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is that which renounces the thinking subject’s il usion of being
able to change the world according to one’s personal wishes. There
is a strikingly obvious fal acy here. How can one “renounce” any
influence on the happenings of the world if one does not have any
influence over those happenings to begin with? The so-called change
of “horizon” – that qualitatively transforms the world of the man
who does God’s will into a “happy” world – cannot be anything that
one could possibly bring about by any means. Surely, if the world is
at all different, even qualitatively, this affects one’s thoughts about one’s experience, and these thoughts are themselves facts of the
world that are supposedly independent of any personal wil .
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein clearly states that what cannot be said in logical y clear language cannot be thought either. However, 24 Ibid., 6.7.16.
25 Ibid., 8.7.16.
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in the passages above Wittgenstein conveniently claims that the
thinking subject is an il usion. But then what is it that re-cognizes
that one bears one attitude towards the world, such as renunciation,
rather than another attitude, such as striving? What is it (if not some kind of thought) that is cognoscente of the qualitative difference of one’s experience of the world in the two cases? If we “are indeed dependent” on the will of God that wil s the facts of the world
as if from beyond the world, then we are always so dependent.
Wittgenstein makes that a conclusion which follows inevitably from
his definition of “God” and of the “facts of the world” as two sides
of the same coin, as it were. There is nothing ‘in between’ them.
Therefore it is not possible for me to change my attitude towards the
world, or to resolve to have an ethical will as if I have ever had an
unethical one. To the extent that I have a will at al , I will everything that does indeed happen – mine is the solitary ‘spirit’ behind all
‘material’ facts:
A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all
stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it
comes from a stone or from my body is neither good nor bad.
...It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.26
Only remember that the spirit of the snake, of the lion, is your
spirit. For it is only from yourself that you are acquainted with
spirit at al ... The same with the elephant, with the fly, with the
wasp... Is this the solution of the puzzle why men have always
believed that there was one spirit common to the whole world?
And in that case it would, of course, also be common to lifeless
things too. This is the way I have traveled: Idealism singles men
out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out,
and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and
so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. [see TLP 5.64] And in this sense I can also
26 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 5.63; Notebooks, 12.10.16.
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speak of a will that is common to the whole world. But this is in
a higher sense my will.27
Everything from cats torturing mice to Nazis experimenting on
starved children, is all my will because I have no conscious self
other than a ‘God’ who wil s the facts of the world (including my
thoughts) just as they stand. I am deluded if I think, wish or appear
to will otherwise, but this ‘delusion’ must itself be the will of God.
Such is the so-called “ethics” of the tractarian Wittgenstein; it voids any coherent meaning of the word.
2. The Missionaries and the Natives
In the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that he has been “forced to recognize grave mistakes” in what he
wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. For the purposes of this paper, the question is whether his running critique of these mistakes
is equal y destructive of any notion of Justice that would transcend
mere cultural conditioning or coercive force. So as to set the stage
for answering this question, a brief and general discussion of
Wittgenstein’s critique of some of the central claims of the Tractatus would be in order.
According to the Tractatus, there is one essential function of language, namely, the description of reality by means of reference.
As we have seen, this notion that only “stating the facts” of the
world is sensibly meaningful has grave implications for ethics. In
the Investigations, Wittgenstein notes that there are many other functions of language, such as joking, acting, questioning, thanking,
swearing, commanding, speculating, evaluating, and story telling.28
Language is instrumental.29 Its words are tools whose meaning is not
27 Wittgenstein,
Notebooks, 15.10.16.
28 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 23.
