Abstract
The chapter departs from Wittgenstein’s idea that “the running-up-against paradox is Ethics” to explore the ethical merits of an experience of astonishment. I argue that by the difficulty with meaning that these experiences present, they bring out the question “How am I involved in meaning?” I discuss the ethical value of an individuated personal involvement in meaning through the role that the first-person pronoun “my” plays in Wittgenstein’s early work and I investigate what the Tractatus calls mere “rumbling and roaring” as a paradigmatic case when such an involvement with meaning fails. I make use of an example from Eugène Ionesco to illustrate further the ethical character of this failure.
Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion—science—And art. And this consciousness is life itself.
Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916
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Notes
- 1.
Whether the possibility of their merit becomes actualized depends on whether one deflects or not from the difficulty of expression and the groundlessness of meaning.
- 2.
This is also a critique against Russell and against Frege . See 5.541, 5.5422, but also 4.442, in which Wittgenstein criticizes the judgement stroke: “[…] Frege’s ‘judgement-stroke’ ‘|–’ is logically quite meaningless : in the works of Frege (and Russell ) it simply indicates that these authors hold the propositions marked with this sign to be true.” The judging subject as the subject asserting that a proposition is true or false is logically meaningless . For a discussion on this, see Soulez (1995, 103–108).
- 3.
I follow here the Ogden translation (Wittgenstein, 1986) “(of the language which I understand),” for reasons that will become clear later in this chapter.
- 4.
Historically, the aim of individuation reaches its peak with the rise of modernity and the collapse of structures that had traditionally been seen as a solid ground (the death of God).
- 5.
In everyday language we do sometimes use those words interchangeably. This does not mean that the sense of “willing” Wittgenstein employs is cut off from natural language, but that in this case to make his point he needs to bring out the differences between the two.
- 6.
It is in this sense that the solipsistic subject (the willing subject) is a limit of the world : nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye (5.633). The visual field metaphor also comes up in the Tractatus, with an eye metaphor diagram in 5.6331. As Michael Morris (2008, 305–306) remarks, understanding the two faults of the metaphor can help understand the nature of the unstatability of solipsism . The first fault is that the diagram Wittgenstein uses portrays the eye as existing within the visual field (“But really you do not see the eye” [5.633]; that is, you cannot contemplate the subject). The other fault is that the diagram draws a line around the visual field, marking its limits and therefore presupposing that there is a region beyond its limits. But the visual field has no limits from the inside, and we cannot contemplate any limits from the outside.
- 7.
This can explain why the Tractarian solipsism cannot be cut off from the fact that there is language (that I am in language). In fact , in the proposition that, according to Wittgenstein, states the truth of solipsism (5.62), we read: “That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world .” The translation of Der Sprache, die allein ich verstehe can be and has been an object of debate, given that it is equally possible to translate it as “of that language that I alone (or only) understand,” “of that language alone (or only) that I understand,” and “of the language which I understand.” In the first two translations, that language is my language is taken to mean that I cannot have access to word meanings that lie beyond my understanding of them: this can concern either a question about the (im)possibility of getting beyond the boundaries of oneself (beyond one’s private mental contents) or a question about the (im)possibility of getting beyond the boundaries of one’s experience or acquaintance (see Hintikka, 1958). From this perspective, that the world is my world means that my words and their meaning are either a private mental matter or restricted to what I have been acquainted with in the world, that is, to my proper experience of the world. These ideas take us back to an idea heavily criticized by Wittgenstein, as discussed earlier. In fact , Wittgenstein asked Ramsey to correct his first translation of the passage from “the language that I alone understand” to “the language which I understand,” and Wittgenstein’s insistence on “the language which I understand” should be interpreted as his insistence on the fact that we do not understand outside language, namely, that understanding itself presupposes language.
- 8.
As explained in Chap. 2 and as I discuss here later, we can make sense without a recognition of the conditions of language, namely, we can make sense unaware of the responsibility that penetrates one’s words, and without a personal involvement with meaning. Being a speaker means that we have no choice except for our actions to have a moral potential, for our actions to be what we are responsible for, however one can ignore this or take it on.
- 9.
This idea is close to the Heideggerian distinction between rede and gerede, authentic talk and “they” talk. As I discuss in the next chapter, this is another common point between Wittgenstein and Lacan, who borrows this Heideggerian idea and turns it into the distinction between parole pleine and parole vide.
- 10.
Interestingly, one of the characters transformed into a rhinoceros is a logician, that is, a character who distorts the rules of logic and ends up with fallacies that look like reasoning:
LOGICIAN: “The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot have four paws. Therefore, Isidore and Fricot are cats.”
OLD GENTLEMAN: My dog has got four paws.
LOGICIAN [to the Old Gentleman]: Then it’s a cat.
BERENGER [to Jean]: I’ve barely got the strength to go on living. Maybe I don’t even want to.
OLD GENTLEMAN [to the Logician, after deep reflection]: So then logically speaking, my dog must be a cat?
LOGICIAN [to the Old Gentleman]: Logically, yes. But the contrary is also true.
(Ionesco, 1994, 18–19)
- 11.
In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein writes about the Tractatus: “In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical” (quoted in Monk, 1990, 178).
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Balaska, M. (2019). From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Wittgenstein. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_6
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