II. Introduction to Ethics
I. Person, life
• Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889 in
Vienna, Austria, to a wealthy industrial family, well
situated in cultural Viennese circle.
• The family was one of the wealthiest in Vienna, and
young Ludwig grew up in a hothouse atmosphere of
high culture and privilege. Johann Brahms and Gustav
Mahler were frequent visitors to the palatial family
home (Palee Wittgenstein) , and Ludwig's brother Paul,
a concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I,
commissioned works for the left hand by Richard
Strauss, Maurice Ravel and Prokofiev.
Studies
• Wittgenstein originally studied engineering,
first in the Realschule in Linz, then in Berlin. In
1908 he went to Manchester to study
aeronautics. Following Frege’s (professor of
mathematics in Jena) advice he went to
Cambridge to study mathematical logic under
Bertrand Russell at Trinity College in 1911.
Years in Cambridge 1911-1913
• During the years in Cambridge 1911-1913 Wittgenstein
worked on the foundation of logic and conducted
conversation at the subject with Moore, Keynes,
Ramsey.
• When the First World War broke out, W. joined the
Austrian army, and became a volunteer in the Austrian
artillery. He served first on a ship at the Vistula River
near Kraków, then in an artillery workshop, and finally
was sent to the Russian front where he gained many
distinctions for bravery.
• In 1918 he was sent to Italy where in the end of the
war he became a prisoner of the ITALIANS in Cassino.
The Tractatus logico-philosophicus.
• During these four years of active service
Wittgenstein had written his great work on
logic, language and the world. In the camp he
finished his one and only work published
during his lifetime the Tractatus logicophilosophicus. While he was still in the prison
camp he managed to send the Tractatus to
Russell. The Tractatus was published firstly in
Wien 1921, then in London 1922.
The Tractatus
• The Tractatus is a highly condensed and
aphoristic text on the philosophy of language
which climes to present, “on all essential
points, the final solution to the problems of
philosophy”.
Formal relationship between language,
thought and the world
• The Tractatus posits a close formal
relationship between language, thought and
the world. There is a direct logical
correspondence between the configurations
of simple objects in the world, thought in the
mind, and words in language. Thus the shape
of ideas in the mind and the relationship of
words in a sentence are identical in form with
the structure of reality or “state of affairs”
they represent.
Doubts about the philosophy of the
Tractatus
• He began to have serious doubts ab. the soundness of the
philosophy presented in the Tractatus. In 1929 he returned to
Cambridge and resumed his philosophical vocation. He became a
fellow of Trinity from 1930 onward.
• During these first years in Cambridge his conception of philosophy
and its problems underwent dramatic changes that are recorded in
several volumes of conversations, lecture notes, and letters (e.g.,
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, The Blue and Brown
Books, Philosophical Grammar).
• He was appointed professor of philosophy in 1939, but served
during the Second War as a hospital porter in Guy’s Hospital in
London, later as a medical orderly, laboratory assistant in the ROYAL
VICTORIA Infirmary, before returning to his academic duties in
1944. He held the chair practically from 1945.
The Philosophical Investigations,
• In the 1930s and 1940s Wittgenstein conducted seminars at
Cambridge, developing most of the ideas that he intended
to publish in his second book, Philosophical Investigations.
He turned from formal logic to ordinary language, novel
reflections on psychology and mathematics, and a general
skepticism concerning philosophy's pretensions.
• In 1945 he prepared the final manuscript of the
Philosophical Investigations, but, at the last minute,
withdrew it from publication (and only authorized its
posthumous publication).
• Retired in 1947 he settled in Ireland, working on
Philosophical investigations, a work containing his mature
thought which he left for posthumous publication.
Aanalogy between words and tools in
a tool-box
• He draws an analogy between words and tools
in a tool-box: …there is a hammer, pliers, a
screw-driver, a ruler, a glue-pot, nails and
screws. The function of words is as diverse as
the function of these objects. It was not that a
word had a meaning, rather it had a use. The
meaning of a word is its use governed by
rules.
Wittgenstein’s death
• In 1949 he spent some time in America and
Ireland. Returning to England the same year
with incurable cancer. W. did not seem
unhappy at the diagnosis. He said he did not
wish to live any longer. He continued to work
on his ideas until a few days before his death.
The cancer killed him at Cambridge in 1951.
• Legend has it that his last words were "Tell
them I've had a wonderful life”.
Fifteen substantial volumes
• His literary executors published volumes of
selections from his notebooks including:
• Remarks on the foundation of mathematics,
• The blue and brown book,
• Zettel,
• Culture and Value,
• Remarks on the phil. Of psychology,
• On Certainty,
• Notebooks 1914-1916, and some other late
writings.
