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Abstract
This paper considers Wittgensteins contribution to ethics. While he wrote little on the topic I argue that all of his philosophy had an ethical purpose. Wittgenstein saw clarity as valuable in itself and in both the Tractatus, his Lecture on Ethics and in the later work he demonstrated a method whereby we might rid ourselves of the conceptual confusions to which our language makes us subject. In this I consider the Tractatus as a programme of therapy that asks us to participate in its elucidations and recognize them as nonsense before discarding them and make the claim that this is the ethical sense of the text. In the later work, I argue, Wittgenstein continues with this programme of therapy and shows that the ethical is an inseparable part of our lives which cannot be considered in isolation. The ethical is not a language game but rather a condition of our lives.

Introduction

In this paper I shall consider the view that Wittgenstein did not concern himself with ethics. In order to do this I shall be looking at the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the Lecture on Ethics and the later work notably the Philosophical Investigations and Culture and Value. It has been a commonly held view that "Wittgenstein has nothing to do with ethics." (Gleeson, 2002, p. 225) It is certainly true that this important and influential philosopher seems to have had relatively little to say on the subject in either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations. This apparent lack of interest is contradicted by Wittgensteins claim that the Tractatus has an ethical point. Some writers ( Hacker for example) think that Wittgenstein did not properly understand the importance of his own works when he made this claim. For those who take Wittgenstein seriously when he claims that there is an ethical point to the Tractatus there are several possible readings. I shall consider the reading offered by the positivists (that all ethical statements are propositionally meaningless) before considering what was, until the end of the twentieth century, the standard reading, that Wittgenstein was attempting in the Tractatus to whistle what cannot be said. I will also outline my preferred (resolute) reading of the Tractatus influenced by Cora Diamond and James Conant which takes Wittgenstein at his word when he says that the elucidations of the Tractatus are to be thrown away as 'nonsense' when we have ascended them like the rungs of a ladder which we can discard when we have climbed it.

On the later work I shall be considering readings which take the view that Wittgenstein radically changed his view between the publication of the Tractatus and his return to Cambridge when he decided there was still useful work to be done in philosophy. I will also look at the view that there is significant continuity between the early and late Wittgenstein, a view which I have a great deal of sympathy. I see in both the early and late work a resistance to theory and

doctrine and a view that ethics is not restricted to the use of ostensibly ethical vocabulary.

As with the readings of the Tractatus that I consider there are readers who believe that they can apply Wittgenstein's method to the area of moral philosophy which he does not address. I shall particularly consider Paul Johnston's work in this respect. I shall be considering the reasons for Wittgenstein's apparent silence on ethics in his later work which I feel is connected with his view that ethics is not a discrete subject area. I shall further argue that those philosophers who attempt to derive metaethical theories from Wittgensteins work have missed an essential point, that there can be no criticism of ethical language as it were from outside. I shall also hope to show that his stance against theory is an ethical one. While I share Duncan Richters view that truly Wittgensteinian moral philosophy is a contradiction in terms it is also my view that, since Wittgenstein sees clarity as valuable in itself, all philosophy which aims at this end is moral philosophy .

It would be useful to set out here what I mean by moral philosophy since the paper is profoundly concerned with this matter. In his Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein mentions G.E. Moore's explanation of the term, "the general enquiry into what is good" (G.E. Moore quoted by Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 4), although he expands it to include "the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 4) He also offers definitions such as what is valuable, really important, the right way of life, the meaning of life and what makes life worth living. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 5) So ethics is an investigation into what is of value although as Wittgenstein makes clear in the Lecture on Ethics he means valuable in an absolute not a relative sense, the sense in which X is the right course of action not to achieve any aim but right whatever ones aim. So moral philosophy must investigate absolute value, this is the sense in which I shall use moral philosophy in this paper although I will have to make distinction between this term and two other related terms. I shall be using the term metaethics to mean that branch of ethics which investigates and theorises about what we mean by ethical terms and ethical statements. Normative ethics is the term I shall use to describe that branch of ethics which sets out ethical theories, i.e. those theories which set out moral rules for action and which may claim to be based on moral philosophy i.e. accounts of absolute value.

It is important to resist the temptation to attempt to say what Wittgenstein held back from saying. This temptation is a feature of much that is written about

Wittgensteinian ethics i.e. an acknowledgement that "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974, p. 74) followed by an attempt to say what Wittgenstein would have said if only he could have. I shall be taking the view that Wittgensteins silence is, itself, an ethical act and shall try to avoid the temptation as much as possible. It is my view that

Wittgenstein said what he thought could usefully be said and no more.

Chapter 1: "The point of the book is ethical"

It is sometimes held, even by those who have read Wittgenstein's work very thoroughly, that Wittgenstein has nothing to do with ethics. (Gleeson, 2002, p. 225) It is surprising that such an important philosopher wrote so little that we can immediately recognize as moral philosophy but in this paper I shall be arguing that Wittgenstein, early and late, is profoundly concerned with moral philosophy insofar as he believes it can be done. For Wittgenstein's not to be interested in moral philosophy would have been particularly remarkable in the light of his own personal deeply held, if rather unconventional, moral principles. He gave away his fortune to teach in village schools, lived a life of almost monkish austerity and seemed to shun trivial pleasures and even his own physical safety, volunteering for front line service in World War 1. (Monk, 1991) He also acknowledged the influence of the fairly repugnant ideas of Weininger and was apparently keener on the existence of a society for war and slavery than one for peace and Freedom'? (Monk, 1991, p. 221) His moral ideas are clearly both original and rather perplexing.

Wittgenstein in a letter to von Ficker written while he searched for a publisher for the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus claimed that the sense of the book is an ethical one. (Monk, 1991, p. 171) This assertion is treated with a degree of scepticism by some readers who feel that Wittgenstein did not properly understand his own work. Peter Hacker says "I do not doubt his sincerity, but I

am inclined to question his judgement about his achievement. The main achievement of the Tractatus consists in its insights into the nature of logic and its criticisms of Frege and Russell" (Quoted by Conant, 2005, p. 41) Hacker's view is certainly an understandable one, the Tractatus seems very far from a treatise on ethics in any recognisable sense. It is a book which presents the reader with a number of challenges, framed as it is by the curious disclaimers to be found at either end of the text. We read that the "propositions serve as elucidations in the following way; anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps- to climb up beyond them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it ) (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974, 6.54) and I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And, if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when the problems are solved." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 Preface) These pronouncements pull the rug from under our feet. We are not sure how to take either the text or the writer who undercuts his own words in this manner. To take Wittgenstein at his word we must believe that in the Tractatus he believes that he has solved the problems of philosophy by writing nonsense and that thus solving these problems achieves nothing, or very little. The confusion thus created may have had the consequence that some of Wittgenstein's methodological insights have been neglected in favour of the less confusing elements such as his refutation of the private language argument. As

Hans Sluga points out some readers have argued that it is best to ignore Wittgensteins general remarks about philosophy and to concentrate on his discussion of concrete philosophical issues. They have said that when one does so it may be possible to discover a coherent and important series of arguments hidden in the apparently scattered series of remarks. (Sluga, 1996, p. 29) However, Cora Diamond takes the view that the ethical point made by the Tractatus is not derived from its content but rather is a function of the ethical purpose to which its elucidations must be put by its readers and this is a view which I shall look at in chapter 4. l will consider how Wittgenstein could have thought that philosophical problems might be solved by nonsense, how the Tractatus which seems to be a work of analytic logic might, in fact, be a work with an ethical point and whether the problems the Tractatus seems to have solved are really as trivial as the author seems to claim.

Chapter 2 Sense and Nonsense in the Tractatus

In this section I shall begin to look at the ways that the Tractatus can be read. I shall outline how readers from Russell, Carnap and Ayer to contemporary thinkers such as Hacker have understood the Tractatus. These interpretations are variants of what I shall call the standard reading.

In the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by the standard reading tells we have a work presenting a theory of meaning created by a logician increasingly transfixed by mysticism. Russell described Wittgenstein in a letter to Ottoline MorelI, saying He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking." (Monk, 1991, p. 182) Here we see the two sides that readers of Wittgenstein have found so fascinating and so difficult to comprehend. He is a philosopher whose work is valued by those who see in him the analytic philosophical tradition of Frege, Russell and even Carnap and Ayer and yet he is avowedly in opposition to the influence of science on our civilization and is considered by associates like O.K. Bouwsma as the nearest to a prophet I have ever known. (Quoted in Sluga, 1996, p. 19) In the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus Wittgenstein's early work on logic meets with the devotee of Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief that had emerged during World War One and the result is, by this reading, a rather confused work which owes as much to Kierkegaard as to Russell. In order to understand this view, as we must

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before we attempt to evaluate it, I shall look at it in some detail.

