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A meditation on wittgenstein’sLecture on ethics

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References

  1. Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 17–26, 25. Hermann Goering’s epigram can be translated as “Right is whatever pleases us”.

  2. The lecture was probably delivered on November 17, 1929. L. Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics” [hereinafterLecture], inLudwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 36–44, 36 [hereinafterPhilosophical Occasions]. Although Wittgenstein was invited to speak by C.K. Ogden, the first English translator of theTractatus, the members of the Heretics’ Society made up “a general audience that had no particular interest or training in philosophy”,ibid. Ray Monk asserts that the Heretics were “less élitist and more concerned with science” than another Cambridge discussion group, the Apostles; he also notes that the Heretics “had previously been addressed by such luminaries as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf”. R. Monk,Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin), 276.

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  3. The typescript, first published inPhilosophical Review 74 (1965), 3–12, was reprinted inPhilosophical Occasions, supra n.2, at 36–44.

  4. The best single collection of his written fragments on ethics is L. Wittgenstein,Culture and Value, trld. P. Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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  5. Supra n.1.

  6. Matthew 5:6 (King James).

  7. See, for example, G.E. Moore, “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33”, inPhilosophical Occasions, supra n.2, at 45–114, 103–04. See also L. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Grammar, trld. A. Kenny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), § 36, at 77, “Thus it could be said that the use of the word ‘good’ (in an ethical sense) is a combination of a very large number of interrelated games, each of them as it were a facet of the use.”

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  8. L. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, trld. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §77, at 36e.

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  9. See, for example, O.K. Bouwsma,Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949–1951, ed. J.L. Craft and R. Hustwit (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 40–41.

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  10. See H.-J. Glock,A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 107. “Wittgenstein’s personal moral outlook was egocentric and contemplative. In this he was shaped by Schopenhauer and by Weininger’sSex and Character, which proclaimed that ‘logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself’. One has a moral obligation to strive for logical clarity.”

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  11. Supra n.9, §77, at 36e. He introduces the concept “family resemblances” on page 32e of thePhilosophical Investigations, where he says that just as “the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross”, so too do the resemblances among our many uses of the word “games”.

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  12. L. Wittgenstein,Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trld. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1961). The first German edition was published in 1921, and was followed a year later by the first English edition.

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  13. Lecture, supra n.2, at 38. The explanation of Moore’s usage of the word “ethics” that Wittgenstein quotes at the beginning of his lecture can be found in G.E. Moore,Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1993), 54. Wittgenstein did not tell his audience of the views he had expressed in a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1912: “I have just been reading a part of Moore’sPrincipia Ethica: (now please don’t be shocked) I do not like it at all. (Mind you,quite apart from disagreeing with most of it.) ... Moore repeats himself dozens of times, what he says in 3 pages could — I believe — easily be expressed in half a page.Unclear statements don’t get a bit clearer by being repeated!!”,Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters, ed. B. McGuinness and G.H. von Wright (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995), 13 [hereinafterCambridge Letters].

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  14. Lecture, supra n.2, at 37.

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  15. Ibid., at 38.

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  16. Ibid. Here Wittgenstein gestures in the direction of his remark, in theTractatus, that “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”Supra n.13, Prop. 6.421, at 71. In one of the notebooks he kept prior to the publication of theTractatus, he explained the connection as follows: “The work of art is the object seensub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seensub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the viewsub specie aeternitatis from outside.”L. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, trld. G.E.M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 2nd ed.), 83e. Comparesupra n.13, Prop. 6.45, at 73, “To view the worldsub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole — a limited whole.” Concerning Wittgenstein’s views on the relation between Ethics and aesthetics, see D. Collinson, “‘Ethics and Aesthetics Are One’”,British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (1985), 266–72.

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  17. Lecture, supra n.2, at 38.

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  18. Ibid., at 39.

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  19. Ibid.

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  20. Ibid., at 38.

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  21. Ibid.

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  22. Ibid., at 38–39.

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  23. Ibid., at 39.

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  24. Ibid.

