined with gratitude to the Creator for my existence, an attitude that implies the recognition that if God saw fit to create me, I must have been worth bringing into existence.

(“The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense”, pp. 48-49) 

Logic and Value in Wittgenstein's Philosophy

Peter Stiers’ “Logic and Value in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy” in Philosophical Investigations Volume 44, Issue 2 April 2021 Pages 119-150 is worth reading, although I don’t know how much of it I agree with.

Here’s the abstract:

In Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus (TLP), Wittgenstein gave ethics the same semantic status as logic. This paper first investigates this claim from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s lifelong semantic framework. This reveals that ethical sentences are meaningless expressions, which can only be used to ostensively point out conditions of meaningfulness. Secondly, the paper assesses the implications of this conclusion for understanding the seven cryptic remarks on value and ethics in TLP. Using the connection between will and value in TLP and will and sentence interpretation in Philosophical Investigations, it is suggested that Wittgenstein held lifelong views on value and ethics.

 

And here are the parts that seem most questionable to me:

 

Asking which ethical attitude is the right one makes no sense, because “we do not know… how it would be determined, what sort of criteria would be used, and so on.” [And now another quotation from Wittgenstein:] “[S]uppose I say Christian ethics is the right one. Then I am making a judgment of value. It amounts to 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.” (pp. 123-124)

 

If saying that Christian ethics “is the right one” makes sense, which I take Wittgenstein to imply here, then surely it makes sense to ask which ethical attitude is the right one? It would not make the same kind of sense that it makes to ask which physical theory is right, for instance, but that doesn’t make it nonsense. Say I am telling students about various ethical attitudes, views, and theories, and one of them asks me which one is right. They might be confused, but they might not be. They might mean: “which one do you live by?” And then I might name any of them and make perfectly good sense. 

To be fair to Stiers, on p. 124 he says only that “in a way [my emphasis], it makes no sense to ask whether” an ethical sentence is true or false, right or wrong. Which is what I think he should have said all along.

Here's more:

 

Now suppose that Wittgenstein, when confronted for telling a preposterous lie, would similarly respond that he knows he behaved badly but did not want to behave any better. In such case, we would admonish him by saying, “you ought to want to behave better.” The analogy of the circumstance of this utterance to Moore’s insistence that his hands exist or to the chess player's holding up the rook is clear: it is an ostensive pointing out of the rules of the game. This demonstrates that ethical utterances do have a use and, thus, are part of the practice in which language has its place. Like logical sentences, they are not nonsensical because they have an unequivocal interpretation in the context of the language‐game to which they belong. (p. 128)

I think it’s fair to wonder here what counts as an ethical utterance. Such utterances are supposed to have a use in a practice, so that saying something like “You should not lie” is reminding someone of the rules of the game. I think this is one use of sentences like that.

But what about “Abortion is wrong” or “Abortion is not always wrong”? A person might say either of these as a reminder to someone of what they already believe. But that is not the only use these sentences can have. They can also be used as part of an attempt to change someone else’s mind. Or (probably in modified form) as slogans chanted by a group whose identity is defined partly by its stance on abortion. Or, no doubt, in other ways too (as examples in a blog post, say).

And then there are similar-looking sentences that aren’t a reminder of anything, such as “In this paper I shall argue that robots have moral rights.” Even if one agrees with this thesis, it isn’t part of a practice (except the practice of doing applied ethics). The kind of robot that might be thought to have rights either doesn't exist yet or doesn't play a big enough part in enough people's lives for there to be a practice of recognizing their rights. But I wouldn’t call the thesis statement about robots' rights nonsense for this reason.

Stiers again:

“we cannot understand someone who does not subscribe to the truth of these ethical sentences.” (p. 129)

I think this is probably true of certain ethical utterances. If someone said that murder is OK I would wonder what they meant. But students have a tendency to say things like “Technically murder can be right” when they mean that war or capital punishment can be justified. So I wouldn’t rush to call even the claim that “murder is OK” nonsense without some further clarification.

And surely we can understand people who disagree with us on abortion or robot rights, even if we don’t always do so. A nice example of this kind of thing is Brandon Boulware on coming to accept his daughter’s being trans:

He certainly seems as though he can understand people who don’t share his view. (Which is not to claim, of course, that he can understand all of them. Some of them might have very different views or ways of viewing things.)

Last one:

Just as the logical insight inherent in a tautology is recognized by someone who knows language, the ethical aspect in ostensively uttered ethical propositions is recognized by someone who already has these practical insights. Thus, ethics, as well as logic, is ineffable. Moreover, all “moral” discussions must be of the form of an ostensive collision between forms of life. (p. 132)

I think I want to question the word ‘already’ here. Say I am witnessing an event where pro-choice and pro-life protestors are waving signs and shouting slogans. Imagine I am undecided about the ethics of abortion, or pro-life but with some doubts. Now someone shouts “A woman has the right to control her own body!” And I think, “You know what? That’s right! She does.”

I doubt this happens often, but doesn’t it seem possible? The pro-choice way of framing the issue invites me to see it a certain way, and when I try out this way of looking at it, suddenly I seem to see clearly. (It could go the other way, too, of course, with the pro-life view, or a pro-life view, seeming to make sense of the whole issue to someone.)

I’m not sure I would call this a collision of forms of life. But perhaps it’s good to think of the abortion debate as a struggle within our form of life.

The Significance of the Tractatus

Blimey, this looks good:

teorema Vol. XL/2, Spring 2021

 

           Table of Contents

 

The Significance of the Tractatus

Guest Editor: José Luis Zalabardo

 

• J. L. Zalabardo, Introduction

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871309

 

• J. Gombin, Simplicity and Independence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871310

 

• N. M. Mabaquiao, Jr, Wittgenstein’s Objects and Theory of Names in the Tractatus

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871311

 

• G. Nir, Are Rules of Inference Superfluous? Wittgenstein vs. Frege and Russell

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871312

 

• J. A. Forero and M. J. Frápolli, Show Me. On Tractarian Non-Representationalism

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871313

 

• O. Kuusela, Wittgenstein’s Grundgedanke as the Key to the Tractatus

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871314

 

• A. I. Segatto, Judgment, Nonsense and the Unity of the Proposition: Revisiting Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Russell

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871315

 

• E. Pérez-Navarro, Fregean Themes in the Tractatus; Context Compositionality and Nonsense

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871316

 

• V. Sanfélix, Tractatus 5.6-5.621

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871317

 

• J. Fairhurst, The Ethical Significance of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

 

      https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871318

 

• R. Henriques, The Tractatus as an ‘Exercise in Kierkegaardian Irony

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871319

 

• C. Diamond, Wittgenstein’s ‘Unbearable Conflict’

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871320

 

• M. Kremer, Cora Diamond on “Wittgenstein’s ‘Unbearable Conflict’”

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871321 

 

• C. Diamond, Reply to Michael Kremer

 

     https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7871322

 

                                         oooo00oooo

 

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