Moral Thought in Wittgenstein: Clarity and Changes of Attitude

Reshef Agam-Segal

In ethics, Wittgenstein, early and late, emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. He once told his friend Rhees: “One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove.” Instead, he says elsewhere: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us […].” Such attitudinal changes involve a kind of clarity of thought for Wittgenstein, and his understanding of them can be explained in part by reference to his later discussion about aspect-perception. Moral problems can disappear in a way that resembles the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of Jastrow's duck-rabbit when the duck-aspect dawns. I compare moral clarification to logical-philosophical clarification. Both cases involve propositions that say nothing, but rather shed light on what other propositions say—tautologies, grammatical remarks, and philosophical elucidations on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘think of her as someone’s daughter’ on the other. I argue that this gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought, a tool with which to think through moral difficulties.

3 Moral Thought in Wittgenstein Clarity and Changes of Attitude Reshef Agam-Segal “we need to clarify philosophical clarification”. (Diamond 2004, 153) 1. Introduction—Some Contrasts In ethics, Wittgenstein emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. He once told his friend Rush Rhees: One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove. (Wittgenstein and Rhees 2015, 12) Instead, he says elsewhere: If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us [. . .]. (CV, 60) Wittgenstein’s understanding of such attitudinal changes can be clarified in part by reference to his later discussion about aspect-changes. Moral problems can disappear in a way that resembles the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of when the duck-aspect dawns. Generating such attitudinal changes, I’ll argue, involves a kind of clarification of thought—moral clarification. I’ll present this as Wittgenstein’s contribution to moral philosophy. I’ll draw on both early and later writings. The grammar of moral clarification can be brought into focus by attention to a series of contrasts. In the 1929 “Lecture on Ethics”, Wittgenstein famously contrasts relative and absolute evaluations. To say that something, e.g., a road, is ‘right’ in a relative sense is to judge it relative to some standard— e.g., whether it is shortest. In contrast, saying that something is absolutely 68 Reshef Agam-Segal right involves judging it without a standard. (This connects to Wittgenstein’s claim that the expression of ethics is nonsense, which I discuss below.) Saying a road is absolutely right implies that it is the road that “everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going” (LE, 7)—regardless of their goals.1 Wittgenstein—early and late—explores a family of related contrasts. They don’t share a common feature, but form a web of overlapping likenesses. I’ll mention a few. I present them not chronologically, but so as to best bring out the resemblances. (1) In the 1938 Lectures on Aesthetics, Wittgenstein discusses judging a person and contrasts saying ‘He behaves well’ with saying ‘He made a great impression on me’ (LA, 8). In the former case, the judgment is relative to a specific standard of behavior. In the latter, the evaluation makes reference to no such standard. (2) Earlier in these lectures, Wittgenstein contrasts two kinds of uses of ‘correct’, applied to tailoring a suit or performing a musical piece: one that simply involves following a set of rules; the other requiring an interpretation of the rules. The rules in the second kind of case do not give themselves unproblematically, and Wittgenstein says the judgment requires developing “a feeling for the rules” (LA, 5). (3) Wittgenstein draws another relevant contrast in these lectures between uses of ‘same’: between cases in which things are said to be the same on the basis of some feature they share, and cases in which we say that without being able to specify it independently of such a description: “Take Brahms and Keller. I often found that certain themes of Brahms were extremely Kellerian. [. . .] I couldn’t say now what it is that made Brahms similar to Keller” (LA, 31–2, fn. 3; also PPO, 66–7). Such comparisons may highlight a peculiarity in a poem or musical theme. (4) In the Brown Book (1934–5), Wittgenstein contrasts uses of ‘particular’ and ‘peculiar’. On the one hand, we may say, [‘particular’] is used preliminary to a specification, description, comparison; on the other hand, as what one might describe as an emphasis. The first usage I shall call the transitive one, the second the intransitive one. Thus, on the one hand I say “This face gives me a particular impression which I can’t describe”. The latter sentence may mean something like: “This face gives me a strong impression”. (BBB, 158) A transitive use of ‘peculiar’ goes with an expectation that the peculiarity be specified, even if—as in the quotation above—one cannot specify it; for example: “This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as children”. This involves a specific comparison. By contrast, in “The soap has a most peculiar smell!” ‘peculiar’ stands for ‘out of Clarity and Changes of Attitude 69 the ordinary’, ‘uncommon’, or ‘striking’. The smell is not compared to anything, but is rather drawn attention to in itself, as it were. (Some of the philosophical importance of this contrast comes out in the Blue Book (5), where Wittgenstein contrasts saying the mind is a peculiar mechanism and saying something similar of an amoeba.) (5) In 1944, Wittgenstein contrasts two ways of believing in a miracle— describing a miraculous event as a matter of course, and being impressed by it in a certain way. In the first way: “God lets the world run on smoothly & then accompanies the words of a Saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence” (CV, 51). Wittgenstein says he doesn’t believe things like that happen, but could believe in a miracle in a different way. This “would be to be impressed by an occurrence in this particular way. So that I should say e.g.: ‘It was impossible to see these trees & not to feel that they were responding to the words’ ” (ibid.). The impression the event gives is most naturally captured by such words.2 (6) In 1916, in the Notebooks, Wittgenstein considers studying a stove “as one among the many things in the world” (83). Other things in the world are here available for comparison; the stove is viewed in the midst of those comparisons. Wittgenstein contrasts this with contemplating the stove all by itself, sub specie aeternitatis, with the whole world as its background, and “when everything else colourless by contrast with it” (ibid.). For Wittgenstein in the Notebooks, this second sort of contemplation indicates what is essential to ethics and aesthetics: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics” (NB, 83). Wittgenstein wrote little about ethics, but the contrasts above suggest a way of looking for ethics in his writings. These are not simply contrasts between sense and nonsense, and they show that the logical-grammatical interest that characterizes his early discussions about ethics survives into his later thought. Failing to attend to such contrasts, Wittgenstein thinks, invites philosophical confusion. Taking intransitive uses for a kind of transitive uses of ‘particular’, for example, may produce: “a kind of delusion” (BBB, 158). Relatedly, in the “Lecture on Ethics”, Wittgenstein claims a scientific examination of a miraculous event—a person growing a lion’s head—makes the miracle disappear (LE, 10). And shortly after the Lecture, he wrote: “In order to marvel human beings—and perhaps peoples—have to wake up. Science is a way of sending them off to sleep again” (CV, 7). The wondrous may be drowned in the trivial.3 This applies to other cases Wittgenstein discusses in the Lecture, specifically feeling absolutely safe and wondering at the existence of world. He says he is tempted to use certain expressions to capture these experiences, 70 Reshef Agam-Segal but as the scientific investigation of the lion-headed person destroys the miracle, so too a certain logical investigation of these expressions would make what is wondrous disappear—make them seem mere nonsense (LE, 8–10). Similarly, in Tractatus 6.422, Wittgenstein writes: “The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form ‘thou shalt. . .’ is: And what if I do not do it?” This misses its point as a moral law; it asks about consequences and thus presents the law as empty of real value. “[I]t is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant”. To take it as a moral law, like seeing things as miraculous or wondrous, means to take it in a certain spirit—‘to wake up’ to it. Ethics for Wittgenstein is thus about helping people into the right spirit, such as a spirit of wonder. And the right spirit, I’ll suggest, connotes a kind of clarity. In §2 I explain Wittgenstein’s conception of logical and philosophical clarity and establish them as objects of comparison for moral clarity, which I discuss in §3. In §4 I make the connection to aspect-perception, and in §5 I say something about the practical import of Wittgenstein’s moral thought. 