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  25. Seesupra n.1. For the argument that Wittgenstein’s classification of Goering’s remark as a “kind of ethics” was erroneous by his own standards, seesupra n.11, at 110. Although Glock calls Goering’s remark “a paradigm of immorality, not an alternative ethics”, he overlooks that from Wittgenstein’s perspective the language game of absolute Ethics that allows Glock to draw this distinction is only one of many imaginable games that people could play. See Wittgenstein’s discussion of the difficulties a translator would have with “a tribe who when they viewed things that were horrible, loathsome to us, clapped their hands, their faces bright, and now they always uttered the word ‘doog’.”Supra n.10, at 42. To write “doog” as “they approve” would be unsatisfactory, and for the same reason that the relative sense of our word “good” is not the same as its absolute sense. On the other hand, “[i]f we were to translate ‘doog’ into ‘good’, we should be suggesting not simply that they approve of certain things but that these things are justified by our law, etc.”Ibid. Wittgenstein’s conclusion in this discussion—“The use of the word ‘good’ is too complicated. Definition is out of the question”—may be restated as: the view from within one particular practice of using ethical words in their absolute sense is different than the view from within another such practice.

  26. Seesupra n.2.

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  27. Lecture, supra n.2, at 39.

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  28. Ibid.

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  29. By the end of 1929, Wittgenstein probably had already abandoned his earlier yearning for a “phenomenological language”—one that could be invented and then used to fully and accurately describe the sense-data of immediate experience. See L. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Remarks, trld. R. Hargreaves and R. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 51. (This manuscript was written no later than early 1930. R. Monk,supra a n.2, at 304). But he had not yet come to the realisation that the description of “private” experience required the use of “public” words whose rule-bound character would have logically precluded the description of states of mind in the sense that he probably meant them in the lecture. This realisation, when it came, found its way into Wittgenstein’s famous “Private Language Argument”, which was written in 1944, and appears in thePhilosophical Investigations beginning in section 243.Supra n.9, at 88e.

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  30. Lecture, supra n.2, at 39–40.

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  31. Ibid., at 40.

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  32. Undoubtedly Wittgenstein would have said that the omniscient person views the worldsub specie aeterni (“under the form of eternity”). I am considerably less sure that he would have characterised the life led by the omniscient person, as Wittgenstein describes him in the lecture, as being a good life. Seesupra n.17.

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  33. Lecture, supra n.2, at 40. Lest there be any misunderstanding here, it would be well to remember that for Wittgenstein “there are no such Things as facts” — e.g., the fact that this paper (a thing) has print on it does not itself (the fact, that is) have print on it; and that for him “the symbol for a ‘fact’ is a prop[osition].”Cambridge Letters, supra n.14, at 48.

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  34. This is the most important sense of Wittgenstein’s remark, in thePhilosophical Investigations, concerning what was then the standard meterbar in Paris. “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. — But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.”Supra n.9, §50, at 25e.

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  35. If the absolute Ethical were a describable state of affairs — a fact — it would have to be something “which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about”. But this state of affairs, Wittgenstein avers, is a “chimera”: “No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.”Lecture, supra n.2, at 40. This shows the sense of his assertion that “all the facts described [in the omniscient person’s big book] would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.”Ibid., at 39.

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  36. Supra n.13, Prop. 4.01, at 19, “A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.”

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  37. Wittgenstein kept coming back to this comparison, long after he had moved away from the picture theory of language. See, for example,supra n.10, at 24 (conversations at Cornell in 1949).

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  38. Supra n.13, Prop. 4.5, at 36.

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  39. Ibid., Prop. 4.121, at 26. It follows that philosophical theories which try to represent the logical form of language are like shadows trying to catch what they are shadows of, for prior to all theories of language is the language that lets the theories say anything at all. The logical form of this primordial sense of “language” is in principle unrepresentable, given the viewpoint of theTractatus. See generally L. Wolcher, “Critical Legal Doubts About Language,”New England Law Review 30 (1995), 1–38.

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  40. Supra n.13, Props. 2.171 and 2.172, at 9. The limit of language in this sense, Wittgenstein wrote in 1931, “is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence”.Supra n.4, at 10e.

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  41. Supra n.13, Prop. 4.1211, at 26.

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  42. Ibid., Prop. 6.42, at 71.

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  43. Ibid., Prop. 6.41, at 71. Why must it lie outside the world? Consider the Schopenhauerian tendencies towards solipsism that Wittgenstein expresses inNotebooks 1914–1916, supra n.17, at 79e, “Good and evil only enter through the subject. And the subject is not part of the world, but a boundary of the world.”

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  44. Supra n.13, Prop. 6.42, at 71.

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  45. Compare Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer’s reduction of human magical practices to behaviours that are merely based on erroneous opinions. L. Wittgenstein,Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trld. A.C. Miles (Gringley: Brynmill Press, 1979). On page 5e Wittgenstein exclaims: “What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!”.