Biography: On Wittgenstein’s life.
• 1. Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein and his Time, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1982.
• 2. Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig 1899-1921.
London: Duckworth, 1988.
• 3. Monk Ray. Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage,
1990.
• 4. Malcolm Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford:
Oxford 1984.
• 5. Janik Alan & Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York.
• 6. Rush Rhees, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections.
Totowa 1981.
• 7. Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader. Ed. by H. J. Glock, Blackwell
2001.
“Duty to oneself”,
• Monk stresses the all-important connection
betw. Wittgenstien’s life and work, religious
conversion and philosophy: His logic and his
thinking ab. himself being but two aspects of
the single “duty to oneself”, this of genius.
Being true to oneself
• W. was arguing for a morality based on
integrity, on being true to oneself, one's
impulses - a morality that comes from inside
one's self rather than one imposed from
outside by rules, principles and duties. “If
anyone is unwilling to descend into himself,
because it is too painful, he will remain
superficial in his writing”. (A commentary
reported to Rhees).
The use of studying philosophy
• “What is the use of studying philosophy, if all that
does for you is unable you to talk with some
plausibility about some abstruse questions of
logic, etc., if it does not improve your thinking
about important questions of everyday life..”
• “A bad philosopher is like a slum landlord. It is my
job to put him out of business.”
• But philosophy is very complicated. Why is it so
complicated? He asks: It ought to be entirely
simple.
Philosophy
• Philosophy unties, disentangles the knots in
our thinking that we have, in a sense, put
there. To do this it must make movements
that are just as complicated as these knots.
Although the result of philosophy is simple, its
method cannot be if it is to succeed. The
complexity of philosophy is not a complexity
of its subject matter, but of our knotted
understanding.
Tractatus
• The Tractatus is a highly condensed and
aphoristic text on the philosophy of language
which climes to present, “on all essential
points, the final solution to the problems of
philosophy”. It was recognized from the outset
as being one of the key works of its age.
The Tractatus’ enigma
• Yet even today The Tractatus remains an enigma.
• Trying to understand the Tr. we are confronted
with two contrasting views about the subject of
the book. After apparently seventy pages
devoted on logic, theory of meaning, philosophy
of mathematics, and natural sciences we are
faced with five concluding pages, proposition 6.4
on: a string of theses about subject, will,
solipsism, death and the sense of the world,
which must lie outside the world.
Critique of language
• Critique of language was taken to be the
crucial instrument of thoughts, the instrument
of fighting with slavery of thought and
expression which is the enemy of individual
integrity, and leaves one defenseless against
the political deceptions of corrupt and
hypocritical men.
A letter to Russell
• „In fact you would not understand it without a pervious explanation
as it's written in quite short remarks. (This of course means that
nobody will understand it); although I believe, it's all as clear as
crystal.
• The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by
props - i.e. by language - (and, which comes to the same, what can
be thought) and what cannot be expressed by props, but only
shown (geziegt): which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of
philosophy. T
• his book will perhaps only be understood by those who have
themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it.
“"The book will … draw a limit to thinking, or rather — not to
thinking, but to the expression of thoughts …. The limit can … only
be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit
will be simply nonsense" (TLP Preface).
Structure of Tractatus
• Tractatus consists of seven main theses and a string of
subordinated theses that make unity - one passage of
thoughts. The theses have a well-ordered structure: subtheses comment the preceding main thesis and introduce
the next main thesis. The structure of Tracatus corresponds
with logical structure of the world.
• Witt. holds that the world is ordered in a logical way and
can be presented as a collection of facts. Beyond facts
there exist nothing.
• A given fact is defined as an existing state of affairs
• and the state of affairs is defined as a given connection of
things.
Thought
• Thought is a logical picture of facts.
• Thought is a sentence with a sense.
• Thoughts in logical way picture facts as well as
sentences.
• Facts are mirrored by sentences.
• The world (its structure) can be projected on language.
• That is why to analyze the structure of language is to
discover the structure of the world.
• Thought means sentence which has a sense, and
sentence that has a sense is a picture of possible state
of affairs.
Sentence
• Sentence can be true or false. One can decide if a
sentence is true or false on the base of reality,
the sentence refers to.
• If a state of affairs exists, then the sentence is
true, if a state of affairs does not exist (but might
have existed), then the sentence has only sense,
but is false.
• There are also sentences which have no sense.
They do not refer to reality, but to an impossible
state of affairs.
