by Iris Murdoch
The other sense in which (in the Tractatus) I am my world, or live or experience my world, is the moral sense. Here I become an artist, or a mystic, ethics and aesthetics being one, looking at and accepting the world as a whole, all the facts. Value lies ineffably outside this limited whole. ‘So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)’ (Tractatus 6. 421, trans. Pears and McGuinness.) Wittgenstein does not, philosophically, discuss art though he makes a number of remarks about it, and like Plato he uses it as an image. Value does not alter, or in that sense enter, the world of facts, in the way in which Kant’s duty or Categorical Imperative does mysteriously enter from the outside, illuminating particular situations and enabling us to act freely. ‘Value’ in the Tractatus, or the moral subject, of whom we cannot speak (6. 423), resides rather in an attitude or style in one’s acceptance of all the facts. This morality is stoical rather than Kantian. The distinction between fact and value, the protective segregation of value from the world, is seen by Wittgenstein as a form of silent stoical understanding and way of life. ‘I am either happy or unhappy, good and evil do not exist.’ The end of the Tractatus, where these views about the moral subject are expressed, has often been treated as an arcane idiosyncratic tailpiece, lacking the philosophical interest of the longer earlier section. But the importance which Wittgenstein attached to it is shown by a letter written in 1919 to Ludwig Ficker (see Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir):
‘The book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write then was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the only rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing I have managed in my book to put everything firmly in place by being silent about it. And for that reason, unless I am very much mistaken, the book will say a great deal that you yourself want to say. Only perhaps you won’t see that it is said in the book. For now, I would recommend you to read the preface and the conclusion, because they contain the most direct expression of the point of the book.’
I also quote here (from Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, p. 68).
‘To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics — whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given — it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St Augustine knew that already when he said: ‘What, you swine you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!’
The reference to Heidegger concerns Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) published 1927, the reference to Moore is to his book Principia Ethica, the St Augustine reference is said to paraphrase Confessions 1 iv. Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt. (God is addressed.) ‘And woe to those who are silent about You [do not praise You], since the ones who chatter say nothing!’
Wittgenstein has nothing to say in the Tractatus about a transcendent reality. Ethics cannot be expressed in words. ‘Ethics is transcendental.’ (6. 421.) It is at the border of experience. Here the ‘fit’, as one might put it, is perfect. There is no suggestive gleam from beyond, or crack through which one might peer, or any sense in talking about one. We enact morality, it looks after itself. Moreover:
‘The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem ... There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science – i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.’
(6. 521, 6. 522, 6. 53; trans. Pears and McGuinness)
The ‘propositions of natural science’ means ordinary demonstrable factual statements. Wittgenstein says in the Notebooks (1.6.15) that his philosophy is entirely connected with whether there is an a priori order in the world. Also, ‘my work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world’ (2.8.16). The letter to Ficker suggests that the ‘setting in order’, or segregation (or magical setting apart) of the factual world has as its objective a clarification or purification of the function of morality. This too reminds us of Kant. The two ‘godheads’ are the world of fact which must be realistically, bravely, accepted, and the moral subject who is to accept it. Our ‘will’ can change the limits of the world but not the facts. (It can only change the total aspect, not the parts within the totality.) The world must wax or wane as a whole, according to our general attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance. (Tractatus 6. 