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  46. Supra n.13, Prop. 6.52, at 73.

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  47. Gordon Hunnings succinctly describes the view on ethics that was held by many members of the Vienna Circle as follows: “[T]he majority of ethical statements either express one’s own feelings or are designed to influence the feelings of others. The rest were at worst simply meaningless, or, at best, misconceived attempts to prescribe a moral order that traded upon the logical sleight of hand of moving from statements about how the world is to statements about how the world ought to be.” G. Hunnings,The World and Language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 77–78.

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  48. Supra n.11, at 110. See also H. Pitkin,Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 30, “But unlike many of the logical positivists, Wittgenstein — even in his early work — cherishes aesthetics and religion and question [sic] of value.”

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  49. Compare W. Bartley,Wittgenstein (LaSalle: Open Court, 2nd ed., 1985), 157, arguing that Wittgenstein’s letters to his friends Paul Engelmann and Ludwig von Ficker show “how far Wittgenstein was removed from logical positivism, a movement which he is still occasionally, and ridiculously, credited with having fathered”. Although it is true that Wittgenstein was going through his most dogmatic “verificationist” stage at or around the time of the lecture — seePhilosophical Remarks, supra n.30, §166, at 200, “The verification is not one token of the truth, it is the sense of the proposition. (Einstein: How a magnitude is measured is what it is.)” — the lecture makes it clear that for Wittgenstein the nonsensicality of Ethical expressions was never a function of their unverifiability.

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  50. Lecture, supra n.2, at 37.

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  51. Ibid., at 40.

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  52. Ibid., at 40. Although Wittgenstein began the lecture by adopting Moore’s definition of Ethics, by now the more philosophically knowledgeable among his audience will have understood that he is aggressively confronting and contradicting Moore’s conception of Ethics as a kind of “science”. SeePrincipia Ethica, supra n.14, at 55. And as Hans-Georg Glock points out, Wittgenstein takes up Moore’s claim that the word “good” is indefinable only in order to radicalise it: Ethics is deep precisely because the attempt to say it inevitably transgresses the limits of language.Supra n.11, at 109.

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  53. See A.J. Ayer,Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1985), 31.

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  54. J. Derrida,Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trld. J. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 94.

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  55. Ibid.,, at 95.

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  56. Lecture, supra n.2, at 40.

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  57. Ibid., at 41.

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  58. “As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.”Ibid.

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  59. Ibid. Wittgenstein’s near-gushing about the existence of the world is uncharacteristic, and it has a distinctively Heideggerian flair. Indeed, it is probably the case that around this time Wittgenstein had been reading or at least thinking about Heidegger’s work. InWittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, trld. J. Schulte and B. McGuinness, ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 68 [hereinafterVienna Circle], in a passage labelled “Apropos of Heidegger”, Wittgenstein is quoted as saying, on December 30, 1929: “To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists.” Michael Murray notes that all references to Heidegger in this passage were deleted (and thus possibly suppressed) when some of Waismann’s notes were published by thePhilosophical Review in 1965, as accompaniments to Wittgenstein’sLecture on Ethics. M. Murray, “A Note on Wittgenstein and Heidegger”,Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 501–03. It is possible that Heidegger’s canonisation of the “Question of Being” and Wittgenstein’s near-canonisation of the “existence of the world” have more in common than some Wittgenstein scholars have cared to admit. Compare H. Finch,Wittgenstein — The Later Philosophy: An Exposition of the “Philosophical Investigations” (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1977), 262–64 with L. Wolcher, “The Man in a room: Remarks on Derrida’s Force of Law”,Law and Critique 7 (1996), 35–64.

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  60. Lecture, supra n.2, at 41. Wittgenstein’s use of this example in the lecture was probably connected to an experience he had while watching a play some two decades before. William Bartley says of this event: Around 1910 Wittgenstein attended and was deeply affected by a performance of the Austrian playwright Ludwig Anzengruber’s play, “Die Kreuzelschreiber”. At the beginning of the third act, one of the characters states: “Whether you are lying six feet deep in the earth beneath the grass or whether you have to face this many more thousand times again—nothing can happen to you. And this was so wonderful that I hollered to all the others around me: Nothing can happen to you ... Now be joyful, joyful — Nothing can happen to you.” Wittgenstein was struck by this thought, and later described it to Malcolm as a turning point in his attitude toward religion. Wittgenstein,supra n.50, at 189, citing N. Malcolm,Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 2nd ed.), 70.