By the standard reading then the Tractatus presents the picture theory of language which views language and thought as identical, A thought is a proposition with sense." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974, 4) Wittgenstein says that a proposition is a picture of reality (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.01) and a thought is a proposition with sense. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.) By this

account, then, propositions and thus language pictures reality, A name means an object. The object is its meaning." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 1974 3.203) This is not to say, however, that language is unproblematic to us; it does not straightforwardly represent the actual relationships that exist in the world. In fact we are told that language disguises thought. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.002) It is possible for us, however, to discern these relationships by an analysis of the configuration of the propositional elements. Wittgenstein tells us The configurations of objects in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4) Thus the picture theory holds that names name objects and

configurations of names depict possible configurations of objects. In this way language pictures reality. It is, perhaps, helpful to consider the origin of this idea of how language is said to picture reality. Wittgenstein recounted to G.H. von Wright that while serving as a soldier in the First World War he read a magazine

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report of a court case in which models of vehicles were used to demonstrate the events which led to a car accident. The models presented to the court corresponded, in their relationships, to the vehicles and it was this correspondence that allowed them to represent the vehicles to the court. (Monk, 1991, p. 118) As Wittgenstein says "Logical pictures can depict the world. A picture has logico pictorial form in common with what it depicts. A picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non existence of states of affairs. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 2.201)

Wittgenstein seems to be presenting us with a theory to explain how language relates to reality. Whether this is, in actual fact, his intention I will consider in chapter 5 especially given the objection to doctrine that he has already expressed in the Tractatus. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.112 Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.) This reading suggests that Wittgenstein goes on to explain the difference between true and false propositions, The picture agrees with reality or not; it is right or wrong, true or false. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 2.21) Of course some utterances fail to picture reality in either true or false ways and these pseudo propositions are meaningless. By this account elementary propositions depict possible states of affairs. All units of language, that is to say the totality of propositions, serve either as elementary propositions or as a truth functions of elementary propositions. The purpose of language and thus the purpose of thought is to make a correct representation of states of affairs in the world. We have here, it seems, been offered a system by

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which to separate propositions from language which fails to be meaningful. This reading is outlined by Hans Sluga who writes, "The assertions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Wittgenstein's account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most immediate interest to philosophers concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Wittgenstein himself the most important part of the book lay in the negative conclusions about philosophy which he reached at the end of the text. He argued there, in particular, that all sentences which are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth functional composites are strictly speaking meaningless. Among these are included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics." (Sluga, 1996, p. 10)

We can by using this method, then, map the units of language and a draw a limit of thought (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 2.201) If a sample of discourse is a combination of names for objects and asserts the existence of a particular state of affairs then it is meaningful (although it may, of course, be false) and it expresses a thought. If it is not such a statement then it fails to express a thought; it is nonsense. It is not a proposition with sense. By the standard reading that I am outlining here Wittgenstein believed, at this stage of his philosophical career, that he had found a way to eliminate the nonsensical pseudo-propositions that were the source of such philosophical confusion. He had devised a theory of meaning and by this theory we can sort genuine thought

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from nonsense and, in this way, identify the sorts of philosophical problems which are meaning-less and thus simply remove the problem. He says in 4.003 "Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.003)

In the next section I shall explore one possible ethical theory that can be derived from Wittgenstein's work in the Tractatus.

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Chapter 3 "It cannot be significantly asserted that there is a non-empirical world of value." (Ayer A. , 1952, p.
31) In order to discern the ethical point of the Tractatus it is necessary to consider a number of interpretations of the standard reading outlined in Chapter 1. In this section I shall outline a positivist reading of the Tractatus before looking, in the next chapter, at what I shall call the ineffability reading in opposition to this positivist reading.

The positivist reading rejects as nonsense language which fails to represent actual and possible states of affairs. Sense in this reading is limited to the contingent.1 It is impossible to talk meaningfully about the structures within which the conditional exists. Language which does not serve to represent states of affairs in the ways outlined in Chapter 2, is devoid of meaning. Language cannot communicate anything which is a necessary truth. Wittgenstein says ''what expresses itself in language we cannot express by means of language." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.121) This account of meaningfulness excludes both logic and ethics and also most of the propositions in which the Tractatus itself is expressed.

Wittgenstein tells us that his project allows only these statements of contingent
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Although Ayer includes meaningful propositions the analytic although they are considered tautologies 15

facts to be meaningful saying whatever we can describe can be other than it is, (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 5.632) and thus the necessary and the transcendent are withdrawn from discussion. That this version of meaningfulness which removes necessary and a priori truths from the purview of philosophy is unlikely to satisfy those who seek general and absolute truths in philosophy and who see this work of sorting sense from nonsense as a kind of "idle tea table amusement" (Russell, 1959, p. 217)is acknowledged by Wittgenstein. He insists however that The only correct method in philosophy would really be the following, to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science 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. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person- he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy- this method would be the only strictly correct one." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.5) The standard reading suggests that Wittgenstein was prepared to depart from strict correctness in the Tractatus in order to explain his theory of meaning although AJ Ayer criticises the view that meaningless statements can communicate sense, saying "It cannot be the case both that his assertions are true and that they are devoid of sense. (Ayer A. J., 1985, p. 30) Ayer is taking a positivist view here, asserting that nonsense is nonsense. This positivist reading

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is summarised by Barrett who tells us that thinkers of a logical positivist tendency took Wittgenstein to mean that expressions of value and metaphysics are nonsensical in the ordinary sense of the term. It was for that reason that they welcomed the Tractatus so warmly and took Wittgenstein to be one of their own." (Barrett, 1991, p. 23)If we accept this positivist reading we can take what Wittgenstein says about sense and nonsense at his word and use it to develop a theory of language which we can use to limit what can be regarded as meaningful and thus to develop a metaethical view of the meaning of ethical language. This is an endeavour which we can see in AJ Ayers account of ethics in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer sees his work in a continuum with "the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume." (Ayer A. , 1952, p. 31) He says that since ethical language fails the verification principle it cannot be literally meaningful. He develops this view to mean that such language merely names behaviour and expresses an emotional response to the behaviour. "If I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money,'' I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, "you stole that money," in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks.' (Ayer A. , 1952, p. 107) This emotivist view of ethical language faces a number of commonly advanced objections and I intend to briefly consider some of these before attempting to see if the positivist reading of the Tractatus is sound and then looking at alternate readings.

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Emotivism is often criticised because it arises from the verification principle which, as is triumphantly pointed out, does not pass its own test. The verification principle, that literally significant statements are either analytical or have empirical evidence that is relevant to their establishment, is neither empirically verifiable nor is it analytic. For this reason, it is argued, it is meaningless and cannot be used to demonstrate anything. In response to this objection we can offer the counter argument that the verification principle is not intended as a statement of fact but rather as a method, a technique which we can employ to identify nonsense just as a mariner would use a sounding tape to check water depth. The tape is not true or false, it is a tool for a particular purpose.

Emotivism faces another, perhaps more serious, challenge in that if my moral judgments are merely an expression of my feelings on an issue rather than a statement of either some natural fact as the utilitarian would have it or some non natural fact as G E Moore proposes, then moral disagreements are impossible and ethical debate, which seems so important to us, is meaningless. Since my moral approval or disapproval does not depend on any facts my efforts to persuade you to share my moral viewpoint (once we have established the facts of the matter) would be merely an attempt to cajole or bully you into submission. To illustrate two people might have a moral disagreement about an issue such as world debt. Ayer takes the view that if one of them is perhaps ill informed about the facts of the case (perhaps they think that to cancel third world debt would bankrupt the developed world) the interlocutor might supply facts which show

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that this is not the case. However, once the facts have been shared and agreed, if the disagreement persists the disputants would simply resort to propaganda to try to make the other feel foolish or cruel about their view point. 2 While this view of moral debate might make us feel uncomfortable this seems to me no reason to me to hold emotivism false. There is, however, a stronger objection to this

metaethical theory that I will outline later in this paper when I consider a related metaethical theory, prescriptivism. It can also be claimed that the emotivist is asserting that, since no ethical fact is objective, that it is possible to assign value just as we choose. If a tyrants moral approval runs to genocide or torture while ours does not there is no absolute sense in which the tyrant is mistaken. This criticism of emotivism is, however, unsophisticated. The emotivist can respond that, while there is no logical reason that I cannot assign value just as I please, there is a factual reason that I do not. We are human beings and are by nature cooperative and collaborative. We are political animals and thus we will have developed feelings of approval and disapproval that reflect this fact about our natures. The tyrant's moral feelings are aberrant because they fail to be human. The ethical non-cognitivist might also suggest that the coherence of our moral judgments can form a basis for ethical debate and discussion. If someone expresses their disapproval of the behaviour of a neighbour in mowing their lawn on Sunday morning then the neighbour might point out that the complainant's noisy radio constitutes exactly the same type of nuisance. We can then have a
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This is an issue which I will return to when I look at Cavells objection to Stevenson in Chapter XX 19

debate about whether music and mowing are similar or significantly different and the disputants might alter their attitude to one or other of these behaviours in order to maintain the consistency of their moral judgements.

The non-cognitivist may additionally be challenged by the charge that if moral values are merely assertions of our feelings not judgements of a transcendent or natural fact that all moral judgements, being equally valid, should be accepted and tolerated. This would be an impossible and amoral way of life. We feel there must be a valid way to criticise and perhaps condemn the moral judgement of another person. If non-cognitivism entails a situation where we are forced to simply accept other, possibly repugnant, moral stances as a difference of taste, immune to censure, then it cannot be an explanation of what we mean by moral language. This position is however not the one held by most non-cognitivists. To give an example, if my moral judgement is that the practice of foot binding is wrong then I will judge it to be wrong, knowing that another judgement is possible does not mean that I am prevented from making my judgement. While we generally value tolerance in moral debate this too is an ethical judgement along with our disapproval of murder and cruelty to animals. It would be incoherent to say that we ought to be tolerant and so moral judgements cannot be made of other lifestyles or cultures since tolerance is part of that self same moral judgement. It can be seen from the account above that as a metaethical theory emotivism is perhaps not as flawed as it is sometimes portrayed. The question remains

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whether this was the ethical point that Wittgenstein was making in the Tractatus. This depends on how coherent a positivist reading of the Tractatus actually is. I will argue that while the non-cognitivist may hold to this account of what is meant by moral language it cannot possibly be described as Wittgensteinian. The positivist reading depends on the assertion that nonsense is nonsense. This reading of the text suggests that language that does not represent states of affairs that exist or might exist in the world is meaningless. No content therefore can be attached to utterances of supposed ethical statements. If the emotivist claims that such utterances are not free of content their reading collapses into the ineffability reading that I shall address in the next chapter, the view that there are categories of nonsense conveying varying degrees of meaning rather than simply nonsense. As Conant points out generally the non-cognitivist takes the view that somehow nonsense can convey content, that there is a kind of content which cannot be captured by meaningful discourse but nonetheless can be communicated by other means. (Conant, 2005, p. 57) However if the noncognitivist adopts what Conant calls the austere interpretation and classes all nonsense as simple nonsense it is hard to see how it can communicate anything at all. The austere non-cognitivist seems committed to the position that something meaningless (literally meaningless in Ayers view) can convey information such as an emotional response to a moral judgement. Perhaps my statement Footbinding was so wrong." may be equivalent to an exclamation like Oh no! Footbinding! but surely neither of these utterances are meaningless. When Ayer uses the term literally meaningless he certainly seems to be

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avoiding this austere reading. The implication is that a statement that is literally meaningless can be meaningful in some other non-literal sense.