Sentence
• Sentences are divided into simple and
composed.
• The composed are constructed by means of
the simple sentences.
• The simple sentences consist of names.
• Simple sentences are functions of names.
A name
• A name denotes an object.
• Configuration of names in a sentence shows
connection between objects i.e. states of
affairs.
The last thesis of Tractatus
• „What we cannot speak about, thereof we
must kept silence”.
• The presiding theses say that limits of our
language are the limits of our world. Our
linguistic competence or better, what we are
able to describe by means of language define
our world.
The Tractarian theory of language
• Words, Witt argued, are representations of objects.
• And combining words lead to propositions which are statements
about reality, pictures of reality.
• The world consists of facts, these facts can be broken down into
states of affairs, which in turn can be broken down into
combinations of objects.
• The world is built from simple objects.
• Propositions, statements about reality, i.e. pictures are deliberately
constructed verbal representations. W's gives an example: “A
gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the
sound waves, all they stand to one another in the same internal
relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.
They are all constructed according to a common logical
pattern.”(4.014).
Proposition as picture of reality
• “A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand
a proposition, I know a situation it represents. And I
understand the proposition without having had its
sense explained to me.” (4. 021).
• "We make models of facts form ourselves" and a
model is laid against reality like a measure."
• The term model (Darstellung) cover architects'
blueprints, children's model toys, painted portraits, all
sort of patterns; mathematical models (Bilder) are only
one species of representations (Darstellungen).
A model represents its sense;
• "in order to tell whether a model is true or false, we must
compare it with reality." 2.223. In order to be a picture
there must be sth. in common with what is pictured (2.16).
And it is its form of presentation (2.17). There is and must
be a logical structure in common betw. a proposition 'The
grass is green' and a state of affairs (the grass being green),
and it is this commonality of structure which enables
language to represent reality. Only in this way can the
proposition be true are false: it can only agree or disagree
with reality by being a picture of situation. The picture
represents or can represent every reality whose form it has.
The spatial picture, everything spatial, the colored,
everything colored, etc (2.171).
Thought as logical picture
• The logical picture of the facts is the thought
(3.). The totality of true thoughts is a picture
of the world 3.01).
• The picture, however, cannot represent its
form of representation; nor shows it forth
(2.172). Beyond naming objects and
describing their configurations, models cannot
assert anything about them.
The conditions for a proposition's
having sense
• It rests on the possibility of representation or
picturing. Names must have a reference, a
meaning.
• It follows that only factual states of affairs which
can be pictured can be represented by
meaningful propositions.
• What can be said are only propositions of natural
science
• And this leaves out a great number of statements
which are made and used in language.
Ethical remarks lacked sense
• Moral remarks cannot be translated into, or reduced to,
empirical propositions. 'No statement of fact can ever be,
or imply a judgment of an absolute value'.
• Nor of course can any statement of value imply a
statement of fact.
• Ethical remarksclacked sense, because no state of affairs is
asserted to obtain when we make an ethical judgment.
• We cannot point to any state of affairs which embodies or
corroborates the moral judgment. We cannot physically
perceive the moral, the proof of that is - when we attempt
to point to it - to point it out in the situation we might
discover that others do not "see" it.
Human actions are morally empty
• "All propositions are of equal value" 6.4. In 6.432 he
writes: "How things are in the world is a matter of
complete indifference for what is higher. God does not
reveal himself in the world.„
• It means that what happens in the world: famine,
disease, etc., natural disasters, are not in themselves
evil, wicked. They just are. Nor is human suffering. In
Notebook he writes 'the happy man is fulfilling the
purpose of existence' . He means who no longer needs
to have any purpose except to live, that is to say who is
content.
The ethical
• But what would the ethical be if it could be expressed?
• It is the mystical.
• This includes the sense of world which must lie outside
the world and so transcendent the expression 6.41.
• It also includes that the world exists. We wonder at the
meaning of life, at the existence of the world.
• But there is no answer here that can be put into words,
and so no question, and no problem and no riddle:
“When the answer cannot be put into words, neither
can the question be put into words. The riddle does
not exist. If the question can be framed at all, it is also
possible to answer it.” 6.5.
Value cannot lie within the world
• The idea had two negative implications: everything which is
important to human life lies beyond the reach of science, as
he says in the Tractatus: “We feel that even when all
possible scientific questions have been answered, the
problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course
there are then no questions left, and this itself is the
answer.” 6.52.
• 'It is clear that ethics cannot be put in words." 6.421. There
are therefore no ethical propositions 6.42.