2. Logical-Philosophical Clarity Tractatus 4.112 says philosophy is about the logical clarification of thought. Clarity as a goal remains central in the Investigations: “My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense” (§464, also §133).4 Philosophical problems, Wittgenstein thinks, can be undone by logical clarification: “The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering them” (PH, 181). I discuss the moral dimension of this below. Not all logical-grammatical unclarities generate philosophical confusions, but some do: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’ ” (PI, §123). Clarity about a proposition is clarity about a whole field of propositions: what follows from it, what it follows from. Gaining it doesn’t require learning a new fact, but for instance re-casting the ideas that confuse us, reformulating them, in a less confusing language, which clearly presents logical-grammatical connections, and in which we know how to do things—draw inferences, make requests, issue warnings, voice concerns. “As I do philosophy, its entire task consists in expressing myself in such a way that certain troubles //problems// disappear” (PH, 181; also CV, 55). Solving philosophical problems is thus often much like clearing up non-philosophical ambiguities. The difference, Wittgenstein thinks, is that ambiguities can and philosophical claims ultimately cannot be clarified (see TLP, 4.003)—e.g., because in the former case we want to use a term with a family of uses only in one sense, and in the latter case we falsely assume there must be something common to all uses: the ambiguity is essential to the idea that there was something we wanted to express at all.5 Philosophical clarification thus typically works by attempting a logically perspicuous Clarity and Changes of Attitude 71 reformulation of a philosophical proposition or question (call that “logical analysis”, LWL, 109), suggesting alternative interpretations, and seeing which we can accept. The aim, more generally, is clarity about our life with the proposition. Sometimes confused/confusing claims or questions can be made sense of (see discussion of “I feel in my hand that the water is three feet underground” BBB, 9–10), but not always. And then, in some cases, we may come to realize that we did not want to say or ask anything to begin with; no interpretation of our claim or question will satisfy us. For Wittgenstein, that’s philosophical clarity. We have passed from disguised to patent nonsense (also PI, §119). We can let go. Wittgenstein exemplifies this with Augustine’s problem about measuring time (Augustine 2009, bk. 11, ch. 14). The past no longer exists, the future is not yet, and the present is a dimensionless point, so how could time possibly be measurable? The puzzle, Wittgenstein thinks, comes from pushing a conception of measurement too far, presumably absorbing an analogy with measuring spatial distances, assuming, almost absentmindedly, that this conception applies here too—that it must: “we try to make the analogy hold throughout” (BBB, 7). And we can dig ourselves deeper by building philosophical theories around this assumption. “We find an analogy, embody it in our language and then can’t see where it ceases to hold” (LWL, 108; also 25).6 This leads to nonsense—e.g., to the idea that in order to measure time we need all the pieces of time to be present at the same time, as all the parts of a person exist simultaneously when we measure how tall they are. Grammatical clarity makes this plain. “Philosophy, by clarifying, stops us asking illegitimate questions” (LWL, 111). It allows us to dump the analogy, disown the question, and look at how we actually talk about time and its measurement, go back to everyday time language: “As soon as I think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary” (OC, 347; also PI, §129). Indeed, the problem does not exist—for Augustine—when he remembers his normal life with ordinary time-language: Augustine recalls to mind the different statements that are made about the duration, past present or future, of events. (These are, of course, not philosophical statements about time, the past, the present and the future.) (PI, §90) Philosophical confusions typically involve a family of ambiguities, possibly different kinds of unclarities, and unlike non-philosophical ambiguities, with philosophical difficulties what is unclear isn’t typically obvious. Identifying all obscurities, untying all knots, and keeping everything clear before us is typically complicated: “proper synopsis [. . .] is enormously difficult” (LWL, 26). Wittgenstein expends much effort investigating what clarity involves exactly. Substantiating his conception of grammatical-philosophical 72 Reshef Agam-Segal clarification, he identifies different methods and tools of clarification, and ultimately different types of clarity. “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (PI, §133). There are different clarificatory methods in the Tractatus too. One relatively well-known Tractarian clarificatory method involves attempting to rewrite philosophical propositions in a concept-script, Begriffsschrift. On this view, philosophical propositions like “1 is a number” (4.1272, LWL, 10), or “a thing is identical with itself” (5.5303), or “Only the present is real” (AWL, 25) simply cannot be written in a concept-script, which reveals their nonsensicality.7 Another family of Tractarian clarificatory methods involves the employment of ‘representational devices’, like ‘a=b’ (4.242). This proposition-like expression allows us to introduce a new sign into our language; it has a preparatory role.8 It does not say anything about the meaning of the signs it contains, Wittgenstein says, but it allows us to rewrite propositions more perspicuously. For example, if ‘a’ is a complex expression, and ‘b’ is relatively simple, ‘a=b’ allows us to maintain perspicuity by avoiding the complexity of ‘a’ when it doesn’t matter. The investigation into the nature and the varieties of clarity marks a continuity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We can see it in the Tractatus in the 6s, in which—or so I suggest—Wittgenstein discusses different types of clarificatory devices—devices that aim at different kinds of clarity. These include the propositions of logic (discussed in the 6.1s), mathematical equations (6.2s), scientific laws (6.3s), the sentences of philosophy (6.5s), and, as I shall argue below, also moral sentences (6.4s). Different sorts of clarity are needed in different cases, and the Tractatus seems to suggest a certain map of such needs and of corresponding types of clarifications.9 Different representational devices yield different sorts of clarity. In §3 I connect morality to a certain sort of clarification. In preparation, I’ll establish two objects of comparison: logical and philosophical clarification. Let me first demonstrate the logical clarificatory workings of one representational device. I’ll emphasize one feature it has: allowing for clarity without itself saying anything (compare TLP, 4.465, 6.121–6.1221). Consider this ambiguous sentence and couple of clarificatory expressions: Unclear sentence: The egg was laid by the dog. Clarificatory expression1: If an egg was laid by something, the egg was placed in its physical proximity. Clarificatory expression2: If an egg was laid by something, then this thing gave birth to the egg. The two clarificatory expressions clarify the ambiguous sentence into two different propositions, yielding two “translations”: Translation1: The egg was placed in physical proximity to the dog. Translation2: The dog gave birth to the egg. Clarity and Changes of Attitude 73 In this particular case, this method would be cumbersome. Something akin to the concept-script method would be more efficient. Still, the example demonstrates that propositional expressions can have a clarificatory function without themselves adding content to the original sentence.10 In context (where else?), these propositional expressions say nothing; it is not their function to say anything. Rather, they shed light on what other propositions say.11 Below I compare this to how moral clarification works. Now, as I mentioned, when applied to philosophical propositions, logical clarification doesn’t make the propositions clear, but rather clarifies that these propositions cannot be clarified—that they are nonsense: “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense” (PI, §119). Given my topic, I should mention that such recognition has moral dimensions: “[l]ack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful” (ROC, III, 33).12 Discovering we cannot clarify a philosophical proposition is like catching ourselves daydreaming. Compare the solution of philosophical problems with the fairy tale gift that seems magical in the enchanted castle and if it is looked at in daylight is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort). (CV, 11)13 The dream-setting around us collapses, the enchantment is lost, and we are left in the spotlight, wondering what we wanted. It is as if we lacked firstperson authority: we did not know what we wanted; we were lost. The failure to clarify a philosophical proposition pulls the rug from under our interest in the proposition, and directs our attention at ourselves. Hence the Platonist theme in Wittgenstein connecting philosophy to the study of ourselves:14 “Work on philosophy [. . .] is really more work on oneself” (CV, 24).15 And the mark of this is that we are reluctant to do this work. The hardness of philosophy comes from its being in this way personal: it concerns our will. “It is not a difficulty for the intellect but one for the will that has to be overcome” (ibid. 25).16 The clarity produced by the failure to clarify a philosophical proposition is a beginning of clarity about ourselves: our intentions, our wishes, our vulnerability to certain types of enchantments. This is, in part, why Wittgenstein in Tractatus 6.54 talks about understanding him—a person: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. Wittgenstein is here in the spotlight; he enacts what he invites us to do with our philosophical problems. This clarity is moral, not merely because it compels interest in something else: ourselves rather than a proposition. Not only the object, but also the 74 Reshef Agam-Segal nature and quality of the interest changes. Philosophical clarity evokes a mental sea-change, a personal reorientation: “Philos[ophical] questions, as soon as you boil them down to ..... change their aspect