Perhaps an austere positivist would be forced to conclude that such a statement is meaningful because of the way it is received by another person. Perhaps my exclamation would be understood by another person in the same way that they might understand a laugh or a sneer without these expressions having literal significance. This however would seem a radically limited view of meaning. If our meaning is limited to the words we utter and excludes our other non verbal language much of our meaning would be rendered insubstantial.

Can it be that the ethical sense of the Tractatus depends upon its effect on its readers in this way? If its ethical sense is dependent upon the effect that the text has upon its readers it will be difficult to assert that the purpose is achieved since the text has, it seems, no consistent effect. This problem for the positivist reading is outlined by James Conant who says how are we to avoid the conclusion that the work is, by its own ethical lights, a miserable failure? For readers of the book hardly seem to be effected by the book in any uniform way". (Conant, 2005, p. 58) The Tractatus has certainly had no consistent or easily definable ethical effect since it has clearly given rise to such divergent interpretations. Thus although the positivist reading of the Tractatus led us to a fairly coherent

metaethical theory it is one which fails to be Wittgensteinian and cannot therefore be the ethical point of the Tractatus.

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Chapter 4: Trying to whistle it.

In this chapter I shall explore the reading of the Tractatus that takes the view that Wittgenstein believed that nonsense (i.e. pseudo propositions of value) could somehow be meaningful. By this account Wittgenstein does not simply dismiss as meaningless all nonsense and he would recoil from the reading of the Tractatus adopted by Carnap and the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. He warns the reader in the preface that if we really understand him we will see how little is achieved by this identifying the nonsense in so much of what we have thought of as thought. He also warns us that if we follow him properly we will see that the propositions that he has used to explain the picture theory are nonsense. I will look at the resolute interpretation of this in chapter 5 but here I will limit my attention to that view adopted by Hacker amongst others and called the ineffability reading by James Conant. As we have seen, the positivist reading of the Tractatus collapses into a view that there are types of nonsense, meaningful nonsense and sheer nonsense. This same notion is at the heart of the ineffability reading of the Tractatus. It is easy to imagine that the mystical Wittgenstein that Russell found had emerged from World War 1 clutching his Gospels in Brief might have a mystical intent and believe that what sense cannot say can, perhaps, be shown by nonsense.

By this reading then, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein seems to suggest that there are things which our language cannot express but which are nonetheless

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important and true. This sentiment seems to foreshadow his statement at the end of the lecture on ethics "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 ... it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 12) How can such important truths be thought if we cannot speak them and if thought is to be defined as a proposition with sense? The ineffability reading finds an answer in looking to that which makes itself manifest. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 5.62) The logical form of reality cannot be expressed with propositions, cannot be said but it can be shown. Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that we can somehow gesture towards truths which cannot be expressed in language. So logical form and ethics, both conditions of the world rather than contingent facts, must be shown rather than said. This idea seems to echo what Wittgenstein says in the Notebooks Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world like logic. (Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 1961, p. 77) Thus both logic and ethics by this reading are a priori, necessary conditions of the world and cannot, therefore, be said but must make themselves manifest." As James C Edwards puts it showing is an escape hatch from the realm of nonsense." (Edwards, 1982, p. 15)

If we accept this reading then, it seems that the picture theory allows Wittgenstein to clear the decks of much of our confused and wrongheaded

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theorising, dismiss problems which are simply nonsense from our consideration but at the same time disallows discussion on issues which we have no option but to consider important. We are reluctant to dismiss ethics (and logic) as nonsense and so Wittgenstein tries to incorporate these truths with the notion of showing. The refutation of the view that the truths of logic can or need to be stated can perhaps be traced back to Wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with Russell's attempt to classify logical rules with the theory of types, the same dissatisfaction which leads him to say in the Notebooks that" logic must take care of itself. (Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 1961, p. 2)

The route through the Tractatus that we are pursuing brings us to Wittgenstein's assertion that There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.522)This mystical dimension is the realm of the ineffable truths, truths about the necessary facts of the world, not how things are in the world but that it exists. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.44) Wittgenstein's conception of the mystical here is connected with the idea of necessary truths, in this case necessary or absolute value. Wittgenstein asks for an answer to the problem of life and what the sense of the world is but these are not related to contingent facts. 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. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.52) and the

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solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.521) Of course, as we have seen, if all that can be meaningfully said are the propositions containing contingent facts, it is clear that questions that are not answered by these propositions cannot be answered by language at all, When the answer cannot be put into words neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.5) The mystical can be found, says Wittgenstein, in feeling the world as a limited whole. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.45) As Wittgenstein has pointed out the self lies outside the world of contingent facts as the limits of the world in just the way that the eye lies outside the field of vision and is the limit of the field. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 5.651) Thus the necessary self is the limit of the world and since all facts are of equal value, value is connected with the attitude of the self to the world. This explains why the world of the happy man is a different word to that of the unhappy man. We are led to the view that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is proposing a theory of meaning that allows us to sort meaningful from meaningless propositions but that in order to avoid excluding the important truths of ethics and logic Wittgenstein has to allow that these truths can be shown rather than said. This is the view held by Hacker who explains his position thus within the domain of nonsense we may distinguish overt from covert nonsense. Overt nonsense can be seen to be nonsense immediatelyBut

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most of philosophy does not obviously violate the bounds of sense. It is covert nonsense for, in a way that is not perspicuous in ordinary language to the untutored mind, it violates the principles of the logical syntax of language Nevertheless, even within the range of philosophical, covert nonsense can we distinguish between what might (somewhat confusingly) be called illuminating nonsense, and misleading nonsense. Illuminating nonsense will guide the attentive reader to apprehend what is shown by other propositions which do purport to be philosophical; moreover it will intimate, to those who grasp what is meant, its own illegitimacy. (Hacker P. , 1989, pp. 18-19) This reading seems a fairly obvious fudge. If a theory of meaning delineates something as nonsensical surely, however attached we are to a proposition we must be resolute in our delineation or abandon the theory of meaning. As Frank Ramsey said this is an absurd attempt to whistle what cannot be said." (Quoted in Edwards, 1982, p. 8) He says; Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition we have to check, and an inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must take seriously that it is nonsense and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense." (Ramsey quoted in Mellor, 1995 p261) Ramsey clearly seems to think that Wittgenstein was proposing a theory of meaning with different types of nonsense and rejects such a theory. Russell's

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introduction to the Tractatus seems to take the same view, "The totalities concerning which Mr Wittgenstein holds that it is impossible to speak logically are nevertheless thought by him to exist, and are the subject-matter of his mysticism. (Russells Preface to Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 xxii) In the next chapter I shall suggest that this is an incorrect interpretation of the text and if this is true it may explain Wittgenstein's despair at the reception of his manuscript when he wrote It is very hard not be to be understood by a single soul. (Monk, 1991, p. 164) Is there any evidence that this reading which suggests that there are truths which are ineffable, that nonsense can show us mystical truths inaccessible to language, is not what Wittgenstein intended us to gather from the Tractatus? In the next section I explore an alternative interpretation.

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Chapter 5 Not Chickening Out

Wittgenstein tells us that the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense and that they serve as the rungs of a ladder which the reader must climb and then recognise as nonsense in order to understand the work. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.54) If we are not to read Wittgenstein as

suggesting that there is something which language can only gesture towards, truth which can be conveyed only obliquely in language but are true nonetheless then how are we to take the Tractatus? Why has Wittgenstein provided us with elucidations which are nonsensical if these cannot gesture towards truth? If we take Wittgenstein seriously we will believe him when he says that we must climb up the ladder of these elucidations and then discard it. If we consider this picture carefully we will understand that we cannot reach the upper rungs of the ladder without standing firmly on the lower rungs. In other words we need to share the pictures suggested by these propositions and recognise them as nonsense before moving on to the next. Unless we share the picture, enter into it, we will not see its inadequacy. This is to say we have to actually employ nonsense of various types in order to see that it is nonsense, to see that we believed that we had correctly assigned a meaning to various signs but in fact, that we had failed to do so. As Cora Diamond says the notion of something true of reality but not sayably true is to be used only with the

