Wittgenstein’s Conception of Ethics:
Absolute Value and the Ineffable
Hans Julius Schneider, Potsdam
Abstract:Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of language is shown to be inspired by the idea of a notation, i.e. by the idea of a symbol system that is different from pictures as well as from natural languages (discursive symbol systems). Seeing this allows us to reject the claim that for the sole reason that ethical statements do not represent ‘states of affairs’ in the Tractatus sense (they are not notations of constellations of objects) they must (since they are not tautologies either) be nonsense. When we stop modelling language as a kind of notation and stop to think of a notation as the only means of formulating cognitive statements, it becomes conceivable that ethics (in Wittgenstein’s cognitive sense) might be possible.
So in what sense can ethical articulations convey something true and important, as Wittgenstein himself suggests at the beginning of his Lecture on Ethics? He refers to his own experiences of ‘absolute value’: Those experiences seem to be points at which ethical language touches reality. Is this a supernatural, absolute reality? Wittgenstein arrives at a paradox. He makes his well known negative claim: Since the experiences he is alluding to cannot be articulated in a notational system for states of affairs, the sentences trying to capture the experience must either be nonsense, or on the way of formulating them their ethical character must have been lost; the result is not saying what it was meant to say. My thesis now is: This paradox vanishes as soon as we give up the idea that natural languages work like notations.
The dependence of the paradox on the notational picture of language can also be seen when we consider a claim that an imagined interlocutor raises against Wittgenstein’s position, namely that ethical language should be understood as consisting of similes. To this Wittgenstein objects that, if they were similes, it must be possible to formulate corresponding literal expressions. If we would do so, he goes on to argue, these expressions would specify the states of affairs the original sentences were ‘really’ speaking about, albeit indirectly. But by their very doing so (by describing states of affairs) they would cease to be ethical statements. Therefore, if ethical language would be similes, the transformation of its sentences into literal sentences would show that they are not ethical sentences but normal sentences about matters of fact. If such transformations are not possible, this shows that the original sentences have to be classified as nonsense.
However, on the basis of our preceding discussion we can see that Wittgenstein’s claim that such a transformation must always be possible for meaningful sentences depends on the premise that the language concerned is a notational system. Only then there must always be a ‘something’ that the notation is a notation of. But we have reasons to give up this premise. Admitting that our natural languages (and therefore the language of ethics) is not notational, does not leave us with the alternative of either regarding the relevant sentences as nonsense or as admitting that they do not have the ethical character we had originally ascribed to them. So is (and in what sense is) ethics speaking in a non-notational language about an absolute realm?
For a positive alternative to the notational model we look at Wittgenstein’s later work on the meaning of expressions for the so called ‘inner’. This makes sense because his starting point to explain what he means by ‘ethics’ was a reference to his personal experience. It is helpful to start not with existential experiences about the whole of a life, but with ‘smaller’ and simpler cases. About pain, for example, Wittgenstein says that “it is not a something, but not a nothing either” (Philosophical Investigations § 304). So in this case we have no ‘state of affairs’ in the early Wittgenstein’s naturalistic sense, not a ‘something’ to be captured by a notation, but also we do not have a case of empty nonsense, we have ‘not a nothing either’. In this sense Wittgenstein’s later so called ‘Philosophy of Psychology’ provides at least the seeds of a dissolution of the paradox he had left unresolved in his Lecture on Ethics. What is necessary here is to build a bridge between his general observations about the language of the ‘inner’ (as a possible paradigm for a non-notational language) and the topic of ethics.
To see more clearly how this could be achieved, we look back to the topic of ‘articulating an experience’: Is such an articulation a description of a ‘something’ (as he had thought in the Lecture), or can it be meaningful (‘not a nothing’) without being related to a ‘state of affairs’ in the Tractatus sense? Wittgenstein’s own answer in his later philosophy is that it is a mistake to treat articulations of an experience of the kind considered as if they were descriptions of ‘states of affairs’. Instead they are moves in ongoing social exchanges the respective meanings of which are negotiated. So it is not the case that the only function of language is to describe or represent states of affairs. But if first person utterances ‘about the inner’ are not descriptions, one would suppose that talk about an experience of absolute value (decisive for Wittgenstein for the realm of ethics in his sense) is not either. What remains to be explained is how articulations of experience (in the sense taken by Wittgenstein to be characteristic of ethics) allow a classification as more or less ‘adequate’ (if not ‘true’ in the strict sense). The clue here seems to be a negotiated truthfulness in the first person articulations of totalising experiences. It is this possibility, I think, that is responsible for our feeling that there is a cognitive side of ethics.
I will conclude with a very short remark about the ineffability claim: Is there not indeed a limit to what language can do in the field of ethics so understood?