entirely” (MS 155 38v; PPO, 343). Although in one respect philosophical unclarity is logical unclarity, it dresses itself up as bewitchment and superstition (TLP, 5.1361; BBB, 143; PI, §110). Clarity here therefore goes further than logical clarity and is accompanied by personal transformation, a change of attitude: “Merely recognizing the philosophical problem as a logical one is progress. The proper attitude and the method accompany it” (LW I, §256). And that’s where the moral dimension of the philosophical discovery lies. This kind of change is a point of contact between the moral dimension of philosophical clarity and moral clarity that is not tied to philosophical problems. Philosophical clarity is in this sense a kind of moral clarity. Below I propose a connection between such attitudinal changes and aspect-changes. Like the representational devices discussed above, Wittgenstein says his philosophical propositions are elucidatory without themselves saying anything (TLP, 6.54). They clarify by shedding light on something else. Unlike “senseless” (sinnlos) tautologies, he says, his elucidations are “nonsense” (unsinn). They clarify not propositions, but our position vis-à-vis propositions.17 To use these elucidations as Wittgenstein intends is to let them reveal our vulnerability to philosophical nonsense. Wittgenstein allows himself to be taken in by philosophical problems. He goes back into the ‘cave of illusion’ and issues what he will ultimately expose as philosophical nonsense, so as to demonstrate, enact, how to see our own way out of our philosophical problems. You must not try to avoid a philosophical problem by appealing to common sense; instead, present it as it arises with most power. You must allow yourself to be dragged into the mire, and get out of it. Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer. But the commonsense answer in itself is no solution; everyone knows it. One must not in philosophy attempt to short-circuit problems. (AWL, 108–9)18 A similar kind of personal involvement, Wittgenstein thought, characterizes moral thinking; “an ethical proposition is a personal act” (PPO, 85). 3. Moral Clarification As in philosophy, so in ethics—and life—the goal is clarity. In 1931, Wittgenstein expressed a wish (and inability) to “sum up my life; and set it down crystallized” (PPO, 19), and in 1937 he writes: “Would that I see life Clarity and Changes of Attitude 75 as it is” (ibid. 237).19 Like philosophical problems, moral problems involve unclarity: What you should do to cure the evil is not clear. What is not permissible is clear from one case to another. (CV, 85) And the source of the unclarity too is similar: “As in philosophy so in life we are led astray by seeming analogies” (PPO, 97). Wittgenstein talks of being woken to wonder, but the point is wider. Moral clarity is achieved via a change in attitude or style of thought—not a change of opinion, but a change of will understood not as a change in desires but as involving a global mental shift, a change in subjectivity.20 In Tractatus 6.43, Wittgenstein contrasts changes in the world with a change in “the limits of the world”,21 and as late as in 1946 he contrasts improvements in situation with improvement in attitude: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us” (CV, 60).22 Different types of propositions—commands, questions, descriptions— can trigger such changes. Like the clarifications discussed above, here too clarity is not produced by saying something. So, for example, with reference to Nietzsche’s “Woe says: Let it go”, Wittgenstein talks of Remarks which you might call illuminating; from which you can learn; or which crystallise something which you had only half realized, etc.. You would not say that the question of whether you can learn from them depends on their being true. (Wittgenstein and Rhees 2015, 49) Dreams can have a similar function: The examination of a dream may show you something about yourself, in a way similar to that in which asking yourself certain questions may show you something about yourself. [. . .] [T]his may give one a different view of one’s self and of one’s life. (Wittgenstein and Rhees 2015, 13) Again, Wittgenstein writes: In the way in which asking a question, insisting on an answer, or not asking it, expresses a different attitude, a different way of living, so too, in this sense, an utterance like “It is God’s will” or “We are not masters of our fate”. What this sentence does, or at least something similar, a commandment too could do. Including one that you give to yourself. (CV, 69–70) 76 Reshef Agam-Segal Questions, commands, dreams, proverbs, and stories (Nathan’s poor man’s lamb parable [2 Samuel 12, 1–7], Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable [Luke 10, 25–37]) may trigger similar sorts of attitudinal changes when we put them against some fact or something we did. In fact, when Wittgenstein says that the Tractatus has an ethical point (PT, 16), this ethicalness is connected to the book as a single unit having a similar sort of application. As Cora Diamond argues: [. . .] the book belongs to what I have referred to as “instruments of the language”. It is in certain respects then meant to be like a proverb, a sentence available for repeated applications, meant to be brought into contact with a variety of situations not givable in advance. Only in its ethical use (and in the intention or hope that it have such use) is there anything ethical about it. (Diamond 1996, 249) And even the representation of a whole life can similarly function as an object of comparison, alongside which we can put our own life: On Kierkegaard: I represent a life for you & now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other relation to it you attain. Through this representation I would like to as it were loosen up your life. (PPO, 83) As in logic so in ethics, any proposition may be clarified; in this way logic and ethics are not particular subject matters but transcendental (TLP, 613, 6421). But words are not essential to moral clarification:23 ethics is not just about the clarification of propositions. Anything may be morally clarified— relationships, goals, life. And unlike logic, where there is an identifiable set of clarificatory devices, e.g., tautologies and grammatical remarks, in ethics there is no limit to which propositions can be used to clarify. In fact, anything may be put to ethical clarificatory use or have such an impact—music (PPO, 17, 81), a new sweater (ibid. 185), discovering we were adopted, or noticing we are older than our parents when they died—and that includes propositions, tautologies and even nonsense.24 This has significant implications for moral philosophy. It suggests a conception of ethics as an activity whose point is a particular sort of clarity: clarity that is not a matter of saying how things stand in the world or with us. Ethics, on this conception, is a matter of representing neither facts nor quasi-facts nor pro-attitudes towards facts. Some misunderstandings of Wittgenstein’s moral thought, like some ways his thought has been skewed by some who inherited it, connect to an ambiguity regarding the word ‘attitude’ (Haltung, Einstellung). For Wittgenstein, it is not synonymous with anything like ‘bias’, ‘inclination, or ‘preference’, but roughly with ‘frame of Clarity and Changes of Attitude 77 mind’ or ‘spirit’, or even ‘mood’ or ‘style’. His conception of ethics is thus distant from the entire debate about the truth-value of moral propositions, and from an entire range of views in moral philosophy that include realism, quasi-realism, fictionalism, and error-theory. Achieving moral clarity, for Wittgenstein, is a matter of bringing out the moral significance of things: of what we think, say, and do, of facts, situations and relationships.25 This idea is nicely captured in this image from Simone Weil: If I light an electric torch at night out of doors I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up [. . .] The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world. (Weil 1970, 147) A moral sentence (also questions, commands, stories, etc.) is morally meaningful not because of what it says, but because it sheds light on what other statements say, or clarifies things more generally: it has a tendency to change our attitude.26 Let me give some examples not from Wittgenstein. Like other representational devises, I argued, moral clarifications do their clarificatory work without saying anything. Take the sentence ‘She is a human being’. Suppose someone said “Don’t worry about the mess. Leave it to Peggy, our administrative assistant”. And suppose another replied: “She’s our administrative assistant alright, but she is still a human being!” Like the logical devices discussed above, the response here aims to produce clarity by being placed alongside what is here evidently unclear: Peggy is being mistreated. In context, the response does not supply information: one knows perfectly well that Peggy is a homo sapiens. Still, it clarifies; it urges an adjustment of attitude. Similarly, Raimond Gaita writes: Often, we learn that something is precious only when we see it in the light of someone’s love. [. . .] One of the quickest ways to make prisoners morally invisible to their guards is to deny them visits from their loved ones, thereby ensuring that the guards never see them through the eyes of those who love them. (Gaita 1999, 24, 26) Accordingly, ‘Prisoners have mothers’ can function as moral clarification. This, not by way of an inference: Major premise: Things with mothers ought to be treated in such and such ways. Minor premise: Prisoners have mothers. Conclusion: Prisoners ought to be treated in such and such ways.27 78 Reshef Agam-Segal If logical argumentation prototypically involves clarifying logical-grammatical, e.g., inferential, connections, moral argumentation clarifies by eliciting a change in attitude. Or again, logical clarification makes things thinkable; ethical