30

awareness that it itself belongs to what has to be thrown away. (Diamond, Throwing Away The Ladder, 1988, p. 8) This reading takes Wittgenstein seriously when he says that the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense, does not look for ways to sort nonsense into categories and instead asks what it is that makes nonsense meaningless. The problem that we face in this endeavour is that we cannot set the limit to language by drawing a boundary since we cannot think on both side of the limit of thought. We cannot possibly describe where the limit of sense gives way to nonsense, where the thinkable becomes the unthinkable. We must test the boundary from the inside. Wittgenstein tells us that Frege says that any legitimately constructed propositions must have a sense. And I say that any possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and, if it has no sense, that can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to some of its constituents. (Even if we think we have done so.) (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 5.4733) This tells us that in Wittgensteins view nothing needs to be nonsense, any utterance can be made meaningful if assign meaning to it. Since sense resides by this account, not in the proposition but rather in the user of the proposition, the limits of meaning cannot possibly be set for all language users by the application of a theory, but must be assigned by the user once they have understood how they are ascribing meaning. We must, personally, examine our own language use to see if the language we use is nonsensical. To do this we examine our language by participating in the elucidations of the Tractatus, identifying

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nonsense in us and then seeing the elucidations as the nonsense they are. We read the Tractatus, as Conant says, resolutely. Hacker criticises this reading of the Tractatus as being less resolute than it claims. He thinks that the Tractatus contains the unresolvable paradox of meaningful nonsense and that the resolute reading (which he calls the post modernist defence) (Hacker P. , 2000) still draws a distinction between two kinds of nonsense: plain nonsense and transitional nonsense. Assuming that it is important that we come to realise that apparent sentences that we think make sense are actually nonsense, then transitional nonsense is important nonsense, unlike plain nonsense. (Hacker P. , 2000, p. 361) I do not think that Hacker has seen that nonsense is not a function or a property of a proposition but of the relationship between a language user and their own language. It is only by seeing that the propositions of the Tractatus are indeed what we are inclined to say and by examining them closely that we can see that they are nonsense. The propositions are plain nonsense and it is the recognition of the nonsense and the process of deliteralizing clarity that the reader undergoes that is the ethical point of the text. Conant points out this error saying The implicit assumption here- to be found in most of the secondary literature on the matter- is that it is an internal feature of propositions themselves (that is a feature they can be said to possess or lack independent of their occurrence in any particular context of use) which allows them to be classified as specifically ethical forms of nonsense (Conant, 2005, p. 60)

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This resolute reading of the Tractatus gives us the ability to identify nonsense in our use of language. As Wittgenstein says, ''Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 4.112) We are not to have grasped a theory but have changed our attitude to our own language and its meaning. If the Tractatus has an ethical point this activity brings us towards that ethical point. Having established the possibility of a resolute reading of the Tractatus and having shown that we need not accept the ineffability reading with its associated paradoxes and inconsistencies it is now necessary to explore in more detail how this resolute reading can make sense of Wittgenstein's claim that the Tractatus has an ethical purpose. Often when readers have sought out the ethical point of the Tractatus they have concentrated their attention on those sections which appear to address ethical issue by virtue of their employment of ethical language. This, as James Conant points out, is an error. In order to see why we need to consider what

Wittgenstein tellus us about signs and their relationships to symbols. He says says I call any part of a proposition that characterises its sense an expression (or a symbol.) (A proposition is itself an expression.) (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 19743.321) A sign however is what can be perceived of a symbol. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 3.32) This

means that a sign, a word for example, can be common to two different symbols. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 3.321)

Wittgenstein illustrates this point by showing how is can be used in three

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different ways, as copula, as a sign for identity and as an expression for existence. If a sign can represent more than one symbol how are we to know what the symbol is that the sign represents? Wittgenstein tells us that we must look to the use of the sign, to recognise a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 3.326) If, as Wittgenstein suggests, ethical statements are nonsense, then they cannot be conveying a symbol. If they are meaningless then they have no

subject matter and thus are not propositions of ethics. If we take Wittgenstein seriously it is not possible that the ethical point of the text is conveyed only by the sections which deal with ethical terms. If we are not to find the ethical point of the Tractatus in the sections traditionally considered ethical then we must look elsewhere The picture theory of language seems to suggest that language is meaningful because its symbols stand in a logical relation to the contingent facts of the world. In section 6 of the Tractatus however Wittgenstein gives a number of propositions which do not operate in the same way. Wittgenstein considers a number of such propositions, first logical propositions (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.1 The propositions of logic are tautologies.), then the propositions of mathematics (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus, 1974 6.2 Mathematics is a logical method.), those of physics (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1974 6.3431 The laws of physics, with all their logical apparatus, still speak, however indirectly, about the objects of the world.), and then ethical (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 1 6.42 So

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too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.) and philosophical propositions (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974). If we follow Wittgenstein and enter into these elucidations in the manner outlined above we begin to see that these ways of perceiving the functions and capacity of language can mislead us. These elucidations draw our attention to the types of pictures which these of utterances suggest; they do not represent contingent features of reality by a correspondence in logical form in the manner suggested by the picture theory. The ineffability reading of the text says that these pseudo-propositions attempt to describe features of transcendent reality but fall short in the attempt. By the reading that I am proposing these propositions do not fail to express inexpressible facts about an ethical realm but relate to our lives in quite a different way. They show us what we might be inclined to say and thus help us to question whether these inclinations make sense. The ethical in the Tractatus is not limited to those elucidations which, by virtue of their use of ethical language, try but fail to deal with ethical truths. Both the positivist and the ineffability reading of the Tractatus rest upon this assumption although they rarely acknowledge this common ground. This assumption, that there is an ethical realm dealt with by moral philosophy is, if we adopt a resolute reading, rejected by the Tractatus. The positivist claims that any attempt to speak about this ethical subject matter is literally meaningless @36 (as if there is another type of meaninglessness) while those committed to the ineffability reading suggest that there is an ethical realm but claim that the nonsense talked about it is meaningful nonsense which while it fails to convey

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ethical facts, gestures towards them (or whistles them perhaps). I would challenge this view and suggest instead that what makes moral philosophy meaningless is its attempt to map a territory which does not exist; the ethical is not a separate land but an essential condition of life as it is lived here. This is the way that logic and ethics resemble each other, not by being equivalent realms but by both being conditions of the world. They both describe the scaffolding of the world or rather they represent it. (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 6.124 ) The ethical point of the Tractatus is not, as I have shown above, restricted to the elucidations which employ ethical terms. The ethical sense of the book is conveyed by all of its elucidations. The ethical is an inseparable part of all language. If it were the case that seeming ethical propositions related to ethical content, as Conant points out, it would mean that showing would just be another kind of saying. (Conant, 2005, p. 67)We would just be using language in a slightly different grammatical form. If we accept that ethics need not be expressed through the language that we have learned to associate with ethical content we need to further consider what we mean when we think of the ethical, Wittgenstein wrote of the poem Graf Eberhard's Weissdorn as follows If only you do not try to utter the unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be- unutterably- contained in what is uttered (Conant, 2005, p. 67) Wittgenstein is saying that although the

ethicality cannot be expressed as a separate entity it is contained unutterably, inseparably in what is said. If we try to remove the ethical from our talk and utter it in abstraction it becomes meaningless. It is ethical only in the context in which

36

it has its life. It is, thus, perfectly true to note that we cannot speak of 'the ethical ' although we can (and indeed we must) practise ethics. As James Conant says if we try to pry it loose from the setting in which it has its life and grasp hold of the ethical all by itself (independently of how it figures in such non overtly ethical utterances) then it gets lost." (Conant, 2005, p. 67) Ethics is not, then by this account, a separate discipline or area of thought but a condition of the world like logic. Our ethical operations cannot be contained (and thus removed from their contexts) in purely ethical language but are entirely part of the ordinary operation of all of our language. The ethical sense of

language cannot be removed from language but is entirely contained within it. Nothing is ineffable but its meaning is lost when it is divorced from its context. The use of ethical language such as good", right" and "virtuous" leads us to believe in an ethical realm as a distinct entity on the principle that for every name there is a thing that is named. We imagine that if there is a word for good then good must be something in its own right which can be examined apart from the circumstances which lead us to call it good. This is our error. By analogy we seek the smile apart from the face and without the face there is no smile. In the same way we imagine there can be right and wrong divorced from the circumstances of life whereas Wittgenstein intends us to see that these terms cannot be separated because they pervade the world like logic. (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 5.6) Once we can come to realise that ethics is a condition of the world the problem of what is right "generally" will simply disappear. "The solution

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of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 6.521) This idea of the ethical as being inseparably part of the circumstances in which it has its life is one to which I shall return in Chapter XXX

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Chapter 6 The Lecture on Ethics.