43.) The morality recommended in the last part of the Tractatus is for all its coldness not without an intensity which might be called religious, or aesthetic. This would be a place from which to look at the relation between these two concepts. The much quoted ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’ (6. 44) is followed by ‘The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.’ We experience or express value more purely (indeed in the only possible way according to the Tractatus) if we are able to look at the world in a detached manner from the outside, as if it were a work of art. Facts are what can be expressed in plain non-evaluative language. There is no place for any idea of ‘moral facts’, or for the development of a ‘moral vocabulary’. Such a view is certainly not just a period piece; it may be seen as prophetic, a morality for an age when space travel and physics make us conscious of the world, even of the universe, as a single entity, and when intimations of determinism and fears of cosmic disaster make ordinary moral distinctions (ordinary ‘good and evil’ or detailed talks about morality) seem unimportant. A cool attitude (‘the propositions of natural science’ (Tractatus 6. 53) might seem appropriate here, a preserved ability at least to ascertain the facts, the silent correlate of which would be an (unnamed) stoicism which eschewed despair. From this position the only possible additional morality might be one not envisaged by Wittgenstein: a scientifically informed global utilitarianism. The Tractatus may in general be regarded as an extreme and pure case, or by some as a reductio ad absurdum, of the idea that fact and value must not be allowed to contaminate each other. The imagery involved is very strong and, in a Kantian view of it, might appear traditional. Wittgenstein’s later book, the Philosophical Investigations, deliberately denies us any dominating pictures. Wittgenstein said of this book that it was ‘only an album’, portraying a landscape continually sket
ched from different points of view. The Tractatus is more like a definitive metaphysical handbook, with its numerous visual metaphors: logical space, the limited whole, inside and outside, looking in a certain light (sub specie aeterni). We might here conjure up something like a picture by Blake, with the factual world spinning as a sort of glittering steel ball and the spirit of value silently circling around it. Or we may see, in a reversal of the Platonic image, the limited factual whole together with encircling value appearing like an eclipse of the sun, with the dark object in the middle and the light round the edges. There is no light in the world: what obscures it is the whole of the world.
Wittgenstein’s relationship with Schopenhauer ‘shows’ in his distress or uncertainty about the concept of will in the 1914 – 1916 Notebooks, where he appears at moments as a reluctant prisoner of that philosopher’s thoughts. I shall discuss Schopenhauer at more length shortly, but will give a very brief account of his views here. Schopenhauer pictures the fundamental reality and basis of our world as a ruthless powerful cosmic force, the Will to Live, and the world as we know and experience it as a causally determined construct of phenomena brought about by (us) subjects through our perceptions, that is objectified ideas of the Will. The Will to Live, to exist, takes care of continuation of species and general ordering of entities. At the human level it is manifest as the natural egoism of the individual, each for himself, resulting in a scene of perpetual misery and strife. The world of ideas (objectifications of the Will) is in itself neither good nor bad. The horrors of the human scene result from the selfish wills of individuals as manifestations of the Will to Live. Other individuals, animals, plants, and the whole of our perceived phenomena are also suffering under the sovereignty of the Will. (Schopenhauer quotes St Paul, Romans 8. 22, ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together’.) In our world there may be some slight alleviation, or degrees of egoism, through experience of art, or in the form of instinctive compassion. Exceptional individuals may achieve complete escape from pain and evil by a total denial of the Will. This ‘dying to the world’ is, according to Schopenhauer, a mystical spiritual condition which cannot be described. Schopenhauer’s interest in Hindu and Buddhist mysticism may well have touched the young Wittgenstein, prompting for instance his attachment to Rabindranath Tagore, as well as his concept of ‘the mystical’ in Tractatus and Notebooks.