clarification makes them thinkable anew. (In this sense, both logic and ethics are transcendental, conditions of the possibility of thought—“Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic” [NB, 77]—but their transcendentalities are different.) We may express the contrast as one between two perspectives: “from within” (TLP, 4.114) for logic, and sub specie aeternitatis (NB, 83) for ethics.28 Logic is alive in a proposition when in use, not as an object of direct contemplation; in contrast, the ethical way of looking contemplates logical space as if it were an object of direct contemplation: “The thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space” (ibid.). (Question: How can something that is essentially not an object of direct contemplation be seen as such? Answer: In somewhat like the way we can talk of ‘seeing at will’ in the case of aspect-perception: “And if this sounds crazy, you need to reflect that the concept of seeing is modified here” [PI, II, 209]. I discuss the connection to aspect-perception below.) So, for instance, in a familiar skeptical-philosophical context, “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul” (ibid. 178) reminds us of our life with people—how an attitude-towards-a-soul we normally have towards them animates our regard to them from within, whether we notice it or not. This reveals the logical transcendental function of the attitude. The same words in a moral debate about slavery urge us to examine our attitude from outside, as a direct object of contemplation. Like metaphors and jokes, moral propositions aim to alter the way we look at things, to “modif[y] the whole logical world, the whole of logical space” (NB, 83). Their point is not to give information, but to make an impression: “Just consider that the justification of an ‘ethical proposition’ merely attempts to refer the proposition back to others that make an impression on you” (PPO, 85). Failure to be impressed, stirred, by an ethical proposition is failure of the imagination: failure to let an image reverberate in us, so to speak, to get involved with the sentence. It is akin to failure to get a joke or a metaphor. Understanding a moral proposition, like getting a joke, requires surrendering to it—an act of will.29 This connects to Wittgenstein’s insistence on the personal dimension of ethics: “an ethical proposition is a personal act” (PPO, 85). Likewise, in the “Lecture on Ethics”, he makes a point of talking personally (LE, 8, 12), and he draws attention to this in discussion with Waismann: At the end of my lecture on ethics, I spoke in the first person. I believe that is quite essential. Here nothing more can be established, I can only appear as a person speaking for myself. (Waismann 1965, 16)30 Ethics is personal not because it is a matter of personal opinion or bias. Rather, Wittgenstein is employing a Kierkegaardian notion of subjectivity. To use a sentence ethically is to attempt to stir an imaginative involvement Clarity and Changes of Attitude 79 with some fact, say, and alter or renew our orientation to it—shift the very grounds of our dealings with it, what Wittgenstein elsewhere calls our ‘primitive reaction’ to it,31 “like teaching [someone] to cry” (LA, 18, fn. 5. Here he talks about an aesthetic sentence): not to refine our reaction, as a cry of pain is refined into pain description, but rather to intervene with the reaction on the primitive level and forge it anew. The personal here is in the service of a better appreciation of the facts—exposing ourselves to them, letting them leave an impression, rethinking them more truly without accepting for granted our preconceptions. The personal here is the opposite of self-assertion. Moral sentences thus help to make the significance of facts appreciable; but this significance is appreciable only from the point of view of our relation to the facts. It is in this vein that John Coetzee writes: That is the kind of thought we are capable of, we human beings, that and even more, if we press ourselves or are pressed. But we resist being pressed, and rarely press ourselves. (Coetzee 2003, 77) To employ a sentence ethically is therefore inevitably to leave it to our audience whether to get involved, press themselves, expose themselves, and allow the sentence to resonate in them. It is always possible to refuse or evade the ethical—to be morally unavailable. The personal dimension of ethics reveals a resemblance to Wittgenstein’s treatment of philosophical problems. To recall, philosophical problems are not solved in their terms. Rather, the very language in which they are formulated is found unstable, and as a result the problems dissolve. This involves a kind of personal examination, and ultimately, if successful, a change in thinkability, which Wittgenstein explicitly ties to aspect-shifts: “Philos[ophical] questions, as soon as you boil them down to. . . . . change their aspect entirely” (MS 155 38v; PPO, 343).32 A parallel point holds for moral concerns. Moral clarity for Wittgenstein involves not so much a solution, but a disappearance of what is problematic: “The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem” (TLP, 6.52). Similarly in 1937: The solution of the problem you see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life’s shape. So you must change your life, & once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear. (CV, 31; see also 55) Here too a reorientation, an aspect-change, is involved. As I elaborate below, the disappearance of a moral problem is akin to the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of when the duck-aspect dawns. Now, as mentioned above, philosophical unclarity, to an extent, is moral unclarity; but 80 Reshef Agam-Segal other kinds of moral difficulties are not tied to philosophical problems, and the kinds of changes in thinkability they require do not concern identifying some instability in language, or discovering that a sentence is nonsense. How then is moral clarity achieved? The key, I think, is in Tractatus 6.42, where Wittgenstein says there could be no moral propositions. Like the philosophical, trying to express the ethical terminates in nonsense: “a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions” (LE, 9). This claim is challenging, and this is my proposal: Sentences like “Peggy is a human being” and “Prisoners have mothers”—or, again, “This embryo is human”, or “Guns don’t kill people”—have both a moral-clarificatory and a fact-stating use, and these are connected. To employ a sentence ethically (and, as mentioned above, any proposition may be applied ethically) involves letting the content of (what in other applications is) a proposition resonate in someone’s imagination, perhaps one’s own. It involves “striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination”,33 when the mind has been shaped by conceptual distinctions, thereby evoking a certain attitude. So, to employ a sentence morally is not to employ it as a proposition—a picturing mechanism in the Tractatus sense (nor is it to employ it as a representational device of the kind discussed in §2). Anything that is (employed as) a proposition does not for that reason have the function of a moral clarification; hence “there can be no ethical propositions”. If there is something moral about those sentences—and plainly they can be so used—it will be visible only if we attend to their imagination-stirring function: appreciate not what they mean, but how they bring out the meaning of something else. To understand a moral sentence is to understand that the meaning it helps to bring out is not in it. The ethical, in this sense, is essentially contained in what is uttered without itself being uttered (Engelmann 1967, 7).34 As with philosophical nonsense, the attempt to logically analyze moral nonsense fails. Our dealings with philosophical nonsense end here; we get our philosophical clarity from this failure, and the mark of such clarity is that we abandon the attempt to articulate the philosophical. With moral nonsense that is not tied to a philosophical problem things are different; for it is not part of our intention to begin with to say something when uttering such moral propositions: “all I wanted to do with them”, says Wittgenstein about his moral propositions, “was just to go beyond [. . .] significant language” (LE, 11); the nonsense is part of the intention.35 If I’m right, the discovery of the logical failure here is therefore not as elucidative as the parallel discovery about philosophical nonsense. The discovery also does not have the tendency to make us abandon the sentences in their moral employment:36 Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. (LE, 12) Clarity and Changes of Attitude 81 Moral nonsense that isn’t tied to philosophical questions clarifies not by provoking involvement with it that lets us expose it as nonsense, but by other kinds of imaginative involvements. 