The Lecture on Ethics is one of the few occasions that Wittgenstein dealt explicitly with the subject of ethics. I shall offer a view of the lecture which points out the ways in which it continues some of the ideas of Tractatus and refer back to the earlier work to illustrate this point. In ithe Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein explains a view of ethics for a general audience and thus his ideas are not developed or amplified here but rather simplified. Wittgenstein takes as his starting point G.E. Moore's account of the meaning of ethics, a general enquiry into what is good. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 4)According to my reading of the Tractatus it is just this general enquiry which is utterly impossible. To decontextualise moral judgements from the specific circumstances in which they have their life is exactly the source of the illusory problems of ethical philosophy which must be dissolved. Wittgenstein explains the fact value distinction to his audience and emphasises that to warrant the use of the term ethical value must be considered transcendent i.e. not merely a matter of natural facts. That is to say it must be a matter of absolute and not relative or instrumental value. However he goes on to point out that any attempt to express this transcendent value is doomed to failure. This could be taken to mean that there is an ethical realm which is inexpressible but I do not think that this is exactly what Wittgenstein intends. I would suggest that Wittgensteins emphasis on the personal nature of

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value means that value is to be found in ones individual interaction with the facts. Wittgenstein is showing us that we all have a notion of transcendent value which arises from our own personal interaction with the world. It is not a realm of universal values, not a form of the good but rather something that arises from ones attitude to the world. Let us consider what he has to say about transcendent value in more detail. 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? 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. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 7)One man would perhaps choose as a stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summers day. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 8) We can see here that our use of the term absolute value depends not on our naming of any fact but on something about our personal interaction with the world. Wittgenstein goes on to note that in his expressions of absolute value, i.e. wondering at the existence of the world and feeling absolutely safe, the language that he uses is nonsense. It cannot be the case that one is perfectly safe whatever happens and one cannot wonder at the existence of everything since the opposite state of affairs is inconceivable. What both of these statements suggest is that the experience towards which Wittgenstein is directing our attention is not one which is about events or states of affairs in the world at all but is rather about a particular attitude. The feeling of being perfectly safe no

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matter what happens is not an assurance that nothing bad will happen but rather an assurance that whatever happens ones attitude will be unaltered. Wondering at the existence of everything is not wondering at anything that is external but rather meeting everything that exists with an attitude of wonder. This is at the heart of the ethical for Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus he has already shown us this position. He says If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than the world of the unhappy. (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 6.43) Wittgenstein is here explaining that absolute value relates not to a realm of transcendent truth but to ones attitude to the world as one finds it. This point is developed in the lecture with the story of the lion headed man. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lions head and began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary

thing as I can imagine. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 10)As Wittgenstein goes on to point out, once doctors and scientists had been summoned and the poor creature vivisected there would be no miracle in the occurrence. The miraculous is in the observer not in the occurrence, in our attitude to the world not in the world. This develops the idea, adapted from Schopenhauer, in the Tractatus that the self is the limit of the world and thus that the world is always my world. Wittgenstein points out that the self can only be located as the limit of the world; just as the eye is not in the field of vision so the self is not an object in the world. (Wittgenstein, T.L.P., 1974 5.6331) The world

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of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy because it is bounded by the attitude of the self. Ethics, and other expressions of value, offer a personal rather than a general response to the facts of the world. This is demonstrated by Wittgenstein's later comment that, At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I think this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated anymore; all I can do is step forth as an individual and speak in the first person. All I can say is this; I do not scoff at this human tendency in man; I hold it in reverence. And here it is essential this is not a description of sociology but that I am speaking about myself. (Quoted in Barrett, 1991, p. 48) Here then we might be able to find a foothold for the notion of showing rather than saying that is not just as Conant protests a funny kind of saying. (Conant, 2005, p. 67) If we can find a way to stimulate the moral imagination we might be able to shift the attitude of the self towards the world. We can look to aesthetics for an illustration since as Wittgenstein proposes in the Lecture on Ethics, 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. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 1965, p. 4) If one believes a work of art to be of great importance, if it moves us in some way we are often disappointed if it does not appeal to others in a similar way. It is, however, ineffective to tell our companion that the work is beautiful or affecting. The history of its creation or the detail of the subject will probably not help them to share our view. Eventually all we can do is gesture at the work with the

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exclamation Look! or See this part! and then perhaps a sympathetic friend might say Well yes, I see something of what you see, They might be able to employ their imagination to see in the work some of the value that their companion perceives. On the other hand if they do not then there is nothing more to be done. They can either enter into your way of seeing or they cannot. The same is true of our attitude to other bearers of value. In order to understand how an action is of moral value we would need to enter into a way of seeing the world. Factual argument will probably be ineffective in making this alteration in a personal response to facts in the world but we might be able to enter into a different attitude to the world through other means.

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Chapter 7 "Clarity, Perspicuity are Valuable in Themselves.

In the following sections of my paper I will consider the later works of Wittgenstein, particularly Philosophical Investigations and Culture and Value. The later Wittgenstein presents anyone interested in his view of ethics with some considerable difficulties. This problem is that he did not address ethics in an explicit way after the Lecture on Ethics. There are some snippets of conversation and a few very brief remarks but certainly nothing that one might consider a body of work on the topic. It might be thought that ethics was of little interest to the later Wittgenstein but I do not believe that is the case, indeed I shall argue that all of Wittgenstein's later philosophical work had an ethical sense just as was the case with the Tractatus and that there is a less clear distinction between the early and later works than is sometimes suggested. Wittgensteins commentators have felt no compulsion to emulate his reticence on the subject of ethics. Indeed some have had no reluctance to say what Wittgenstein would have said on the topic, had he chosen to address it. Wittgensteinian moral theory may be (as I believe it is) a contradiction in terms (a point put forward by Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word) but that does not mean that it has not been widely attempted. I shall refer in this section and those that follow to Paul Johnston's attempt to address ethics in a Wittgensteinian manner and while he makes, it seems to me, quite sound points in relation to Wittgenstein's method I shall suggest that ethics is a special case which is not

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available to Wittgensteins method in exactly the same way as other branches of philosophy. I shall argue that the problems of ethics are problems of life and that any attempt to treat them as merely conceptual confusions risks deepening rather than dissolving their perplexities. In his later work Wittgenstein battled against confusion. As he writes in Culture and Value "For meclarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves."

(Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 7) Wittgenstein viewed philosophical problems as the products of conceptual confusion and took the view that the proper occupation of philosophy was the elimination of these confusions and the achievement of clarity. The proper function of philosophy as he saw it was not the establishment of ultimate truth but the achievement of clarity. As he said It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard of ways. For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.'' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 133) Standing in the way of this ambition, however, is the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 109) We may find that our thought falls into certain habitual pathways or that the clarity we seek eludes us because we have certain unexamined pictures in mind. In fact, the more commonplace and every day the concepts we seek to clarify, the greater the difficulty we face. Wittgenstein identified this problem in Culture and Value, saying "What makes a subject hard to understand if it's something significant and important

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- is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most

obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will rather than with the intellect. (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 17)

The problem that must be faced, if we are to achieve the valuable clarity which Wittgenstein prescribes for us, is to see and then to understand that our language is not, in fact, answerable to reality but rather answerable to us and our requirements. We cannot help but believe that our concepts match an independent reality or, if they do not, that they are errors to be corrected by the gathering and assessing of evidence. We must face the fact that language matches not reality but the use it is put to by us. The clarity we must achieve is clarity with regard to our use of language not to how language relates to the world. Wittgenstein says "How do I know that this colour is red? -It would be an answer to say: I have learnt English." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 381) In other words our use of the term red is answerable to other language users not to some universal form of redness. I am right or wrong depending on the naming of the colour by others. If my naming is not in line with other language users. I would resolve my confusion not by an investigation of the colour but by investigation of the use of the word. The implication of this is that there could never be a language which I could use to draw attention to the

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particular use of a concept and try to show that it is wrong. Since language has meaning by virtue of its use in a context to claim that a use was wrong would be illogical. The concept of the wrong use of language relies on the assumption that language refers to objects in the world not to its use in communication. In order to achieve clarity we cannot draw the limit of language from the outside, sub specie aeternitatis. There is no one meta-language which does represent reality that we can use. If we attempt to criticize one use of language using another variety of language we are in danger of exacerbating the confusion which we seek to eliminate Certainly a sign may convey more than one symbol it conveys in this context is futile. If we do this we will be mistaking a disagreement about the use of a term for a disagreement about the way things stand in the world. Wittgenstein remarks on the difficulty of his task in Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical problemsare, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 109)

So, if Wittgenstein believes that philosophical problems can be eliminated by gaining clarity, but if there is no language which does not have either the same or

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its own bewitchments how can clarity be achieved? Wittgenstein writes of the position of the would-be philosopher as that of a fly in a fly bottle, buzzing powerlessly inside a prison that it cannot even see. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 20013009) Let us consider some of the philosophical confusions to which language might make us prey in order to illustrate the bewitchments that Wittgenstein would have us notice. We are tempted by the surface grammar of language to think that names name objects. This confusion leads us to imagine that since we

commonly talk of minds and souls, that these must be objects which we own or which are located about our persons. If we take this talk out of context and seek to find these organs on mortuary slabs or X-Rays we will be forced to imagine them as entities made from some immaterial substance. However misguided one might believe this notion to be the idea of souls and minds are concepts, which we employ without difficulty and which make perfect sense in everyday language. It is only when, in a philosophical context, I go onto speculate on the nature of the soul, the means by which it interacts with the body and how immaterial substance can be so located as to belong to one body rather than another that I encounter real confusion.

This example brings forward two features of Wittgensteins method to achieve clarity. Firstly we cannot criticise one language game from the perspective of another. I cannot meaningfully use the language of science to criticise the language of faith or poetry. For this reason it simply does not make sense, if

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someone says that their soul was moved by a piece of music, to ask how far it was moved or how a substance which is immaterial can have any location. We cannot attempt to stand outside language to see it aright. Secondly we need to acknowledge that language is in order as it is. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 98) We need not aim to replace our language with some imagined language which is free of confusions. Rather we need to find a way to see the pictures our language uses to bewitch us. We need then to see if this picture, alongside others, represents the world we recognise. The problem that we encounter is our inability to command an overview (Ubersicht) of our concepts. In order to command such an overview we need to gain a perspicuous representation of our ideas. As Wittgenstein tells us A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our wordsour grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in "seeing connexions Hence the importance of finding and inventing immediate cases. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 122) There is no one language that we can use to express the ways that our language moulds our thought but perhaps by considering the ways we use language in a variety of situations, we can see that the language we use is answerable to our needs not to some notional objective reality. This shows why Wittgenstein toyed with the idea of using Ill teach you differences as the motto of Philosophical Investigations. In it he attempts to demonstrate a method by which we might extricate ourselves from the fly jar by

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carefully considering how we use language in a variety of contexts and seeing how a context might be literalised in such a way as to cause us confusion.

