Abstract
I use Heidegger’s early thoughts about anxiety and authenticity to read Wittgenstein’s later work as a kind of performative ethics. Although overt discussions of ethics largely disappear from Wittgenstein’s later writings, these works can be read as exercises in radical philosophical honesty, by exposing the pictures he tacitly relies on to pretend to know more than he does. Being and Time gives up on the traditional ethical project of offering specific recommendations for what to do or how to live, and turns that lack of answers itself into the answer. The one thing we know about morality is that there is nothing to know about morality, at least in the traditional sense of transcendent values; we must honestly and courageously own up to the fact that there are no given answers, that our being remains forever unsettled. In other words, the absence of objective values gives rise to one objective value: the courage to face and face up to this absence. Wittgenstein too seeks an attitude of metaphysical humility, an admission that traditional philosophical questions have no answers, that they must be dissolved instead of solved. The Investigations can be seen as one long confession that his previous philosophizing had not been honest, that he had claimed to know things he didn’t know, deep secrets about truth and reality he couldn’t know because they weren’t there to be known. Much of Wittgenstein’s later work consists in precise descriptions of the mental images and analogies he associates with various phrases which led him to think that he had grasped deep metaphysical truths. His readers, recognizing similar notions occurring in their own thoughts, can then realize what flimsy support their own ideas have, thus exchanging their disguised nonsense for patent. This self-examination can be seen as an exercise in radical philosophical honesty that courageously gives up illusions, clearing up linguistic confusions in service to an ethical endeavor.
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Notes
- 1.
Monk 1990, 64.
- 2.
PI §118. See the end of the paper for a list of abbreviations.
- 3.
Stanley Cavell (1982) finds considerable emotional weight in Philosophical Investigations, in particular the worry that we might somehow lose contact with each other, but I have never found this tone of anxiety there, as fruitful as Cavell’s views are. The interlocutors’ worries seem to me the artificial results of confusions rather than genuine concerns.
- 4.
Georg Henrik von Wright claims that “philosophy was an integrated part of his own being” (Johannessen et al. 1994, 165).
- 5.
Fann 1967, 34, 52, 81.
- 6.
As his friend G.H. von Wright notes, “it is surely part of Wittgenstein’s achievement to have made concern for language central to philosophy. But few only of those who shared Wittgenstein’s concern for language also shared the peculiar motivation which aroused his concern for it. One aspect of Wittgenstein’s all too obvious alienation from his times is his feeling that not even those who professed to follow him were really engaged in the same spiritual endeavor as he” (1984, 204–5).
- 7.
I am not alone in noting this discrepancy. Brian McGuinness writes, “he brooded over his own defects and difficulties. He was a fierce critic of failings, especially those of honesty, in others. He came to write a book whose main point (he said himself) was an ethical one. What had the foundations of mathematics in common with propensities like these?” (2005, 77, see also Shields 1993, 1).
- 8.
All abbreviations given above.
- 9.
Z §447. His target is always “a philosophical trouble… an obsession, which once removed it seems impossible that it should ever have had power over us. It seems trivial” (AWL 98, see also CV 11, 48, LC 28, RFM 137, 272, PG 169, RPPI §65, §378, §380, §417, §751, §1015, §1074, PI §§105–6, §§435–6).
- 10.
- 11.
LRKM 57–8. In 1937, while writing the first part of Philosophical Investigations, he wrote, “but if I am to be REALLY saved, − what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams or speculation – and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind” (CV 33, see also CV 17, 53, 56, 61, 62, RFM 132, 302, PPO 217; Fann 1967, 64, 91, 94). One of his intellectual heroes, Karl Krauss, felt the same way (Janik and Toulmin 1973, 69, 81).
- 12.
- 13.
Engelmann 1967, 143.
- 14.
T 3.331, 5.132, 5.451–5.452, 5.535, NB 104.
- 15.
See my Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. MIT Press, 2012; and “Disintegrating Bugbears: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Basic Laws of Thought.” In Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Pathways and Provocations. Eds. David Egan, Stephen Reynolds, and Aaron Wendland. New York: Routledge, 2013.
- 16.