4. Philosophy, Ethics and Aspects In §1 I discussed a family of contrasts Wittgenstein draws, and the kind of moral language I characterized suggests another contrast, between using a proposition to state a fact and using it to stir the imagination and trigger an adjustment of attitude. Now, the grammar of the moral language I described is not easy to capture. One main difficulty connects to Wittgenstein’s recommendation to look for the use of expressions (PI, §43), or consider their “significant use” (TLP, 3.326),37 when inquiring about their meaning. When employed as moral clarifications, some of the inferential connections of propositions don’t matter much; the bonds between meaning and use become slack. This is especially clear with absolute uses of language like ‘I’m absolutely safe’, which does not entail ‘I can’t get hit by a bus’. To early Wittgenstein, this smelled like nonsense. Wittgenstein investigates the oddity of cases where meaning and use diverge in the Investigations. For instance, when establishing the connection between meaning and use, he asks: “Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘If it doesn’t rain I shall go for a walk’?” And he answers: “It is only in a language that I can mean something by something” (note to §35; also §510). In PI II, he revisits the issue: “You can say the word ‘March’ to yourself and mean it at one time as an imperative at another as the name of a month” (215). The linguistic expression is here somewhat detached from its grammatical surroundings, “it is a language without grammar” (CV, 85), and something similar emerges in the contrasts I described in §1—especially in the cases that involve judging without standards: Judging without standards hardly seems like judging. Now, detachment of meaning from use, and the sense in which the meaning can be experienced, is a main theme in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the phenomena of aspects. Let me then say what I take aspect-seeing to involve. Aspect-seeing involves a mode of thinking about things apart from a routine of conceptualizing them. This typically involves a kind of perception that places an object in a new conceptual environment—as if glimpsing at the conceptual life that the object would have had, considering what might be. This, without yet treating the object as routinely having this life. I take it as the typical game of “seeing something as something”, when someone says “Now I see it as this, now as that”. When, that is, he is acquainted with different aspects, and that independently of his making any application of what he sees. (RPP I, §411) For example, when we see the duck-aspect of , we are not employing the picture as a duck as part of a routine, as we would with a sign that warns 82 Reshef Agam-Segal about feeding the ducks. Rather, we are viewing it ‘independent of application’, of use, and merely contemplating an alternative way of conceptualizing it—an alternative logical life—considering our primitive reaction to it. We get a “picture of the life of a sign” (PI, II, 209), “as if a germ of meaning were experienced” (Wittgenstein RPP I, §94; also §1025; see also PPO, 404, where he treats seeing different Gestalts as seeing alternative patterns). We may do this, for instance, if trying to decide how best to employ the picture. It is of the nature of the contemplation here to be partly experiential, perceptual. The thought is “echoed” in perceptual experience (PI, II, 212; discussion in Agam-Segal 2014). Note that Wittgenstein begins his discussion about aspects by drawing a contrast: Two uses of the word “see”. The one: “What do you see there?”—“I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness between these two faces” [. . .]. (PI, 193) In the second sort of case, the sense that there is similarity does not depend on the ability to point to a particular feature which is similar; it is not like when we say: “they have the same nose”. The contrast thus resembles contrasts described in §1 between two uses of ‘same’, and transitive and intransitive uses of ‘particular’. Wittgenstein introduces the topic of aspect-perception with a contrast of the sort with which he introduces the discussion of ethics. Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-perception has application to ethics. He ties the disappearance of a moral problem to a change in attitude, but he likewise ties the dawning of an aspect to a change of attitude. There is “good reason to say that we altered our visual impression through our attitude” (RPP I, §1112), and “Whoever observes differently also sees something different” (LW I, §772).38 He also ties seeing an aspect to willing: “Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to the will” (PI, II, 213). If nothing else, aspect changes give a powerful image for what moral attitudinal changes consist in, sometimes of the disappearance of a problem: how problems can vanish when the Gestalt changes. An investigation of ethics in Wittgenstein points to an investigation of aspects. Thus, in a debate about euthanasia, people say: “This is merciful. It is the same thing we do with dying cows”; others reply: “This is a human being not a cow, not something you would consider eating”. In ethics, people often argue by evoking images; they don’t just try to change opinions but whole Gestalts, transform primitive reactions, elicit different attitudes. Here there are objections to my suggestion. First, what would the right attitude be? Could ‘Peggy is a natural slave’ be clarificatory; could seeing her in this aspect be right? Second, morality is about right and wrong; but if clarification is like making an aspect dawn, then propositions could be Clarity and Changes of Attitude 83 genuinely clarificatory while obscuring other things—as disclosing the duck hides the rabbit. Does this mean that here we can’t talk about ‘right’, or that different ways of seeing are equally okay? Does this point to relativism? Wittgenstein rejects moral relativism. Asking about the right attitude in the abstract, he suspects, is meaningless: it is unclear what a Gestalt that is not a Gestalt of something particular would be—e.g., the particular circumstances of a particular life. “If you say there are various systems of ethics you are not saying they are all equally right. That means nothing” (Rhees 1965, 24). At the same time, however, he regards it as very much meaningful for someone to ask about the right attitude when faced with a specific dilemma—e.g., a choice between leaving one’s wife and abandoning one’s cancer research (ibid. 22), and elsewhere he talks of using images to “achieve the right effect with your words” (CV, 92).39 But what would the right attitude be? Here we should note that the reality of people and things can strike us, force itself on us in a particular way, limit our concepts and will. The rightness of an attitude for Wittgenstein can thus be understood as a function of what life would accord with the reality of things, what desires would ‘agree’ with them, what we can will— e.g., it depends upon whether we can honestly have a life with Peggy the administrative assistant as a slave, not merely see her briefly as such, or use this expression in characterizing her Sartrean-waiter self-image, but expose ourselves to actual involvement with her in such terms and think that we have thereby opened ourselves to what she really is, and to significant relations with her—relations in which we are exposed, morally available, to her. There is here a moral sense of impossibility and necessity, “necessity viewed sub specie aeterni” (PPO, 37).40 Again, Simone Weil gives a vivid image for such necessity: What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man’s eye out if I am allowed to do so and if it takes my fancy? (Weil 1986, 51)41 The impossibility here is not physical, but moral. It characterizes our life with things: the sense this life has for us. It makes certain thoughts, actions, and ways of seeing things foreign to who we are. Moral necessity, what is morally right, is appreciable only when we expose ourselves, and involve ourselves imaginatively. And this can also take a more deontological form, as it often did for Wittgenstein: The thought occurred to me that I should fast tomorrow (on Good Friday) & I thought: I will do that. But immediately afterwards it appeared to me like a commandment, as if I had to do it & I resisted that. I said: ‘I want to do it if it comes from my heart & not because I was commanded to’. But this then is no obedience! There is no mortification in doing what comes from the heart (even if it is friendly or in some 84 Reshef Agam-Segal sense pious). You don’t die in this, after all. Whereas you die precisely in obedience to a command, from mere obedience. (PPO, 233–5)42 Letting the reality of things strike us and feeling the necessity of their claim on us is here like coming into contact with an “alien will” (NB, 75). It is feeling that no room is left for what we want, and that a certain death is essentially involved in obeying.43 Four comments in conclusion: (1) Rightness as agreement is connected to ‘happiness’—an attitude that Wittgenstein understands as “agreement with the world” or “agreement with [an] alien will” (NB, 75). “Contentment with your fate ought to be the first command of wisdom” (PPO, 227). Faced with a practical problem, with things not going their way or with having to make a terrible choice, the unhappy person takes it personally, gets angry: ‘Why is this happening to me!’ Wittgenstein tells himself: “When you are sick, accommodate yourself to the sickness; don’t be angry that you are sick” (ibid. 191). It is one thing to dislike being sick; it is another to get angry. This is where the practical problem becomes moral—a problem in life becomes a problem of life: our attitude fails to ‘agree’ with the world because a seeming analogy misleads us (PPO, 97). We think of the world, fate, or God, as someone to disagree with. “If you want to quarrel with God, that means that you have a false concept of God. You are superstitious. You have an incorrect concept when you get angry with fate” (ibid. 225). The inability to accept a fact, our place in the world, our fate, is inability to come to terms with what we know, or know deep down. Unhappiness is thus also disagreement with ourselves, refusal to have our life; it involves tension between our concepts and our world, between will and life. (2) In the quotation above about fasting, notice how the necessity strikes Wittgenstein not as a logical conclusion. He rather gets caught imaginatively in, surrenders to, a thought that suddenly morphs into a commandment. The necessity goes to characterize the grounds of his renewed relation to things, his very orientation to them, and is itself groundless: “ ‘It is good because God commanded it’ is the right expression for the groundlessness” (PPO, 83 translation amended; Waismann 1979, 115).44 To emphasize: moral rightness, in Wittgenstein’s conception, is given only from the perspective of our