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  61. Lecture, supra n.2, at 41, “And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense.”

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  62. Ibid., at 42.

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  63. Ibid.

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  64. See, for example,Cambridge Letters, supra n.14, at 47, where Wittgenstein writes to Russell, in 1913: “Your question was — I think — due to the misprint (polarity instead of bipolarity). What I mean to say is that we only then understand a prop[osition] if we know both what would be the case if it was false and what if it was true.”

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  65. Lecture, supra n.2, at 41. See alsoPhilosophical Remarks, supra n.30, §54, at 84, “Language can only say those things that we can also imagine otherwise.”

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  66. Lecture, supra n.2, at 41–42.

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  67. Ibid. Compare G. Frege,The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry Into the Concept of Number, trld. J.L. Austin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2nd ed., 1980), §29, at 40, “The content of a concept diminishes as its extension increases; if its extension becomes all-embracing, its content must vanish altogether.”

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  68. Lecture, supra n.2, at 42.

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  69. Ibid., at 43.

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  70. SeeVienna Circle, supra n.60, at 117, “In religion talking is not metaphorical, either; for otherwise it would have been possible to say the same thing in prose.”

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  71. Lecture, supra n.2, at 43.

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  72. R. Descartes, “The Principles of Philosophy”, inA Discourse on Method, trld. J. Veitch (London: J.M. Dent, 1986), 146–228.

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  73. Ibid., at 167.

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  74. Around the time of the lecture, Wittgenstein wrote: One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I’, particularly when it is used in representing immediate experience, as in ‘I can see a red patch’. It would be instructive to replace this way of speaking by another in which immediate experience would be represented without using the personal pronoun; for then we’d be able to see that the previous representation wasn’t essential to the facts.Philosophical Remarks, supra n.30, §57, at 88; see alsosupra n.9, §§404–05, at 122e–123e.

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  75. Epictetus, “The Manual,” inEssential Works of Stoicism, ed. M. Hadas (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), 85–101, §8, at 87.

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  76. Supra n.13, Prop. 7, at 74, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

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  77. Neurath is quoted insupra n.54, at 32.

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  78. Vienna Circle, supra n.60, at 117. See also what he wrote to his friend Paul Engelmann, of a poem the latter had sent him to read in the 1920s: “The poem by Uhland is really magnificent. And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be — unutterably — contained in what has been uttered!” P. Engelmann,Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir, trld. L. Furtmüller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 84–85.

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  79. Lecture, supra n.2, at 42.

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  80. Ibid., at 43–44.

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  81. Ibid., at 44. How could we even want to express something the expression of which is always bound to be nonsense? Here Wittgenstein can perhaps be forgiven, given the context of his remarks, for not taking care to clarify the grammar of “wanting”, as he had done or was about to do for the grammar of “wishing” and “expecting” in preparing the manuscript that was later to be published as thePhilosophical Remarks. Seesupra n.30, §33, at 70: “Expectation, so to speak, prepares a yardstick for measuring the event when it comes and what’s more, in such a way that it will necessarily be possible to measure the one with the other, whether the event coincides with the expected graduation mark or not.”

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  82. Lecture, supra n.2, at 44.

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  83. Ibid.

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  84. Ramsey’s remark is quoted in A.C. Grayling,Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55.

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  85. Lecture, supra n.2, at 44.

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  86. Ibid. (emphasis added).

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  87. Vienna Circle, supra n.60, at 117–18. Compare William Bartley’s observation that “Wittgenstein insisted that philosophical encounter with him produce moral change.”Supra n.50, at 16.

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  88. Supra n.13, at 71, 74.

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  89. See D. Downing,A Dictionary of Mathematical Terms (Hauppauge: Barron’s, 1995, 2nd ed.), at 176, “An irrational number is a real number that is not a rational number (i.e., it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers). Irrational numbers can be represented by decimal fractions in which the digits go on forever without ever repeating a pattern.” π, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, was first proved to be an irrational number in the eighteenth century, by J.H. Lambert. R. Courant and H. Robbins,What is Mathematics? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 2nd ed.), at 300.

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  90. Courant and Robbins,supra n.90, at 69; see D. Downing,supra n.90, at 279.

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  91. G.H. Hardy,A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63.

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  92. Seesupra n.4, at 29e, “people who have never carried out an investigation of a philosophical kind, like, for instance, most mathematicians, are not equipped with the right visual organs for this type of investigation or scrutiny.”