29 Ibid., 569.
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an object to which they refer, but the manner in which the word is
used.30 There is no essence of all language.31
To think that words always function as the names of things or
that they always refer to objects (which is in fact only one type of language use) leads to the abstract reification of nouns like “time”,
“being”, “nothing”, and “number” as if we could meaningful y
inquire into what these ‘things’ are – as if we, as knowing subjects
could determine to what objects they actual y refer. This causes
these unusual ‘objects’ to assume the pretensions of an occult
significance. According to Wittgenstein, Philosophy – including his
own earlier efforts in the Tractatus – consists of over-generalization, over stretching of analogies and the abstraction of words from the
context of their normal usage in our ordinary practical lives.32 We
are bewitched by words on account of paying attention only to their
surface grammar or apparent place in the structure of a sentence,
rather than to their depth grammar or usage in everyday life.33
Philosophy’s ‘problems’ arise only because Philosophy is divorced
from the practical tasks of everyday life.34 These specious perplexities of the annoyingly confused pedant are not to be ‘solved’, but rather
dissolved by remembering the everyday practical employment of
language that appears philosophical y problematic.35
Generality is a matter of degree, and ‘logical’ words are not any
more ‘sublime’ or significant than other words.36 The Investigations call the reductionist foundationalism of the Tractatus into question.
Wittgenstein admits that he was mistaken to believe that there are
basic terms from which all others are defined, or that there are any
absolutely simple entities of which all others are composed. While
it may be said that logic characterizes the basic structure of what is 30 Ibid., 108, 421.
31 Ibid., 16-27, 65, 92, 110.
32 Ibid., 38, 60.
33 Ibid., 664.
34 Ibid., 132.
35 Ibid., 116.
36 Ibid., 114.
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possible within a language (e
ven what it is possible to think), this is a vacuous observation, since there are different ways of stipulating
the meaning of terms such as “basic”, “structure”, and “possible”.37
On this view, what is taken to be “basic” and how one construes a
“structure” is never a matter of objective fact, it depends on the aims and motivations of those doing the defining.
All that is universal y basic to language, and can never be
eliminated, is its indeterminacy. Such indeterminacy or vagueness of linguistic terms, and the open texture of language in which
they function, does not in practice detract from their utility.38 The
meaning of the same word will differ based on the variety of ways
in which it is used.39 The various ways in which we use words can
be thought of on the analogy of language games.40 While the rules of any given language game are arbitrary, these “rules” are what render
the game meaningful and they should not be violated so long as one
is playing that game and not some other. The practical nature of the
rules and the function that they confer on words (and expressions)
means that language games should not be judged based upon how
successful y they mirror reality. This would be like evaluating soccer on the basis of how successful y it refers to the world. It also does
not make sense to judge one game by the standards of another, as if
one could sensibly say that poker is inferior to sprinting because it is slower. Each language game has its own aims and standards.41
Wittgenstein does, however, observe that there are family
resemblances between the various applications of certain words.
The analogy is to the fact that certain members of a family share
their build and gait with others, but not their eye color and facial
features, while others share their build and features but not their
hair color, and so forth.42 These irregular overlapping similarities
37 Ibid., 89-106.
38 Ibid., 69, 71.
39 Ibid., 43.
40 Ibid., 108.
41 Ibid., 23.
42 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 67.
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and dissimilarities are also found among games.43 Soccer and
tennis both involve coordinated control of a ball and are similar in
this respect, but soccer is also similar to racing because it involves running, and tennis is similar to volleyball in so far as it involves
sending a ball over a net whereas in soccer one tries to get a ball into a net. To the extent that it involves a net at al , however, soccer shares a similarity with tennis and basketball that it does not share with
American football (which involves running and controlling a bal ,
but no net). Games of the aforementioned type are all more similar
to each other than they are to board games, and some card games
bear a greater resemblance to certain board games than they do to
other card games like solitaire (where there are no fellow players or
opponents).
By means of this analogy to games and family resemblances,
Wittgenstein also critiques the mistaken ‘ostensive definition’
picture of language forwarded in the Tractatus.44 The reader will recall that this notion that words somehow ‘mirror’ objects in the
world, so that the former can be distinct enough from the latter in
order to refer to them, ultimately involved Wittgenstein in a bizarre parallelism between an impersonal immaterial consciousness and
an unconscious world of facts. This metaphysical parallelism was
shown to be detrimental to the individual’s capacity to exercise
choice, which capacity must be the basis of any and all coherent
notions of ethical responsibility. The heretofore explicated remarks
in Philosophical Investigations amount to a rejection of this tacit metaphysical dualism of the Tractatus.