Wittgenstein was (evidently) attracted, as many other less philosophical persons were, by the outrageous simplicity of Schopenhauer’s picture. The structure of objectified ideas is simply there, not in itself good or bad, an objectification of the Will which as a cosmic force is both ruthless and blameless (like a waterfall or earthquake). Human wills, willed by the Will to Live, are however, in their existing context, necessarily selfish, an inevitable cause of suffering and unhappiness. The facts, ideas, world is entirely separate from selfish human will and unchanged by it. Humans cannot enforce their will upon the world. Schopenhauer postulates a superhuman cosmic will, Wittgenstein simply speaks of an alien will. While following Schopenhauer, he ‘demythologises’ the picture. Since he (Wittgenstein) cannot change this alien will (how the world is) his relation to it must be that of an attitude. Can I not make myself entirely independent of it, and so be master of it, by renouncing any influence upon happenings, that is by denying the will altogether? ‘How can a man be happy at all, since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? Through a life of knowledge ... The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world.’ Total denial of the Will is best; a realistic stoicism may be next best. Denial of the Will, with the disappearance of the problem of life, is the mystical. This is a state which we cannot conceptualise, of which we cannot speak. Wittgenstein’s ‘denial’ is apparently offered as an accessible stoicism. Schopenhauer is more pessimistic, offering little hope of human happiness. The mystical stage is only reached by extreme asceticism. However he allows some escape by contemplation of art. Wittgenstein mentions happiness (Notebooks): ‘the happy life is good’, and ‘the end of art is the beautiful, and the beautiful is what makes happy’. There is also ‘living in the present’ and stoical ‘agreement with the world’ which is ‘What “being happy” means’. (See Notebooks 11.6.16 onward.) Wittgenstein entirely agrees with, and adopts, Schopenhauer’s rejection of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (Tractatus 6. 42.2.); but although both regard morality as an attitude (since the world cannot be altered) Schopenhauer has quite a lot to say about morality (especially about compassion and justice) whereas Wittgenstein suggests his views by his silence. There is in Schopenhauer a shadowy picture of a spiritual pilgrimage. Both postulate a world of facts (or entities) independent of human will, but neither explains ‘will’ sufficiently to make clear why this world must be assumed. The segregation of the factual world allows in both cases a stoical morality which verges toward mysticism. What Wittgenstein indicates by a silent nod, is stated by Schopenhauer as a distinction of phenomenal and noumenal deriving from Kant. Schopenhauer accounts for our helplessness by a theory of determinism. Wittgenstein simply decrees it and wisely does not tangle with determinism. He equally decreed the machinery of the larger logical part of the Tractatus; his segregation of morality also serves the purpose of keeping the world clean for the propositional calculus. Schopenhauer does not explain how the Will relates to ideas, or ideas to particulars. His metaphysical substructure is kept clear of value while at the same time establishing value’s place. Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein is in the field of morality, appearing in the last section of Notebooks and of Tractatus. Later Wittgenstein did not philosophise about morals.
Wittgenstein’s (in the Tractatus) limited whole which is the integrated world of fact, language and experience, separates the area of valueless contingency, where everything is as it is and happens as it does happen, from the thereby purified ineffable activity of value. The world can then become, from a moral point of view, with an acceptance of all the facts, an object of contemplation: an idea which would have appalled Kant. This stoical contemplation is true happiness, beyond tainted and illusory ideas of good and evil, fearless of death. We may profitably compare and contrast this strong imagery with that conjured up by Kant’s moral philosophy, which also involves a strict separation of fact and value. Here (Kant) the self-contained world of necessity (causally determined contingency) might be thought of as blocking, at any rate rendering unclear, the light which comes from a distant, thereby invisible, God, or spiritual principle better called Freedom and Reason, yet also showing up this spiritual light by contrast. But of course in Kant’s picture, value (as practical Reason) does all the time enter the alien world as a kind of laser beam and can be enacted as duty and spoken of in rational discourse about moral maxims in a way which is very familiar to us, and which indeed provides us with a dominant image of spiritual reality. A laser beam: very clear, narrow, strong, coming from an unseen source, illuminating a point in a world which is otherwise valueless. This can be a religious or non-religious picture according to whether the will is seen as a vehicle of a higher power or itself the source. The contingent particularity of the world is hallowed, one might say, by becoming