Duncan Richter

There are intriguing hints in the works of Stanley Cavell and Stephen Mulhall of a possible connection between ethics and Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language, which are concerned with expressions of Empfindungen: feelings or sensations. The point of this paper is to make the case explicitly for seeing such a connection. What the point of that is I will address at the end of the paper. If Mulhall and Cavell both know their Wittgenstein and choose their words carefully, which I will take as given, then the (to me) irresistible inference is that they see a connection between Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ethics and his thoughts on private language. Yet this connection has not, as far as I know, been made explicit. Can it be? Should it be? These are my questions. Even if no one ever intended a connection between the “Lecture on Ethics” and the remarks on private language, those remarks do at least touch on issues raised in the lecture, and it is worth thinking about what the author of those remarks would say about the lecture. So in this paper I summarize the “Lecture on Ethics” (in part I), look at the private language remarks themselves (in part II), and then apply some ideas from these remarks to the “Lecture on Ethics” in part III. My conclusion will be that Wittgenstein’s later remarks are largely consistent with his earlier ones, the main difference being that some of what he first called nonsense he later called secondary meaning. One result of this change is that attempts to express the feelings that Wittgenstein regards as fundamental to ethics, aesthetics, and religion are first treated as doomed to result in nonsense but later as risky. Like cries of pain, they might or might not find a sympathetic audience.

The relevance of Wittgenstein for ethics depends on which Wittgenstein we mean. I argue that we should distinguish not only between Wittgenstein's personal opinions and his philosophy, but also, within his philosophical work, between broadly methodological remarks and what Wittgenstein might call genuinely philosophical remarks (which are not about philosophy but try to bring clarity to the mind bewitched by language). Wittgenstein's personal opinions will be considered irrelevant by most philosophers (although I try to show that they are not as crazy as some people might think), and his philosophical remarks consist only of what he calls ?boring truisms?. It is to his methodology, therefore, that we might expect philosophers to look for ethical implications. If that methodology is well conceived, though, it should be ethically neutral. I argue that it is neutral in this way, that Wittgensteinian philosophy says nothing about ethics, but that its proper use will not likely leave our philosophical beliefs about ethics unscathed

The subject of this paper is not Wittgensteinian ethics but Wittgenstein’s own ethical beliefs, specifically as these are revealed in the so-called Koder diaries. While the Koder Diaries, also known as Manuscript 183, do contain the kind of thing that one would expect to find in a diary (e.g. accounts of travel and personal relationships), they also contain more obviously philosophical remarks, sometimes as reflections on these personal remarks. Wittgenstein’s diaries illustrate well a point that Iris Murdoch has emphasized, that a person’s inner life can have an ethical dimension not necessarily directly related to overt action or to other people. The kind of ethical concern that we see in these diaries is one with what we might call global implications. Not in the sense that they might affect the whole planet but in the sense that, for Wittgenstein (or anyone else involved in such struggles or deliberations), they might affect every aspect of his life in the way that a religious conversion might change one’s whole life. This ethical ubiquity is another idea that Murdoch has brought to attention.

The A to Z of Wittgenstein's Philosophy is intended for anyone who wants to know more about the philosophy and the life of this enigmatic thinker. The book contains an introductory overview of his life and work, a timeline of the major relevant events in and after his life, an extensive bibliography, and, above all, an A-Z of ideas, people, and places that have been involved in his philosophy and its reception. The dictionary is written with no particular agenda and includes entries on philosophers who influenced Wittgenstein, those he influenced in turn, and some of the main figures in contemporary Wittgenstein scholarship. Suggestions for further reading are also included, as well as a guide to the literature on Wittgenstein and a bibliography broken down by subject area