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Chapter 8
Wittgensteins project to help his readers achieve clarity is not just in order to clarify their language. Wittgenstein is not concerned only with language. Our language is the mould of our thought. As he says "One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word imagination", is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question as to the nature of the imagination is as much about the word imagination as my question is. And I am only saying that this question is not to be decidedneither for the person who does the imagining, nor for anyone else-by pointing, nor yet by a description of any process. the first question also asks for a word to be explained; but it makes us expect a wrong kind of answer. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001370) That is to say our notion of imagining has been formed by how we have learned to apply the term. Wittgenstein wants us to see how our language can mislead us and give us the tools to extricate ourselves from the confusion that have built up one by one. As he says, Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turnings, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong

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turnings so as to help people part the danger points. (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 18) In other words Wittgenstein has to carefully construct examples which alert us to the uses language makes of analogy and picture so that we may examine these examples for ourselves. As he says, We now demonstrate a method by examples. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 133)

If Wittgensteins view of ethics is founded on this clarifying project we must next consider how moral philosophy can be done. It might be undertaken by studying the ethical theories and viewpoints of the past but if these are grounded upon the kinds of errors we must avoid this would seem a fruitless task. We might learn not to fall into one particular hole or another but these theories will not help us to achieve a sound understanding. Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value what's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing? (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 14) Clearly he thinks that if we are to do any type of philosophy it must have a clarifying impact upon us. Perhaps then we could develop a sound understanding of good or right and then attempt to share an understanding with others. Unfortunately any attempt to share our own understanding will have to be couched in language and would be merely an attempt to preach to others who must come to the understanding for themselves. Just as in the Tractatus the work must be carried out individually, we must deal with our own confusions. I shall argue later that ethical understanding is

fundamentally a personal endeavour. Perhaps the only moral way to undertake

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moral philosophy is by showing others how their moral thinking might be distorted and by this enabling them to examine the moral truths that they might adopt without clarity. The only avenue for moral philosophy it would seem is description without theorising. "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it for it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001124) The task then is to describe without theory, to show how we use language and allow our interlocutor to draw their own conclusions and not to set forth any agenda for alteration. This harsh discipline, it seems, is the only way to do moral philosophy and the only way to philosophise morally.

In order to criticize a particular language game we would have to stand outside it. This cannot be achieved and so all we are able to do is look at the use we make of relevant language. As Duncan Richter puts it "To understand the meaning of a word we ought to look at the use we make of it. This consists in looking at a variety of circumstances in which the word is used and perhaps making up hypothetical examples to show what does and does not make sense. We can see more clearly the nature of the concept (Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word, p. 16) In other words we understand that the meaning of the word is its use not its relationship to an object or process. Words like good, right", justice might then seem to give us an insight into our moral thought. Wittgenstein seems to recommend just this approach in Philosophical Investigations In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning at this word (good for

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instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 77) This is exactly what Paul Johnston attempts in Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. He notes that we learn the word good in contexts where we are inclined to express approval. Our teachers and carers note our preverbal expressions of approval and attempt to develop them by teaching us words with which to extend the language game. "Thus, through our teaching, the child's natural expressions of approval are extended into language, and in non verbal behaviours supplemented by a language game which opens him up to him new possibilities of expression. (Johnston, 1991, p. 98)

In the next section I shall consider the proposal that ethical language is a language game like any other and, since it can lead to the same confusion as other language uses we can apply a kind of therapy to our dealings with this language. It is my contention that ethics is a rather special case because it does not have a vocabulary by virtue of which it is ethical but rather brings us to the bedrock of our belief. I shall be considering both the means by which we make moral judgements, apply language which seems to be ethical and the shortcomings of this approach.

Johnston goes on to describe how the use we make of such language depends on many contextual factors. There are to use Wittgenstein's term a set of family resemblances behind an application of a term within the play of human

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expression, we see similarities, a pattern. (Johnston, 1991, p. 99)

Michael

Luntley has written very interesting about this disposition that we have to see similarities. He says that Wittgenstein shows that concept possession cannot be theorized such that patterns of language use are independent of the seeing of similarities.(Luntley, 2002, p. 273) We cannot explain how we come to see these similarities as this capacity is unthought. It is the basis of our conceptual grasp not a consequence of it. As Wittgenstein puts it "Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, -but that they are related to one another in many different ways. " (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 65) For Luntley as for Johnston this application of words such as good reaches the bedrock where no further justification can be given. When we are asked to justify the similarity we have seen which allows us to apply a certain term (good for example) we might find this either difficult or we might supply reasons after the fact. If we are asked to name games we can do so without difficulty but then if we are asked why we have named a particular game we will often create a rule retrospectively. It can come to seem to us as if we were applying a rule when, in fact, we simply saw a similarity. This is indicated by Wittgenstein when he says one gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way. - I do not, however, mean by this that he is supposed to see in those examples that common thing which I-for some reason-was unable to express. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 71) and later "To

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use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001289)

Johnston points out words like 'good' have in their use the possibility of moral disagreement because their bedrock is our approval or disapproval. We cannot justify this as it arises from our entire history and background. I see a similarity between one situation and another and I carry across a judgement or I approve of this object and thus I name it good. Having declared that ethical language such as good rests on the bedrock of approval Johnston seems to be making what amounts to an emotivist claim however he goes on to outline how ethical language differs from the simple expression of moral approval.

As he says "In making a moral judgement we hold that there is something at stake other than just our preferences; we claim that one and only one act is the right thing to do and that this is so regardless of whether we or others recognise this."(Johnston, 1991, p. 16) In other words this language game includes an aspect of the universal. When we claim that a course of action is not only to be preferred but is also right we mean that this course should be preferred by any rational person; that the action in question has intrinsic value. This calls to mind the example that Wittgenstein employed in the Lecture on Ethics. While we would not be alarmed by a persons expression of no desire to play better tennis we would be shocked if we were told they did not want to behave better. To use

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the concept, as Johnston says, involves holding that there are standards of right and wrong which our judgements and (and actions) must strive to embody.(Johnston, 1991, p. 116)
Mulhall criticises Johnstons view saying that this metaethical theory is both incoherent and inconsistent with Wittgensteins other comments. I will deal first with the accusation of inconsistency.

The criticism

that Mulhall levels at Johnston is that Johnston argues that the criteria for being considered a moral law is the appeal to a supposed universal standard. In other words if I say that I happen to approve action X and acknowledge that is simply a matter of taste and culture and that to detest action X would be equally valid then my altitude is not a moral one. lf however I believe, at some level, that anyone who detests action X should feel ashamed then my moral altitude holds to a view of the world which appeals to some universal standard. To illustrate I might hold that the binding of female children's feet in China was a cultural practice in which I do not happen to partake and I might perhaps feel fortunate in that respect without condemning those who did it. If, however, I feel that this practice was wrong, that if people had been able to see the word aright' they would have been ashamed of the practice whether that is because it does not contribute to utility or because it does not result in eudaimonia or because Christ commanded that we should do unto others then this is a moral attitude. Mulhall criticizes Johnston on this matter (Mulhall, 2002) pointing to Wittgenstein's response to Rush Rees' mention of Goring's Recht is das, was uns gefallt that even that was a kind of ethics." Munhall points out that ethical statements require, in Johnston's view, an appeal to a universal standard which, it seems to him that, Goerings statement

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lacks. I disagree with Mulhall on this view however. It seems to me that Goering is not stating a position which denies a moral absolute but rather he views his statement as creating a universal standard. 'God is dead' he is saying and claiming the position of lawgiver for himself and his comrades. 'Right' is not what pleases just anyone but rather he is creating a universal right out of what he approves. This is not ethical egoism where what is right is what benefits the individual or even what the individual chooses. What is right here is what Goering declares is right, he is lawgiver. For this reason I do not believe that Mulhall's criticism of Johnston's reading can hold.

Further to this criticism Mulhall argues that metaethics is impossible because when we seek to describe how an ethical position has been reached we will need to use language to do so. Without language we cannot even call any issue ethical. He thinks our description of any ethical position will immediately thrust us into the language game of ethical discourse. lf I seek to describe any theory about an ethical position even if I consciously choose only the most neutral words my description will place me in the midst of the debate. By describing an ethical statement as meaningless or "prescriptive I place the debate in a logical space that can no longer be considered neutral. He makes just this point in response to Paul Johnston. Mulhall puts forward an argument which springs from Cavells objection to Stevensons prescriptivist view of ethics. Cavell says that such a view makes ethical statements propaganda for a particular standpoint. The fact that here, in this metaethical debate we are being asked to

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contrast propaganda with moral urging shows, according to Mulhall, that metaethics is really simply ethics. We are clearly asked to view propaganda as amoral. It is according to Mulhall impossible to engage in any account of ethics without such normative elements emerging. Mulhall thinks this argument is fairly devastating for Johnston's position since "The conclusion to draw is that there is and can be no such thing as metaethics. There is no way of characterising the subject matter of moral philosophy that will not itself give expression to ones own interests and concerns" (Mulhall, 2002, p. 303) I think this is an important criticism of Jonstons position but I think that it is not a true representation of Johnstons view. The view of ethics which is being proposed by Johnston is significantly different from that view proposed by Stevenson for example. Noncognitivists claim that ethical language is propositionally meaningless. They believe that ethical language facts to accurately represent the word. This, of course represents the position of all of our language. The non cognitivist is in the position we examined in relation to the Tractatus of claiming that language which does not represent the word is in some sense meaningless although it successfully conveys meaning. The non cognitivist has been bewitched by the picture that language relates to the world rather than to the use we put it to. It seems to me that Johnston takes a very different view in his book, that our use of moral language is meaningful and, as all language relates to our use, not to any notional objective reality.