incarnate in moral maxims, in moral laws, in principles of action. Insights interact with rules. We then see a (problematic) part of our world clearly from a moral point of view. The laser beam image needs some qualification however. Kant’s maxims (rules), as dictates of Reason, are universal, applying to all rational beings in similar situations. In the Grundlegung Kant seems to imply that such rules are also of great generality. (Be benevolent, do not lie.) This may be said to reflect a certain kind of (perfectionist, unified, simplified) moral society. One could agree that ‘do not lie’ casts its light upon the whole world and must always be kept in mind. But many duties arise in particular complex situations, for instance where rational maxims conflict, and where we have to use our reason to create more particular (fitting this situation) moral rulings for ourselves. This is the form of a ubiquit
ous human problem. Lying is wrong. Yet: when is it right to lie? Benevolence is good, but when is it a moral mistake? (Etc. etc. etc.) Schopenhauer discusses this matter, disagreeing with Kant. (I come to this later.) In any case, this dilemma (put in Kantian language, how particular can a universal rule be?) does not affect the validity of Kant’s excellent dictum that ‘we are not gentleman volunteers, but conscripts, in the army of the moral law’. Our fundamental recognition, in all our various adventures in the contingent world, of the difference between good and evil is Kant’s starting point: a self-evident one he would say. How Reason (moral value) alters the course of the (causally determined) realm of fact is not clarified and perhaps cannot be. We recognise this picture of our dual nature, and we experience the influence of Respect for the Moral Law, especially when it contradicts our desires. Wittgenstein does not speak of moral rules or discuss freedom or cause. His ‘limited whole’ world is everywhere equally and relentlessly contingent and value-free. Good or bad willing cannot alter the facts, but only the ‘limits’ (or one might venture the image ‘colour’) of the whole world, which waxes and wanes as a whole. A moral attitude is to be taken as a totality. ‘The world of the happy is unlike the world of the unhappy.’ We are subject to fate; God (one of Wittgenstein’s two ‘godheads’) is to be seen as fate, as amor fati. We must accept ‘all the facts’, the world is not altered by morality, but the whole of it is (as one might say) bathed in a certain light. In the Vermischte Bemerkungen, Culture and Value (p. 78), Wittgenstein says, “‘Le style c’est l’homme, le style c’est l’homme même”. The first expression has cheap epigrammatic brevity. The second, correct version opens up quite a different perspective. It says that a man’s style is a picture of himself.’ (Of the whole man, and his whole world.) To speak of the ‘waxing and waning’ in terms of general moral ‘style’ is to emphasise a contrast with Kant. It may be said that surely in (moral, spiritual) ‘conversion’ a man’s whole life (world) alters. Another remark in Culture and Value (p. 53): ‘I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)’ This is an inspiring dictum, but how does this come about? A general ‘conversion’ does not, any more than a general ‘style’, solve detailed unpredictable problems of duty, to which we must have the humility to realise that we are subject. We need a ‘moral vocabulary’, a detailed value terminology, morally loaded words. (Not a requirement of Wittgenstein.) Important moral partings of the ways are implied in the complex relations between these concepts. Wittgenstein gives no status to the idea of duty, he follows Schopenhauer who regarded ‘duty’ as an archaic magi-co-theological idea derived from the Ten Commandments and connected with rewards and punishments. Schopenhauer: ‘In the conception of ought there lies always and essentially the reference to threatened punishment or promised reward.’ (‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy’, The World as Will and Idea, henceforth styled WWI, Haldane and Kemp translation. See also The Basis of Morality II 4.) This is echoed by Wittgenstein at Tractatus 6. 422. Wittgenstein does not use the vocabulary of noumenal and phenomenal, but what it names is present, and the relation of value to the ‘ordinary world’ is also mysterious. Value is essentially ineffable since significant discourse is tied to fact. It cannot alter facts but its operation is thereby extremely pure. Moral philosophy and theology too are bound to be ineffable, an attempt to say what cannot be said but can only be, in the whole living of life, shown. ‘Ethics is transcendental’ (Tractatus 6. 421). Indeed the whole of the Tractatus is really nonsense (6. 54), since if we attempt to limit the conditions of experience from inside we cannot properly talk about what is outside. Can we not see a little beyond those transcendental barriers, do we not have intimations, gleams of light, glimpses of another scene? The Tractatus is a sustained attempt to put a final end to such talk, and to do so (as he explained in the letter to Ficker), in the interests of morality. We must, at least, talk as little as possible and then, as Wittgenstein tells us at the end of the book, ‘throw away the ladder’. Kierkegaard would have appreciated that image.