For example: philosophical questions “are bent, not on increasing an identical stock of propositions, but instead on bringing the one questioning, in his being, to a being and domain of matters…. In this type of questioning, the possibility exists that the answer is an answer precisely when it understands how to disappear in the right way” (Heidegger 2005, 55–6). I take it that the similarity with the Tractarian ladder to be thrown away once claimed is obvious. On Heidegger’s view of philosophical questions and answers, see my “Strange Questions: The Question of the Question in Later Heidegger,” unpublished.
- 17.
See Nietzsche: “whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!—But precisely this knowledge we lack” (1974, §301). Or Sartre: “the existentialist… finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven…. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men” (in Solomon 2005, 211).
- 18.
Thomas Sheehan (2001), for instance, argues that what he calls the existentialist paradigm of Heidegger interpretation was the initial reception, but it was corrected as more texts became available. Lawrence Vogel (1994) considers the existentialist reading of Being and Time “plausible,” by which he means that “a thoughtful reading of the text might yield [such an] interpretation” (7), although he ultimately rejects it (47–8), largely, it seems to me, on the basis of later Heideggerian texts rather than Being and Time itself. See also Aho 2003.
- 19.
- 20.
“Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘they’” (BT 168/130).
- 21.
Others have made similar claims about Heidegger. See for instance Olafson: “In Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, or human existence, there can be no question of an authentication of our projects by reference to preexisting rules or truths of any kind…. Views of this kind would not seem to afford a basis for ethical distinctions among the various kinds of choices that human beings make; but it is apparent from Heidegger’s account that an existential ethic would recognize at least one positive virtue. This would be a capability for living in full awareness and acceptance of one’s ontological situation…. Typically, human beings seek to suppress such self-knowledge… by an illusory sense of there being determinate and preestablished norms that define the individual’s situation and his action for him” (Olafson 1973, 29–30). He calls this virtue “ontological courage” (ibid.). Marjorie Grene writes that for existentialists, “the ultimate value is honesty rather than freedom” (1959, 143).
- 22.
- 23.
One example is the time he beat himself up and apologized deeply to friends for not correcting the impression that his parentage was ¼ Jewish and ¾ Christian rather than the reverse proportion (PPO 281, Rhees 1984, 35, 120; Monk 1990, 412). Fania Pascal writes that his less than forthcoming account of having struck a girl in the Austrian school he briefly taught at became a “crisis…burdening his conscience forever” (Rhees 1984, 37–8). Note that it is his not being fully forthcoming, not the act of striking a child, that haunts him.
- 24.
- 25.
Many of his contemporaries comment on the importance of honesty to him. Russell wrote that “no one could be more sincere than Wittgenstein or more destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth…. He is always absolutely frank…. He is not a flatterer but a man of transparent and absolute sincerity” (quoted in McGuinness 2005, 102). Brian McGuinness writes, “Wittgenstein wanted nothing but honesty” (McGuinness 2012, 4) and says that he was “fiercely concerned about any departure from the truth even for the sake of giving pleasure to others” (McGuinness 2005, 48). Fania Pascal writes that she “never met anyone more incapable of telling a lie” (Rhees 1984, 37). Von Wright speaks of Wittgenstein’s “unconditional veracity and candour” (Johannessen et al. 1994, 165, see also Fann 1967, 57; Malcolm 2001, 26, 60).
- 26.
PPO 125, see also PPO 105, 133, 141, 201, 221.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
CV 26, see also CV 77, Monk 1990, 371.
- 30.
- 31.
CV 52. “One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage” (CV 38, see also CV 44, Conv 55). He also proclaims as a general motto: “courage, not cleverness” (CV 38).
- 32.
PI §109. Compare with Heidegger’s claim that attempts to accurately describe Dasein “should capture the Being of this entity, in spite of this entity’s own tendency to cover things up” (BT 359/311, see also BT 61/36, 96/67, 151/115, 155/119, 167/129, 255/212, 265/222, 285/241, 428/376, 439/387, HCT 29, 87, 128–30, 136).
- 33.
- 34.
PPO 133, see also Klagge 2001, 177.
- 35.
- 36.