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Mulhalls criticism of metaethics seems to me, however, to be a criticism more worthy of careful consideration if we are to find Wittgensteins moral point in the later work. It is my view that Wittgenstein does not intend to provide us with theory, or doctrine, in the later work any more than he did in the earlier work. Some commentators have assumed that Wittgenstein is advancing substantive theories in the later works but this is far from the case. While it is easy to think that for example that Wittgenstein warns us against the Cartesian model of the mind I outlined in chapter 7 but in fact he presents the reader with 'differences' and leaves it to her to work out where she can stand in relation to what she discovers. In Philosophical Investigations on private language he says "But don't we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a colour and name our colour-impressions? It is as if we detached the colour-impression from the object, like a membrane. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)" (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 276) Wittgenstein asks us to look at how we use language, he does not advance a theory.

Theories will be of no use to us in dealing with the particular confusions which we want to address. All we can do is learn a technique by example and then apply it to our own language. He is refusing to theorize and instead wishes us to come to a perspicacious presentation of our conceptual nexus and thus be able to steer clear of the philosophical problems which might otherwise plague us. This approach has been read on occasion as a theory in itself. James Conant characterises this reading in a rather mocking way saying the central thesis of

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the Tractatus is retained though it matures from a self refuting contention into a full blown philosophical theory about the impossibility of philosophical theory. (Conant, Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for their Work as Authors, 1995, p. 294)The truth is closer to the view that generalisations have a tendency to obscure rather than reveal and thus projects like Russell's to "systematize a vast body of facts and never lead to any consequences which there is any reason to think false. (Russell quoted in Johnston, 1991, p. 16) represents the philosopher's contempt for the general case. (Quoted in Johnston, 1991, p. 14)Wittgenstein does not propose to us a theory that opposes theory but he does suggest that the questions which we imagine may be solved by such hypotheses are not actually questions at all. To dissolve the question makes the theses both absurd and redundant. Wittgenstein, then, aims to achieve clarity with regard to the language pictures which hold us in thrall. He wants to do this not by advancing theses, which, because they would necessarily be in a language game of some kind, would come with their own pictures and confusions, but rather by showing us differences, enabling us to make a survey of our concepts and identify their power to influence our thought. "Our task is only to be impartial, i.e. we have only to show up the ways philosophy is biased and to correct them, but not to set up new parties and creeds." (Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript, 2005, p. 309)

The traditional view of Wittgenstein is that the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus advanced a theory of language and asserted that language which attempted to

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express ethical ideas was both meaningless and important while the later Wittgenstein made theories about the impossibility of philosophical theories. I do not believe that either of these views are correct. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein offers us a process which, if we engage with it, will rid us of philosophical confusions and in the later work this process is continued. The difference, in my view, between the writer of the Tractatus and the writer of Philosophical Investigations is that of scope. The early work helped us to see that some of the pictures of how the world was were nonsense and that our talk about subjects like ethics needed a radical therapy but he seemed to imagine that one course of treatment would be enough. If we were able to advance, rung by rung, up the ladder of the elucidations he seemed to think that the process would be complete, we would be able to see the world aright. By the time of Philosophical Investigations he can see that the work is far more extensive and must be solved painstakingly, problem by problem. As he says "we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. Problems are

solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 133)

Given that we are not interested, if we decide to adopt Wittgenstein's therapies, in theories or generalisations and we see that theories are impossible to articulate given the unavailability of language in which to do so we are, forced now to ask what place moral philosophy can possibly hold? It certainly seems the

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case that metaethical theories are not what Wittgenstein would consider moral philosophy. Mulhall has directed us to the issue which I feel is central in Wittgensteins moral philosophising, the ethical content of all language. This is an idea which we have already considered in relation to the Tractatus but it is just as important in the later philosophy.

Diamond develops this position with reference to Wittgenstein's response to works of fiction such as Tolstoys Hadji Murad which conveys a moral attitude without the use of any obvious moral vocabulary. The point here is that all language is capable of conveying an ethical stance and thus that the description of the employment of language which we ordinarily recognise as ethical is not sufficient to get at the ethical dimension in all language. Diamond asks us to imagine a society where all moral instruction is carried out via stories and without the use of explicitly ethical terms. In such a society we can easily conceive that children would be encouraged to emulate the behaviour and attitudes exhibited by the characters that the community felt admirable. The example Diamond provides is from Laura Ingalls Wilders story The Long Winter where one might be encouraged to be like Almanzo, in other words exhibit characteristics of bravery. The exhortation to be like Almanzo however would not be identical with an exhortation to be brave. Diamond proposes that it would be more like locating ones behaviour in the nexus of attitudes in the story. Mulhall characterises Diamond's position thus the story organizes or crystallizes a whole way of thinking and attending to particular situations and decisions. (Mulhall, 2002, p.

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306) The power of a story to create a moral understanding can be related to Wittgenstein's comment about the power of a picture to create a way of life. Barrett notes that in his Lecture on Religious Belief Wittgenstein talks about someone whose belief in the Last Judgement is his guidance for life. Whenever he does anything this picture, the picture of a Judgement Day, when he will have to give an account of himself, is in his mind.(Barrett, 1991, p. 132) The picture shows itself in his way of life although it is beyond justification.

Ethics then is not a discrete subject area and does not have a vocabulary. We have seen that ethics is an attitude to the world. The whole world has, therefore, an ethical dimension. Ethics is a condition of the world rather than a separate or separable area of endeavour. As Andrew Gleeson puts it moral concern need not require any special subject matter or language (Gleeson, 2002, p. 222) This idea, derived from Wittgenstein's insistence that meaning is use, means that we cannot identify ethical statements by virtue of its employment of ethical vocabulary. We could not make a list of words which indicate that this statement is ethical since all language has an ethical dimension. In fact since ethics is a condition of the world it does not have a subject matter or a content. If there is, then, no necessary ethical vocabulary which we can use to identify ethical statements we must ask how ethical statements can be made. Gleeson points to this notion when he says that language has a pervasive moral dimension (Gleeson, 2002, p. 223) This is a position outlined by Cora Diamond when she says Whole sentences, stories, images, the idea we have of a person, words,

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rules: anything made of the resources of ordinary language may be brought into such a relation to our lives and actions and understanding of the world that we might speak of the thinking involved in that connection as 'moral'. There is no limit to be set. We cannot, that is, say that these are the words, moral words for moral subject matter, that can have this character. If a sentence or word has this character, it arises not through its content but from its use on particular occasions." (Diamond, Wittgenstein, Mathematics and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism, 1996, p. 248) Sabrina Lovibond disagrees that all language has an ethical dimension and argues that the ability to discern a moral element in language which is not ostensibly ethical as in the case above depends on a shared form of life. That is to say she thinks that we cannot use language which is not obviously ethical in ethical contexts but this reflects a kind of conceptual essentialism which I think is alien to Wittgensteins methods. As Mulhall points out the pictures which might affect us most profoundly are those where we do not already share the context they portray. These picture are ones which have a transformative effect which can create a shift in the bedrock of our attitude.

This ability of any language at all to contain an ethical dimension, or more accurately, the inevitability of any language to contain a moral aspect depends on our ability to use our imagination and to see the similarities between morally relevant situations. Mulhall puts it this way determining whether or not a given context allows or invites the projection of a given word will depend (among other

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things) upon a given speaker's imagination, her linguistic creativity, her individual weightings of the multiple nodes of criterial interconnection that give any word its identity. (Mulhall, 2002, p. 319) The consequence of the ubiquity of the moral dimension means that it is impossible to treat ethical language in the same way as we have treated other language games. If all of our utterances are, at some level, ethical then there are not, in the same way as with other language games the predictable pitfalls and missed roads. This mean that ethics is not an area where the cartographer of confusion can help us steer a course but rather an area which we must map for ourselves using the methods and perhaps inventing our own to avoid the types of confusions to which we are particularly prone.

Chapter X Problems of Living

Wittgenstein clearly felt that the example was of paramount importance in moral thinking. He felt as Barrett says that Moral problems can only arise in concrete situations.(Barrett, 1991, p. 237) He apparently remarked that he found it

strange that you could find textbooks on ethics in which there were no genuine ethical problems. By a genuine moral problem he seemed to mean an ethical problem which is concerned with how we should act in a given situation, that is, whether what we do is good or bad in concreto not in abstracto.(Barrett, 1991, p. 243) What this approach shows is that for Wittgenstein ethical problems could not be general but rather had to be individual, personal and concrete. As Barrett says these are not ethical problems as much as they are problems of

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living.(Barrett, 1991, p. 241)Perhaps here it would be profitable to consider an ethical problem or a problem in living and look at Wittgenstein's reaction to it. Rush Rhees reports Wittgenstein's reactions to three such problems in his paper Some Developments in Wittgenstein's view of Ethics. Rhees suggested to Wittgenstein "the problem facing a man who has come to the conclusion that he must either leave his wife or abandon his work of cancer research."(Rhees, 1965, p. 22) Wittgenstein does seem to agree that this would be a genuine ethical problem for the man involved but because we cannot know his inner motivations and attitudes it is impossible for us to draw a general ethical conclusion from it. There is, in effect, no answer that is generally right. If on the one hand the researcher decides to leave his wife he may justify his decision by reference to suffering humanity (Rhees, 1965, p. 22) but his motive actually be an excuse to be rid of her. In any case whatever he does will have an influence his future reflections on his choice. If his research comes to nothing and his wife gives in to despair and ends her own life then he might well see this as a judgement against him. If he abandons his work and then his marriage becomes unhappy he will likewise think that this is because he put his own happiness ahead of the needs of the sick. We want to think that one of the courses of action available to the man must be "the right course of action but this is not at all the case. How would we know which criteria we were using to judge the actions. "But we do not know what this decision would be like -how it would be determined, what sort of criteria would be used, and so on. (Rhees, 1965, p. 23)