Now Wittgenstein insists that like all other games, language
games only develop their significance within the context of the
collective cultural activities of a particular society.45 We are not immaterial minds trapped within physical bodies, waiting only
to learn the right words to express our innermost thoughts.46 We
43 Ibid., 66.
44 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 3.6.
45 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 23.
46 Ibid., 32.
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cannot even think, let alone talk to ourselves before we have been
taught the practical uses of words. For a child to learn language is not at all the same type of phenomenon as for an already linguistical y
adept British adult to travel in a foreign country and try to learn
its language by means of guessing at whether certain words that the
non-English speaking locals try to teach him to refer to the same
object-concepts as certain words in his native language do.47 It is
Wittgenstein’s contention that a child first acquires the capacity for any conceptual thought at all only as she is taught language in the
context of the shared cultural practices of her society.
The problem, from an ethical perspective, is that while the
standards of certain cultures may overlap, people brought up in
very different cultures may be unable to find any rational y objective standard of ethical conduct to arbitrate in their relations with one
another. Indeed, in On Certainty Wittgenstein claims that where there are real y two (or more) fundamental y different worldviews
there will be a “combat” that can only end with the destruction of all but one party, or with an irrational persuasion (Überredung, literal y to ‘out talk’ / ‘over speak’ or verbal y dazzle) that converts ( bekehren, literal y ‘turns’) one of the combatants:
Where two principles real y do meet which cannot be reconciled
with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and
a heretic. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t
I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. [Überredung]. (Think what
happens when missionaries convert [ bekehren] natives.)48
Could it be that Wittgenstein’s thoroughgoing critique of the
inhuman worldview of the Tractatus has no greater ethical
implication than a return to Thrasymachus’s doctrine of ‘might
makes right’? Wittgensteinians who wants to avert this conclusion
might claim that it overlooks the fact that Wittgenstein does not
47 Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 32.
48 Wittgenstein,
On Certainty, 611-12.
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see all empirical propositions as holding the same status.49 “Not all
corrections of our views are on the same level.”50 The sense of certain propositions hinges on certain others already being presumed. These
‘hinge propositions’ are more fundamental than others:
That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as
it were like hinges on which those turn.51
Wittgenstein also uses a river’s water flow, the sand on its banks
and bed, and the more solid bedrock of the river as an analogy for
different types of empirical propositions.52 The analogy is intended to suggest that these different types of empirical propositions admit of
si
gnificantly different degrees of susceptibility to change over time, even if no sharp distinction can be drawn between them (even if the
bedrock can be eroded by the water currents). None of them have
the timeless certainty of a priori logical truths. The beliefs according to which we act are not based upon logical tautologies. Rather, our
actions are grounded on empirical propositions, some of which are
analogous to the river bed and act as tacit background assumptions
that lend more derivative propositions the context that allows them
to be meaningful – as the hidden river bed shapes the visible flow of
the water.53
“Earth is older than 50 years” is such a proposition, whereas
“Earth is 4.5 (rather than 4.8) billion years old” is not. The latter of these two is always open to reevaluation based on new scientific
evidence, while the former is assumed by the very activity of
collecting and assessing such evidence. The former is not a logical y
certain truth, but if it were false it would mean something like our
world is a computer simulation that was just started up and all of
49 Ibid., 213, 167, 308, 401.
50 Ibid., 300.
51 Ibid., 341.
52 Ibid., 96-99.
53 Ibid., 151, 309.
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our ‘memories’ are programmed and so forth, in which case no
empirical ‘evidence’ that we amass would tell us anything about what
the world (outside the simulation) is real y like. Our whole “system of evidence” would have to be called into question. That the Earth
is older than 50 years is tacitly assumed by the fact that either I am over 50 years old or my parents (or their parents) are. To question
such operating assumptions as “Earth is older than 50 years” is to be
involved in viciously “going around in a circle.”54
There is some evidence to suggest that Wittgenstein identified
the fundamental hinge proposition as the fact of our being human, and that this is even more fundamental than “Earth is older than
50 years”, the latter deriving its certainty from the fact that a
human being has forbearers.55 There are a handful of passages in
Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein makes reference to a singular human “form of life” or “common behavior of mankind”
that acts as our most fundamental “system of reference”. It does not