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  93. A good historical discussion of the various rules that mathematicians have used to calculate the value of π can be found in P. Beckmann,A History of π (PI) (Boulder: Golem Press, 1982, 5th ed.).

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  94. Supra n.92, at 102.

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  95. For Wittgenstein, π’s rule, like all of the axioms of geometry, has “the character of stipulations concerning the language in which we want to describe spatial objects. They are rules of syntax. The rules of syntax are not about anything; they are laid down by us. We can stipulate only something that we ourselves do.”Vienna Circle, supra n.60, at 62.

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  96. SeeThe Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, trld. T. Heath (New York: Dover, 1956), I.326 (showing An-Narizi’s construction for dividing a straight line into any number of equal parts).

  97. SeeA Dictionary of Mathematical Terms, supra n.90, at 35: “A Cartesian coordinate system is a system whereby points on a plane are identified by an ordered pair of numbers, representing the distances to two perpendicular axes.”

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  98. Although Wittgenstein himself was no particular friend of set theory, let me hasten to say that set theoretical calculations in mathematics (as opposed to non-mathematical philosophising about the “possibility” and “actuality” of sets with transfinite numbers of objects) are not what I am criticising in text. Compare L. Wittgenstein,Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trld. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 260, “[I]n set theory, one is doing a branch of mathematics of whose application one forms an entirely false idea. Now, isn’t one doing mathematics none the less?”

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  99. CompareWhat is Mathematics?, supra n.90, at 299, which gives the relations cited in text as leading to a method for calculating the value of 2π (and hence π) by constructing inscribed and circumscribing regularn-sided polygons within and without a circle of unit radius: “[A]sn increases, each of the sequencesp n,q n approaches 2π monotonically, and with each step we obtain a smaller margin of error in the approximation of 2π given byp n orq n.”

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  100. Philosophical Remarks, supra n.30, §193, at 237, makes a similar point with respect to the operation (√2)2, where the decimal value of √2 is expanded to the nth place. Consider alsoibid., §128, at 149, where Wittgenstein says: “‘Can God know all the places in the expansion of π?’ would have been a good question for the schoolmen to ask. In all such cases the answer runs, ‘The question is senseless’.”

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  101. See, for example, Walter Benjamin’s distinction between mythical (legal) violence and divine violence, and his remark that the “the expiatory power of [divine] violence is not visible to men.” W. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, inWalter Benjamin: Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writings, trld. E. Jephcott, ed. P. Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 277–300, at 300.

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  102. The quoted phrase, concerning the incalculability of justice, is from C. Douzinas and R. Warrington,Justice Miscarried: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Law (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 184. It is immediately preceded, on the same page, by the assertion that “justice is the dislocation of the said of the law by the — unrepresentable — saying of ethics”.

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  103. Seesupra n.9, §201, at 81e, where Wittgenstein discusses the problem of “following a rule”. He reminds us that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.”

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  104. Some accuse Wittgenstein of being ahistorical by characterising Ethics as timelessly and transcendentally unsayable. See, e.g., A. Janik and S. Toulmin,Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 243. But I think they overlook the most important point of his lecture, which is to acknowledge and offer respect to those efforts we make in history to say the unsayable.

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  105. Lecture, supra n.2, at 44.

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  106. Supra n.4, at 1e.

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  107. Philosophical Grammar, supra n.8, at 381.

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  108. The 1996 Critical Legal Conference, held at the University of East London.

  109. Supra n.4, at 3e (last entry in 1929).

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  110. Ibid., at 2e. Comparesupra n.17.

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  111. “The Second Coming”, inThe Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. R. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 187 (first published in 1921).

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  112. A. Hitler,Mein Kampf, trld. R. Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 289 (first German edition published in 1925).

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  113. It is clear that Wittgenstein was no friend to modernity in any of its manifestations. In an early draft of the printed foreword toPhilosophical Remarks, supra n.30, for example, he wrote, in 1930: “The spirit of this civilisation makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author.”Supra n.4, at 6e.

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  114. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Remarks, supra n.30, at 7.

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  115. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir, supra n.79, at 143–44, “My book [theTractatus] draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside, as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits.”

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  116. N. Carter,This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 143.

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An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 1996 Critical Legal Conference at the University of East London.

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Wolcher, L.E. A meditation on wittgenstein’sLecture on ethics . Law Critique 9, 3–35 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02699906

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