imaginative involvement with things, the point of view of our orientation to them. Moral rightness in this sense is personal, “[g]ood and evil only enter through the subject” (NB, 79); again, not because it expresses some personal preference: in both examples above from Weil and Wittgenstein preferences are explicitly suppressed. Rather, moral rightness is personal because it is appreciable only from the point of view of one’s relation to things. Clarity and Changes of Attitude 85 (3) Early Wittgenstein, characteristically, does not discuss the varieties of rightness, or happiness—what ‘agreement with the world’ may come to in different cases. His conception of rightness leaves room, however, for various cases, including ones in which different, even opposing, ways to see something allow for meaningful imaginative involvement. The objections above therefore have a kernel of truth. Thus, Psalms 139:16—“my days had been shaped before any of them existed”—can be clarificatory, and so can its converse, e.g., Simone Weil’s: “The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance” (Weil 1952, 107). There are also cases in which the right way to see something is in tension with the right way to see something else—as seeing animals’ suffering in the meat industry in light of Nazi death camps might be in tension with properly viewing the Holocaust.45 And Wittgenstein is even willing to count certain refusals of ethics, particularly Göring’s ‘Recht ist das, was uns gefällt’, as “a kind of ethics” (Rhees 1965, 25), inasmuch as they express a certain attitude. More broadly, later Wittgenstein recommends an “anthropological study of ethical discussions” (ibid.), to get an overview of the varieties of moral language. Wittgenstein has never conducted this study, but here are some possible varieties to explore—in each case, rightness comes to something different. Moral clarification can be local or global. Telling someone “You have two hands, don’t you!” may get them to see themselves as participants rather than spectators in a particular situation; a film like Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There may make one realize that one has been living one’s whole life as a spectator. Further, moral clarifications may be determinate or exploratory: “He ain’t heavy; he’s my brother” determines what we are supposed to see; “Try walking in their shoes” sends us searching for what to see. (4) One especially noteworthy difference is between what we may call ‘preparatory’ and ‘non-preparatory’ moral clarifications (see Agam-Segal 2012). The point of saying ‘This is a human being, not a pig!’ is typically to get someone to adopt the right attitude towards a person, to ‘prepare’ a practice: to get them to treat the person right and become alien to certain kinds of treatment; it makes ‘preparations for a use of language’ (LFM, 249). In contrast, ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ or ‘We are only flesh and blood’ typically expresses a certain imaginative involvement with things, but does not point to or prepare a practice.46 Now, as personal as such involvement and attitude may be, it is nevertheless shareable. That is, others can find themselves similarly imaginatively involved, and they can be urged to become so involved. And when one becomes involved, one may say this is the right attitude, or even that some things are only visible if one is involved in this way. Martin Buber talks in this connection of things that are “apparent only to the gaze of fervor” (Buber 1947, 24).47 This is what ‘right’ may come to in some cases. There is a kind of Fregean fantasy about the accessibility and shareability of thought: that any thought is in principle accessible 86 Reshef Agam-Segal to and shareable with anyone, and that accessing it is just a matter of knowing the facts and being logically careful. Wittgenstein allows us to see how distances between people may be not merely distances of knowledge or logical carefulness (related discussion in Diamond 2005). Some distances have to do with differences in willingness to get imaginatively involved with things: in how willing people are to look at a person, for example, and try to see more than just someone to whom we have duties but also something wonderful, a riddle that is never fully solved, or, as in Wittgenstein’s case, to look at a religious practice and see it as demanding mortification. Of course, people are not always able to do that, and they are not always willing to do that even if they can. 5. The Practical Edge: The Disappearance of Moral Problems It is sometimes complained that Wittgenstein’s moral thought lacks practical import, that it promotes stoic resignation (“The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world” [NB, 81; 73]), or that it is dismissive about the awfulness of situations or choices we have to make (TLP, 6.521; CV, 31). Taking Wittgenstein to promote resignation is implausible, for resignation is unhappy—not an agreement with the world, but a reaction to perceived conflict between what we want and what we can realistically have. And he was surely not dismissive of moral concerns. In fact, he was alive to them even when others weren’t. He, for example, warned Norman Malcolm upon the latter receiving his PhD: “[. . .] may you not cheat either yourself or your students. Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s what will be expected from you” (Malcolm 2001, 33). Whatever Wittgenstein is promoting, it is not supposed to be or make things easy; as Rush Rhees tells, Wittgenstein used to insist: “Go the bloody hard way. [. . .] And it was not only a way of thinking and working, but a way of living as well” (Rhees 1969, 169). Wittgenstein was less concerned with helping us get what we think we need and more concerned with getting us to rethink what we need: “[. . .] my purpose is a ‘revaluation of values’ [. . .]”.48 His moral thought would therefore seem impractical to someone who wants help with problems as they understand them. Here again, the remark about his sister with which I began: One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove. (Wittgenstein and Rhees 2015, 12) For Wittgenstein, asking what can be done as an impulse is looking for an easy way out; it is shielding ourselves from being touched by the awfulness, Clarity and Changes of Attitude 87 from being changed by it from the inside, wishing to keep the world at arm’s length by staying busy. We don’t want to be changed. We tend to be attached to how we see things—what matters, what is trivial, what is awful. We tend to be attached to the ‘amenities of the world’ (NB, 81), to life as we know it. We want our problems to be solvable in the life we already have, the language we already understand. We assume they are; we don’t want to change. Similarly, “Nobody can say with truth of himself that he is filth. For if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, still I cannot myself be penetrated by this truth: otherwise I should have to go mad, or change myself” (CV, 37). Since we don’t change, we keep coming back to our problems “again and again as if bewitched” (OC, 31); life seems “to repeat [them] to us inexorably” (PI, §115). If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, & we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty. (CV, 60) The difficulty here is to challenge our problems—our conception of them, our sense of their reality, the cosmology and contours of our moral life: question our anger at fate, or our wanting to believe the bad cannot touch us, or our sense of our problems that depends on us valuing something or worrying about something—money for instance, or publications, or tenure, or things turning out this way or that. We need ‘a revaluation of values’; “the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated” (PI, §108). In the new conception and life, our moral problems will have no room. And the need to revisit our sense of what matters does not expire—not only for individuals; whole societies and cultures may be locked in battles about the proper way to see moral issues. As mentioned above, moral problems don’t disappear simply because we discover that the language in which we want to formulate them is unstable. Unlike philosophical problems, the motivation for solving moral problems is not intellectual to begin with; when Job cries “Let the day perish wherein I was born” (Job, 3:3), theories are the least that concerns him. “For my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not my abstract mind” (CV, 38). Moral problems thus dissolve not into intellectual clarity but into happiness, the right way of living. Now, Wittgenstein talks of ‘essential riddles’ and ‘incomprehensible mysteries’ in connection to some Christian doctrines (CV 36, 93), and I think happiness was such a riddle for him: one that can be solved only on a “higher level” of living than he thought he attained, and whose solution would seem nonsensical on a lower level (ibid. 37–8, 92–3). (“Non-sense” here, the failure to give meaning to certain words [TLP, 5.4733], is ethical not merely logical. It connects not only to the slackening of logical ties, but more importantly to the inability to imaginatively engage with an idea—‘be penetrated by a truth’.) 