Abstract
One of Wittgenstein’s lines that could be cited as a motto is “Don’t think, look and see” (PI § 66). This can be described as an empirical and descriptive but not scientific creed for the practice of philosophy. Wittgenstein focuses on language use, but language for him is always merely one aspect of human practices. Philosophical trouble is in his view frequently caused by use of language which has become meaningless through the loss of an appropriate, meaningful setting. By “bringing back words” to their ordinary uses we retrieve a sense of their proper functioning. In ethics Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has inspired a body of work which is less concerned with our language and more with our lives. Rather than focusing on moral language, the work of philosophers like Peter Winch, Cora Diamond, and Raimond Gaita has been concerned with describing (their own, our own) frameworks of moral life where certain ways of talking and thinking make sense. Moral philosophy, in these terms, is a kind of excavation of one’s own moral understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
Nonetheless, for an excellent overview of Wittgenstein’s own evolving ideas on ethics throughout his work, from Tractatus to his late thinking, see Christensen 2011.
- 2.
The original German for “agree to” here is “Einverstanden” which denotes inclusion (in point of view) rather than merely shared opinion.
- 3.
For similar lines of argument concerning the philosophical and ethical roles of narrative literature see, for example, Jonathan Lear (2010) on J. M. Coetzee and Niklas Forsberg (2013) on Iris Murdoch. A similar idea of the lesson not being in the texts is also prominent in Peter Winch’s classical discussion of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Winch 1987).
- 4.
This is a central point of agreement between Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch (see Hämäläinen 2014), and Diamond draws on both of them when developing her view of the ethical role of literature.
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Hämäläinen, N. (2016). Wittgensteinian Applications. In: Descriptive Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_7
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