• Indeed, it is not just that there are no ethical propositions,
for the whole business of language was making
propositions, there are no meaningful ethical remarks or
utterances.
Notebooks 1914-16
• He asks: What gives meaning to life and the world?
• The question is problematic, because what happens in the
world is purely contingent and does not manifest any kind
of moral necessity. How can be meaning and value in the
seemingly nihilistic world of modern science, where the
world has been divorced from any conception of value?
• He asks: What gives meaning to life and the world? The
question is problematic, because what happens in the
world is purely contingent and does not manifest any kind
of moral necessity. How can be meaning and value in the
seemingly nihilistic world of modern science, where the
world has been divorced from any conception of value?
Will and value
• Like Kant Wittgenstein locates value within a
will which is not a part of the empirical world,
the ordinary empirical will is simply another
fact in the world and, as such, cannot be
neither good or bad.
Will and world
• The will is not capable of effecting changes in the
world. All that exists in the world, all facts are
contingent.
• “The world is independent of my will”. Tr.6.373.
“Even if all we wish for were to happen, still this
would only be a favor granted by fate, so to
speak: for there is no logical connection between
the will and the world, which would guarantee it,
and the supposed physical connection itself is
surely not something that we would will.” 6.374.
The ethical will can alter only the limits
of the world
• "If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter
the world, it can only alter the limits of the world,
the way we look at the world, not the facts – not
what can be expressed by means of language. In
short the effect must be that it becomes an
altogether different world. It must, so to speak,
wax and wane as a whole. The world of the
happy man is a different one from that of the
unhappy man.” 6.43 The world is my world; it is
seen in the fact that, the limits of language (of
that language which alone I understand) mean
the limits of my world. Tr. 5.62.
Subject and ethical meaning
• The subject gives ethical meaning to life through the way in which it
views the world as a whole. In Tr. 6.45. he says that “to view the
world sub specie aeterni (from the viewpoint of eternity) is to view
it as a whole – a limited whole or a as created by God.
• He also connects this idea to both ethics and aesthetics: the work
of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is
the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.
• This is the connection between art and life. Viewing the world as a
limited unity is analogous to viewing it as an aesthetic object, in
that contingent facts acquire a meaning. In other words, our sense
of meaningfulness of an object, or the world, can come and go
depending on our perspective on it. Witt.: “ethical will alters only
the limits of the world, so that it must, so to speak, wax and wane
as a whole, as if by accession or loss of meaning. Notebooks, 73.
Moral imperative
• Witt. saw knowing of the self as a moral imperative. It
was the same need to eradicate logical flaws as any
other kind of deception. Logic and ethics are one. It is
the Kantian freedom of choosing the good or the bad,
that manifests itself in consciousness of sin and in
repentance. As the empirical ego man is a part of
nature, the world of causality. But as the intelligible
ego is free.
• Freedom lies above the bidding of the empirical ego:
Duty is duty to oneself, duty of the empirical ego to the
intelligible ego. M159.
Experiences of the First War
'What do I know about God and the
purpose of life?'
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that I am placed in it like my eye in the visual field.
That sth. about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That life is the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the
meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pry is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am
completely powerless.
• I can only make myself independent of the world
- and so in a certain sense master it - by
renouncing any influence on happenings.
• Later' Fear in the face of death is the best sign of
a false, i.e. a bad life'
• To believe in a God means to understand the
meaning of life.
• To believe in God means to see that facts of the
world are not the end of the matter.
• To believe in God means to see that life has a
meaning.
• The world id given to me, i.e. my will enters the world completely
from the outside into sth. that is already there.
• However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense
dependent, and what we were dependent on we can call God.
• In this sense God would simply be the fate, or, what is the same
thing: The world which is independent of our will.
• I can make myself independent of fate.
• ...When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in
agreement with Sth. But what is it? Is it the world? Certainly it is
correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God. How things stand, is
God. God is how things stand. (He means - How they stand in the
world and how they stand in oneself) . This is precisely what is, the
unreasoning life, a false view of life.' 'You know what you have to do
to live happily'.
Summary
• Ethics is not a science of morality. It is not a branch of knowledge,
like geometry or chemistry.
• It has nth. to do with facts but the paradoxical.
• Only a good man knows what values are, only he can communicate
them.
• Viewing the world as a totality, as when it is experienced as a
miracle created by God, constitutes the “ethical space’ in which
value and meaning can enter into life.
• For without the unifying perspective on life and the world there are
only ethically neutral facts.
• For. W. ethical self is disconnected from the common public world
not only in that it can produce no effects in that world, but also in
that its moral perspective is essentially private.