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The other moral questions that Rhees records Wittgenstein as addressing are the question of Brutus' assassination of Caesar and Kierkegaard's question referring to Thomas Moore as to whether a man should allow himself to be put to death for the truth. Wittgenstein denied that these are genuine moral problems, Wittgenstein said this was not even something you could discuss. You would not know for your life what went on in his mind before he decided to kill Caesar. What would we have had to feel in order that you should say that killing his friend was noble (Rhees, 1965, p. 22)

The decisions that we make, considering them to have an ethical dimension, are then fundamentally problems of living which we make personally not in general. Duncan Richter makes just this point saying We should expect Wittgenstein to be sceptical, to look for awkward counter examples to any theory, and to feel no need to offer an alternative ethical theory of his own. In this sense he might be considered an anti theorist, perhaps even a particularist. But what is left after philosophical investigation is personal not philosophical. (Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word, p. 131) This is because the similarities we see are foundational and without justification as is the bedrock of an attitude to the world. Since this is the basis for my judgements it is mine alone. Rush Rhees reports Wittgenstein as saying "Or suppose someone says, One of the ethical systems must be the right one-or nearer to the right one." Well, suppose 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

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theory has no counterpart here. (Rhees, 1965, p. 24) In other words if we decide that a particular system of belief is the moral one we have adopted it and made it our own bedrock.

So Wittgenstein's moral perspective is that genuine moral problems are problems of living. Moral judgement is ineluctably the judgment of human beings, with all the particulars of their messy, flesh and blood existence."(Gleeson, 2002, p. 224) Any attempt then to undertake moral philosophy in general is an attempt to give an account of what people actually do when they act morally and give their reasons for so acting. (Barrett, 1991, p. 256)

We can see in this insistence on example the importance that Wittgenstein attaches to pictures or stories which convey ethical standpoints. This is a vital part of our everyday experience of moral thinking. If I disagree with someone with regard to a moral question we will probably use just such a technique. While I might say think of it like this I will provide them with a situation and ask them to see the similarity. This plays an important part in moral philosophy too. If we take Judith Jarvis Thompson's famous thought experiment in defence of abortion we find that she is asking us if we can change our usual picture of the embryo to the picture she offers us. We may or may not be convinced by the picture she offers but it is certainly an effective way to show a different view of the ethical issue under question.

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This brings me to the next part of Wittgensteins idea of the ethical. A change of ethical outlook cannot be achieved by argument or reason (by saying) but must be attempted by showing. Just as Achilles demonstrates over and over his way of going on so if we wish to make an ethical point all we can do is attempt to alter our interlocutors world by demonstrating how we go on. Cavell makes an interesting analysis of Kripke view of this matter. We are to imagine a pupil who does not follow a sequence being demonstrated by his teacher. Kripke takes the remark we have just considered Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do, and in Cavell's view recasts it as 'Then I am licensed to say: "This is simply what I am inclined to do. The change alters the Wittgensteinian model by licensing the dominant method rather than the pupils deviant approach. Cavell points out that the remark is that l am inclined to say not that l do say. As Mulhall says Wittgenstein's teacher does not demand that her pupil adopt or inculcate, or even match her inclinations; she refrains from saying anything and simply stands there, continuing to exemplify her community's ways of going on and waiting for her pupil to respond or fail to respond to this implicit invitation to join in-were exactly to join.(Mulhall, 2002, p. 316) This recalls Moore's

recollection of a lecture in 1932/33 where Wittgenstein said "What Aesthetics tries to do, he said, is to give reasonsReasons, he said in Aesthetics, are of the nature of further descriptions, e.g. you can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing him lots of pieces by Brahms, or by comparing him to a contemporary author; and all that Aesthetic does is to draw your attention to a thing," to "place things side by side. He said that if by giving reasons of this

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sort, you make the other person see what you see" but it still doesn't appeal to him," that is an end" of the discussion; and that what he, Wittgenstein, had at the back of his mind was the idea that aesthetic discussions were like discussions in a court of law, where you try to clear up the circumstances of the action being tried, hoping that in the end you say will appeal to the judge. And he said that the same sort of reasons were given, not only in Ethics but also in Philosophy (Edwards, 1982, p. 129)

Next I would like to investigate the notion of bedrock of which Johnston makes use in his account of ethical language. The term comes from 217 of Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein says If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am

inclined to say: This is simply what I do.(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001) What then is this bedrock? It is the worldview for which no further justification can be given. We can make useful comparison here to Lewis Carroll's Achilles and the Tortoise. The Tortoise accepts that if X then Y but then simply refuses to accept Y. Achilles wants to provide reasons and so inserts the line if X is granted then Y must also be granted and yet the tortoise simply refuses to accept. There is no justification that can be offered and we, like Achilles, can merely repeat our process in the hope that the other person will catch on. Our exemplification is, at base, an invitation to the other to take part but I am not able to claim that they should see the activity in this way. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein told us that the worlds of the happy and unhappy man were different worlds and described the world as fundamentally the world of the

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self. The limit of the world is the self. This idea can be traced forward into Wittgensteins view of the bedrock as being the word as I found it.

So the bedrock is that final layer of beliefs which cannot be justified, which are not responsive to argument, which simply are, perhaps by virtue of our culture, our background, our idiolect and our turn of mind. From this bedrock we develop our moral attitude based not on reasons as much as on a particular attitude to the world. While these attitudes are not amenable to explanation or even to argument they are open to picturing in metaphor and story. While we are unable to justify the bedrock we can demonstrate it by action or by story. Perhaps this is one reason that Wittgenstein wrote that philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 24) Wittgenstein says "Rules of life are dressed up in pictures. And there pictures can only serve to describe what we are to do, not justify it. Because they could provide a justification only if they held good in other respects as well. I can say: Thank these bees for their honey as though they were kind people who have prepared it for you. That is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: Thank them because, look, how kind they are!"-Since the next moment they may sting you." (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 29) In relation to the sort of philosophical confusions which Wittgenstein wishes to dissolve if, at last and with clarity, his reader holds to the idea, for example, that impressions are like membranes, then it is no longer a bewitchment but rather a kind of religious belief and Wittgenstein has nothing to say about such fundamental world views. As he says If I have exhausted the

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justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned, Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2001 217) Once justifications are exhausted our way of looking at the world

simply is as it is. As he says A picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition. (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1980, p. 83) To change someone's views at this level would be to change how they live, to have them simply do something different. This is however not Wittgenstein's task. We have seen that Wittgenstein proposes a method for the elimination of philosophical problems. He prescribes a course of therapy which will enable us to see the world aright and avoid the plaguey confusion to which we are prey. Richter gives us an account of the difficulty, saying Wittgensteins view seems to be this: our language itself is not wrong, and is indeed the only way out of our confusion, but it is misleading. It makes words and expressions that are quite different appear to be rather similar and it does this because the people whose language it is, whose lives it expresses and informs, tend to think of these words and expressions (and what they stand for) as being rather similar. (Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word, p. 28) However moral statements are not wholly

amenable to this approach. We can look carefully and studiously at our use of words such as good' or ought but we will not, thereby, achieve a way out of our confusion because all of our language can be moral. It is used by people who have an ethical view of the world, whatever that ethic might be, and this morality is at the heat of the way we view the world. The only way we can achieve

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something in moral philosophy is to work towards a clear understanding of our own ethical position. If we can become adept in the employment of a clear understanding of our own bedrock beliefs and understand how language is employed without being deceived then we will be acting morally. Thus when we are told that Wittgenstein did not do moral philosophy we might respond that he did the only moral philosophy that can be done. Rather than abandoning moral philosophy in his later work we can contend that all philosophy which has clarity as its end was for Wittgenstein a work of ethics. As Richter says Truly Wittgensteinian moral philosophy is an impossibility or a contradiction in terms. We should not do moral philosophy. Certainly we should philosophize morally.'' (Richter, Wittgenstein At His Word, p. 118)

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Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to show that Wittgenstein was profoundly interested in and exorcised by morality. He attempted to deal with moral philosophy in some sense in both of his published works. In the Tractatus, I have argued, Wittgenstein hoped to demonstrate that language does not convey ethical statements in the same way as it conveys the propositions of natural science. I have considered both emotivism and prescriptivism as accounts of Wittgenstein's moral outlook and found that their idea of the relationship of language to the world and to language users is invalid. I have considered the later views of Wittgenstein as a whole looking at Philosophical Investigation and Culture and Value as well as minor sources and it is my contention that Wittgenstein's method cannot be straightforwardly applied to ethics because ethics is a condition of the world rather than a specific area of language use. This means that we would have to apply the method both more widely and more personally than in other examples of the therapy. Ethics is fundamental to our attitude to the world and cannot therefore be separated from or considered apart from every aspect of our language use. This, I suggest, is why Wittgenstein does not himself write ethical tracts. Theory is the enemy of clarity because of its emphasis upon the general rather than the particular. Ethical problems are not problems in the same way as mathematical problems. What we do is not subject to criteria in anything like the same way. To suggest

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that there is a right course of action independent of the agent is an absurdity. We will choose the course of action which our bedrock beliefs suggests itself as in line with right. This is not to say that just anything can be called right although it is probably the case that anything can be justified dishonestly.

I suggest that Wittgenstein did the moral philosophy that can be done in the attempt to realise clarity which he saw as valuable without qualification.

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