88 Reshef Agam-Segal Wittgenstein was nevertheless committed to this: Coming into happiness, resolving our tension with the world, if it is anything, has to involve profound “realism”, acknowledgment of the facts; and if the facts are awful, it has to involve profound acknowledgment of the awfulness—“Would that I see life as it is” (PPO, 237), live it as it is. There is unrealism in unhappiness, in being “angry with fate” (ibid. 225). Question: when a parent loses their child, would anything less than anger at fate even be acknowledgment of the horror? Wittgenstein offers this: “someone who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all as a problem, but rather as joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his life, not a murky background” (CV, 31). This is not so much an answer, but a restatement of the riddle of happiness: ‘agreement with the world’, the attitude and life that would allow the problem to be experienced as joy. And naturally, Wittgenstein cannot solve this riddle for us, or adjust our personal attitude (compare: “No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me” [CV, 4], “Anything the reader can do for himself, leave it to the reader” [ibid., 88]); at best he can give us some idea of what is involved. Whatever else is involved, happiness, being penetrated by truth, will not come from dismissing the problem or resigning ourselves to it, but rather from ever renewed exposure to it. The kind of imaginative language I discussed, its point, is such exposure. When Socrates gets Crito to imaginatively think his situation regarding the laws in terms of parents-children relationships, for example, he re-exposes Crito to the facts, and makes him rethink what is happening. This, in general, suggests a practical way of confronting moral problems—of coming into ‘agreement with the world’ by re-exposing ourselves to things, thus rethinking the terms of our relation to them; not by making things easy! Socrates surely doesn’t make things easy for Crito. Far from promoting resignation or dismissing moral concerns, such rethinking of our relation to things is most involved, most personal, and therefore hardest. In Stanley Cavell’s words: “[Wittgenstein’s] writing is deeply practical [. . .] it wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change” (Cavell 1969, 72). That we have this task in ethics—to feel the weight of the facts, personally relate to them, involve ourselves with them, let them leave a mark and reorient us, and be in this way clear about them—is a central tenet of Wittgenstein’s moral thought.49 Abbreviations AWL BBB CCO CV LA Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1932–1935 (Wittgenstein 2001) The Blue and Brown Books (Wittgenstein 1958b) Letters to C. K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1973) Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1998) Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Wittgenstein 1967) Clarity and Changes of Attitude LE LFM LW I LWL MS NB OC PH PI PGL PPO PT RC RFM RPP I TLP WC Z 89 “A Lecture on Ethics” (Wittgenstein 1965) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein 1976) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume I (Wittgenstein 1990) Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932 (Wittgenstein 1980b) Manuscript in Wittgenstein 2000 Notebooks 1914–1916 (Wittgenstein 1961) On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969) “Philosophy” (Wittgenstein 1993) Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1958a) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–47 (Wittgenstein 1988) Public and Private Occasions (Wittgenstein 2003) Prototractatus: an early version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1971) Remarks on Color (Wittgenstein 1977) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein 1978) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume 1 (Wittgenstein 1980a) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922) Wittgenstein in Cambridge (Wittgenstein 1995) Zettel (Wittgenstein 1981) Notes 1 It might be useful to mention an affinity with Kant’s distinction between having a price and having dignity: for Kant this involves a difference between evaluating something according to some standard, and evaluating without a standard. Further, for Kant, that the dignity of being human is valuable involves a kind of paradox (Kant 1997, 4: 439), and this is related to Wittgenstein’s tying the expression of the ethical to nonsense. It is possible to construe Wittgenstein’s discussion as contributing to a Kantian investigation into a particular sort of form of judgment. I do not explore this here. 2 “It is a miracle only when he does it who does it in a marvelous spirit. Without this spirit it is only an extraordinarily strange fact” (PPO, 93). “As to religious thoughts I do not think the craving for placidity is religious; I think a religious person regards placidity or peace as a gift from heaven, not as something one ought to hunt after” (letter to Maurice Drury Feb 1938: WC, 265). 3 Wittgenstein insists on keeping apart ways of using declarative sentences, as “a reaction against the overestimation of science” (CV, 70). 4 Clarification here is opposed to theory. For the claim that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is not proposing a theory, see Diamond 1991; Conant 2002. 5 “[Wittgenstein] cited a passage from Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics, in which the latter said that people ask about the essence of matter etc. because a lot of defining criteria have been hea[p]ed on these notions, and these criteria are in conflict. This irritates our mind, and makes us ask ‘what is the essence of so and so?’ The answer is not given by giving further criteria, but by giving less criteria. When these contradictions are avoided, the question is not answered, but the mind no longer 90 Reshef Agam-Segal 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 perplexed ceases to ask it. Dr W said he must confess that this passage seemed to him to sum up philosophy” (Minutes of the Moral Science Club, Feb 23, 1939: WC, 295). Also Conant and Diamond 2004, 64; Conant and Dain 2011, 72. “We store away impressions in our mind, certain standards [. . .] and are inclined to think that everything we may meet must conform with these standards” (Letter to Sraffa, 21 Feb. 1934: WC, 226). “[T]o construct new notations, in order to break the spell of those which we are accustomed to” (BBB, 23). Wittgenstein talks of an action being ‘preparatory to the use of a word’ (PI, §26), and of ‘preparations for a use of language’ (LFM, 249). This is a precursor to PI, §133. Compare James Conant’s contrast between what he calls the “methodological monism” of the Tractatus and the “methodological pluralism” of the later Wittgenstein (Conant 2010, 75). Cora Diamond writes: “the activity of clarification can, in some cases, be thought of as adding tautologies to the propositions that need clarification, and contrasting them with propositions to which somewhat different tautologies have been added” (Diamond 2004, 153). Tautologies, on the Tractatus view, are senseless—i.e., they say nothing. “One needs to remember that the propositions of logic are so constructed as to have no application as information in practice” (RFM, Appendix to I, §20). What Wittgenstein later called ‘grammatical remarks’ and ‘reminders’ (PI, §127) function somewhat like Tractarian ‘representational devices’: both have preparatory roles. Also AWL, 135–8. For a discussion of closely related issues, drawing on material from later Wittgenstein, see Cora Diamond’s discussion about different ways in which a proposition, a story, and even a word, can be “true” (Diamond 1996). See also Conant 2005, fn. 57. Moral dimensions of philosophy are mentioned in Kremer 2001, 51, Donatelli 2005, 24; Conant 2005, 68; Mulhall 2007, 243; Diamond 2011, 258. In the present volume, see especially chapters by Dain, Kuusela, Friedlander, and Cahill. “A philosophical trouble is an obsession, which once removed it seems impossible that it should ever have had power over us. It seems trivial” (AWL, 98). E.g., in Laches: “[. . .] whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto” (Plato 1997, 673). Wittgenstein on Plato’s method: “Philosophy could be taught (cf. Plato) just by asking the right questions so as to remind you” (PGL, 45). “One cannot speak the truth;—if one has not yet conquered oneself” (CV, 35); “You cannot write more truly about yourself than you are” (ibid. 38); “You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thought? The answer, I think, is: with courage” (CV, 52). “Ideas never make any real change unless it hurts us to recognize them” (PPO, 404). “I [. . .] wish I were a better man and had a better mind. These two things are really one and the same” (Engelmann 1967, 5). Lastly, Russell once asked Wittgenstein: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” and Wittgenstein replied “Both” (Russell 1975, 313). “I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do” (Rhees 1970, 43). Wittgenstein’s translation of Tracrarus 4.112: The result of philosophical clarification “must be that the prop[ositions] now have become clear that they ARE clear” (CCO, 49). “When philosophizing you have to descend into the old chaos & feel at home there” (CV, 74). Also Conant 1995. Also PPO, 4, where he talks about writing a biography whose purpose is “truth and clarity”. Clarity and Changes of Attitude 91 20 The discussion about attitudes connects to Wittgenstein’s discussion about the will and its relation to reality: “The will is an attitude of the subject to the world” (NB, 87). This attitude to the world is what Wittgenstein’s calls ‘the will as the subject of the ethical’ (TLP, 6.423), and he distinguishes it from ‘the will as a phenomenon’. 21 Relatedly, he contrasts ‘the will as a phenomenon’ with ‘the will as the subject of the ethical’ (6.423), and the ‘psychological’ with the ‘metaphysical’ subject (5.641). 22 Also CV, 72; LA, 35; RFM, II, §23. 23 “One could conceive a world where the religious people are distinguished from the irreligious ones only in that the former were walking with their gaze turned upwards while the others looked straight ahead. And here the upward gaze is really related to one of our religious gestures, but that is not essential & it could be the other way round with the religious people looking straight ahead etc. What I mean is that in this case religiosity would not seem to be expressed in words at all & these gestures would still say as much & as little as the words of our religious writings” (PPO, 69). 