AWL 13. “We make many utterances whose role in the investigation we do not understand. For it isn’t as though everything we say has a conscious purpose; our tongues just keep going. Our thoughts run in established routines, we pass automatically from one thought to another according to techniques we have learned. And now comes the time for us to survey what we have said” (CV 64, see also LWL 22, 50, 53, 84, 101, LLVC 77, 153, 248, AWL 43, PG 50, 62–63, 80, 85, 96, BB 15, 25, PO 202, 456, RPPII §417, §603, §736, Z §86, §111, §118, Conv 23–25, RFM 210, LFM 61, 183, PI §150, §199, LC 68, OC §46). For more on this connection with Heidegger, see Braver 2012, 23–34.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
“What I do think essential is carrying out the work of clarification with COURAGE: otherwise it becomes just a clever game” (CV 19).
- 40.
AWL 61, see also RPPI §889, PI §164, LFM 137.
- 41.
- 42.
PI §435, see also PI §92, §126, §559. Baker and Hacker connect Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysics with his methodological commitment to description: “philosophy is purely descriptive…. Explanation would be possible only if it made sense to get behind these rules and supply a deeper foundation…. But there is no behind…. This insight shapes the whole of Wittgenstein’s philosophy” (1985, 22).
- 43.
T 6.45. In one of his rare references to the history of philosophy, Wittgenstein acknowledges the long pedigree of this aspiration: “men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combined—a priori—to form a self-contained system” (T 5.4541). At this point in his career, he does not reject this quest, believing that he has succeeded in it: “that utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety” (T 5.5563).
- 44.
- 45.
LFM 103–4, see also LFM 137–9, PI §426, PI II.xi, p. 185, 192; PhR 149, 212, 237, PO 94, LC 71, RPPI §139, Edwards 1990, 139.
- 46.
PO 408, see also PO 73. Wittgenstein’s interlocutors worry about cognitive nihilism: “but what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here” (PI §108, see also OC §108, LC 64). Michael Dummett appears to subscribe to this view: “if Wittgenstein were right, it appears to me that communication would be in constant danger of simply breaking down” (1978, 176–7).
- 47.
RFM 199, see also RFM 102–3, 205, 323.
- 48.
PI §211, see also PI §219, §228, §289, §292, §323, §377, PI §485, AWL 5, OC §358, PO 381, 395, PG 47, RFM 46, 326, 330, 333, 337, 350–51, Z §314, LFM 199, 234, 289, RPPII §314, §402, §453.
- 49.
PI §§105–6, see also PI §107, §§435–6, PhR 52, 61, 188; Harries 1968, 285.
- 50.
Rhees 1984, 82, see also 105.
- 51.
CV 18. “At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I think that this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person” (LWVC 117).
- 52.
He once called Kierkegaard “‘by far the most profound thinker’ of the nineteenth century” (Rhees 1984, xvi), and discusses Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication in his diaries (PPO 83, 131).
- 53.
Or, if we are cynical, like Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’ The Fall. I am grateful to Onur Karamercan for this suggestion.
- 54.
“One must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth” (PO 119).
- 55.
“What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought” (PO 165, see also PO 119, PI §464, §524, AWL 90).
- 56.
PPO 301, see also PPO 366. Wittgenstein often said this about G.E. Moore, a man whose mind he didn’t respect but whose character—especially his honesty and humility—he revered.
Abbreviations
- AWL:
-
Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, ed. Alice Ambrose
- BB:
-
The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’
- BT:
-
Being and Time
- Conv:
-
Wittgenstein Conversations 1949–1951
- CV:
-
Culture and Value
- HCT:
-
History of the Concept of Time
- LC:
-
Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief
- LFM:
-
Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939
- LRKM:
-
Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore
- LWL:
-
Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–1932, ed. Desmond Lee
- LWPPI or II:
-
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (Two Volumes)
- LWVC:
-
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann
- OC:
-
On Certainty
- PG:
-
Philosophical Grammar
- PhR:
-
Philosophical Remarks
- PI:
-
Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Rev. Ed. 2001
- PO:
-
Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951
- PPO:
-
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions
- RFM:
-
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Rev. Ed.
- RPPI or II:
-
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Two Volumes)
- T:
-
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Z:
-
Zettel
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Braver, L. (2022). An Ethics of Courage and Honesty in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. In: Rogove, J., D’Oriano, P. (eds) Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_14
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