24 This suggests a way of understanding the parenthetical remark in Tractatus §6.421 “(Ethics and æsthetics are one)”: Aesthetic statements like ‘thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from mount Gilead’ and moral statements like ‘If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter’ come from the same extended clarificatory grammatical family. “Reasons [. . .] in Aesthetics, are ‘of the nature of further descriptions’ [. . .] the same sort of ‘reasons’ [are] given [. . .] in Ethics [. . .]” (Moore 1959, 315). This is not in tension with the claim that art helps to uncover alternative ways of experiencing and inhabiting the world, and thus has moral significance in allowing us to rethink our ways, e.g., Eaglestone 2004. 25 Jeremy Wisnewski similarly suggests that ethics in Wittgenstein’s later thought is clarificatory (Wisnewski 2007). However, the sort of clarity I’m discussing is not mentioned by Wisnewski. He also does not find the idea of ethics as clarificatory in the Tractatus. This prevents him from correctly characterizing what moral clarity involves for Wittgenstein—early and late. 26 This connects to Aristotle’s claim that certain judgments lie “in perception” (Aristotle 2004, 1109b): to this extent, changing someone’s perception, giving them a new way to see things, is morally clarificatory. Now, for Aristotle, getting someone to see properly is a matter of training and habituation; a single recognition or clarifying sentence would typically not suffice. But Wittgenstein is not simplifying our moral difficulties. For one thing, nothing he says suggests that what we identify as a single moral difficulty can’t in fact involve a cluster of unclarities of different kinds. More broadly, here are three questions regarding the relations between Wittgenstein’s and Aristotle’s moral thought: (a) What is the role of attitudinal changes in the shaping of character and habits? (b) What kinds of habits of mind would encourage wondering and exploring alternative perspectives? (c) What is the relative role in moral education of developing the ability to renew our moral experience and enliven our moral sensibility on the one hand and developing rooted moral habits on the other? 27 Compare John Wisdom 1953, 1965. 28 “The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We are supposed to look at our work from the outside, not just from within” (CV, 91). 29 Cohen 1997, 239: “What metaphor-making and joke-telling have in common is their solicitation of a complicity in the person to whom they are directed. They aim to induce intimacy and they do this in part by requiring an engagement of the hearer at the outset, just in order to understand what has been said. I suppose they are used in a kind of coercion, forcing the hearer to a special effort. The hearer is induced to join the speaker in a particular intimacy, probably a selective intimacy, not available to everyone; and already thus engaged, the hearer is nudged into the further intimacy of joining the speaker in feeling”. 92 Reshef Agam-Segal 30 “If in the end you don’t have disgust for this & admiration for that, then there is no justification worthy of that name” (PPO, 85). 31 PI, §244, p. 200; CV, 36; Z, §545. 32 “[Y]ou have to start thinking about these things in a new way” (CV, 55). “The philosopher says ‘Look at things like this!’ (ibid. 70); “In philosophy we must always ask: ‘How must we look at this problem in order for it to become solvable?’ ” (ROC, II, 11). Also LA, 27; PPO, 382, 384). 33 The image is from PI, §6; he there talks of other kinds of uses. 34 See Diamond 2000 and Conant 2005. I agree with Conant that, for Wittgenstein, the ethical in propositions is not in what they are about, or the vocabulary they employ, and that what is ethical in propositions can be made to vanish—be alive in a proposition without being its subject; in this way ethics like logic is transcendental (TLP 6.13, 6.421). Unlike Conant, I wish to stress the difference between the transcendentalities of ethics and logic. Logic makes things thinkable; ethics makes them thinkable anew. The disappearance of moral problems is a separate issue. Philosophical problems, but not moral problems, disappear, when we discover we cannot formulate them in meaningful language. I discuss this further below. 35 “It therefore seems that I could use all those expressions which religion really uses here. These images thus impose themselves upon me. And yet I am reluctant to use these images & expressions. Above all these are not similes, of course. For what can be said by way of a simile, that can also be said without a simile. These images & expressions have a life rather only in a high sphere of life, they can be rightfully used only in this sphere. All I could really do is make a gesture which means something similar to ‘unsayable’, & say nothing.—Or is this absolute aversion to using words here some sort of flight? A flight from a reality? I don’t think so; but I don’t know” (Diary entry 2.16.1937: PPO, 181). 36 Diamond 2000, 161: “The attractiveness of philosophical sentences will disappear through the kind of self-understanding that the book aims to lead to in philosophers; the attractiveness of ethical sentences will not”. 37 NB, 82: “The way in which language signifies is mirrored in its use”. 38 “ ‘To me it is an animal pierced by an arrow’. That is what I treat it as; this is my attitude to the figure” (PI, II, 205). “But do I only see the picture in this aspect so long as I have this attitude toward it?—That can be said” (LW I, §670). 39 Compare: “The work of art compels us [. . .] to see it in the right perspective” (CV, 7), and Wittgenstein’s discussion of “This name strikes me as the only right one for this face” (PI, §171), and of finding “the ‘right’ word” (ibid. 218). Wittgenstein further distances himself from relativism, talking of family-resemblances between uses of moral language: “We understand what Homer means when he speaks of the heroism of someone like Achilles or of the mourning of someone like Priam—not because these concern ‘eternal values’ or the ‘eternally human’ [. . .] but because we are connected to Homer’s world somewhat as by a rope. A rope, however, is not of one piece but consists of many interwoven, partially overlapping short strands of hemp of which none reaches from one end to the other [. . .]” (PPO, 364). 40 “There is only logical necessity” (TLP, 6.37). Moral necessity, I’m suggesting, is that necessity seen not “from within” (ibid. 4.114), but sub specie aeterni. This may partly explain why Wittgenstein says (LE, 7) that on seeing the absolutely right road, one would have to take it “with logical necessity, or be ashamed for not going”. 41 “ ‘It was impossible to see these trees & not to feel that they were responding to the words’. Just as I might say ‘It is impossible to see the face of this dog & not to see that he is alert & full of attention to what his master is doing’ ” (CV, 51–2). Compare Elizabeth Anscombe’s outrage at the utilitarian willingness to even consider the conviction of the innocent (Anscombe 1981). 42 “[E]verything can be demanded from me, & specifically demanded,—not just recommended as good or worthwhile. The idea that I might be lost if I don’t do it” (PPO, 187). Clarity and Changes of Attitude 93 43 Kant speaks of finding oneself “watched, threatened, and, in general, kept in attitude of respect (of esteem coupled with fear) by an inner judge” (Kant 1996, 6: 438). Likewise in Wittgenstein, the source of moral normativity can be thought of both as who we truly are and as a foreign will. 44 Groundlessness for Wittgenstein characterizes both ethics and logic (TLP, §6.1222; PI, §§289, 324, 477–85); but again, the groundlessnesses are different. For logic, grammar, or belief, to be groundless is for them to have an animating presence in our thoughts and actions without being direct objects of contemplation. This groundlessness comes out in such facts as that we don’t doubt that people feel pain when hurt, or that stones fall when dropped. There is here “an ungrounded way of acting” (OC, §110; §166). “The language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life” (ibid. §559). For a moral thought to be groundless is for it to embody a kind of imaginative involvement—exposure to the reality of something, and to the grounds of our life with it. 45 Cora Diamond describes this tension in John Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: “as if we could not keep in focus the Holocaust as an image for what we do to animals without losing our ability to see it” (Diamond 2003, 10). 46 Wittgenstein makes a related distinction in 1930: “The work of art compels us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective [. . .]. [. . .] besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is—as I believe—the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight” (CV, 7). And again in 1947: “At one point we can say ‘Now I see!’, ‘Now I understand’. After that we can point out certain patterns and the picture would have a new meaning for us. It would become a paradigm. Thus a smiling face as painted may become a model for certain expressions we find among people. The picture would then have a use for us. [. . .] The ‘click’ was compared with seeing different Gestalts, but the difference of course is obvious for to appreciate a picture is not merely the seeing of a new pattern” (PPO, 404). 47 “The sense of the verb ‘to imagine’ contains the full richness of the verb ‘to see’. To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with ‘the mind’s eye’. It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with ‘dreaming up’. It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned” (Berry 2012). 48 MS 120, 145r (April 23, 1938): “If, rather than a more correct way of thinking, I want to teach a new movement of thought, my purpose is a ‘revaluation of values’, and with this I come to Nietzsche as well as to my view that the philosopher should be a poet”. 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