presented in the spectacle of the three prematurely debauched girls:
“As for the girls, he turned them off, he would not admit one of
them, eagerly as they implored and hard as they tried to enter
by force if not by permission. The hunchback alone managed to
slip in under his outstretched arm, but he rushed after her, seized
her by the skirts, whirled her once round his head, and then set
her down before the door among the other girls, who had not
dared meanwhile, although he had quitted his post, to cross the
threshold. K. did not know what to make of all this, for they
seemed to be on the friendliest terms together.”232
This seems to be an intentional foreshadowing of the man from the
country debating whether or not to enter the doorway into the Law
without permission, especial y as Titorelli is a man in the confidence of the Court, with a higher unofficial position than many of the
Court officials. It has been suggested that the three girls who storm
his studio by force, like the three women who offer K. help, are
symbolic references to the Goddess Hecate. Titorelli is, of course,
the painter of the image of the War Goddess of Justice who is also
the Goddess of the Hunt.
The Law maintains the firm ground of ‘the country’, even if
those who live there are free from having to deal with the law. The
Priest explains that the man from the country was not compelled to
remain at the side of the doorway into the Law. He could have gone
back into the country and lived his life as he wished. Nevertheless,
he lives because there is a Law. The man from the country, for whom
alone this entryway to the Law has been forged, is a man who is
called before the Law – as into the primordial understanding that 232 Ibid., 143.
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precedes principles of limited relevance. He is called to a wisdom before the scriptures, a wisdom that surpasses the deception of the
Law, in a word, to Witchcraft. The parable is clear enough that unlike the doorkeeper, it is his destiny to enter, but he may choose the time of this destiny’s fulfillment. If he were to storm through its entrance without permission, the Law would not be destroyed. Rather, he
would be ecstatical y annihilated by the understanding that the
scriptures are a lie and the essence of the Law is the unknowable
Oneness of Being.
The same is true of Joseph K. The very first line of The Trial is
“someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without
having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”233
The passages above suggest that this view, implicitly attributed by
Kafka to the perspective of Joseph K., is a naïve presumption. No one
has been telling lies about Joseph K., rather the wrong that Joseph K.
has done is that he has believed himself to exist at al . Joseph K. is a lie, he exists a lie. There is some aspect of him that suspects this, and his arrest is not so much a condemnation (of his possessiveness and
desire to gain advantage) as it is an invitation into the devastating
revelation of the triune goddess that is already seducing him from
within. Yet it remains true of Joseph K. that, as Kafka writes in
his Blue Octavo Notebooks: “His answer to the assertion that he did perhaps possess, but that he was not, was only trembling and palpitations.”234
233 Ibid., 1.
234 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 90.
316
WITTGENSTEIN’S INCOHERENT
ETHICS
The most highly reputed philosophers in Western history,
from Plato and Aristotle to Locke, Kant, and Hegel, did
not confine their work to epistemology or metaphysics.
Ever since conservative mobs set fire to the Pythagorean
schools and condemned Socrates to death for confronting the likes
of Euthyphro and Thrasymachus, the quest to justify some universal
standard of ethical conduct has been central to philosophy’s defining
struggle against religious dogma and the blind rule of force.
While Ludwig Wittgenstein is hailed by some as the preeminent
philosopher of the 20th century, or even as the greatest thinker since Immanuel Kant, he never developed a coherent ethics. Perhaps
this could be overlooked if Wittgenstein were simply uninterested
in ethics, but the fact is that he always believed there to be nothing more important. The theory of meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus1 rejects the ethical as nonsensical. Yet the young Wittgenstein attempts, both in that work itself and in his early
wartime notebooks,2 to stow away and protect ethics on a mystical y
transcendent plane.
In the first section of this paper, I argue that this attempt
is ineffectual and incoherent from both an ontological and an
epistemological perspective. So far as his latter work, as best
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003).
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
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exemplified by Philosophical Investigations 3 and On Certainty,4
Wittgenstein’s views on the rational incommensurability of diverse
“language games” precludes any understanding of Justice that
transcends cultural conditioning or coercion. I hope to make clear why that is so in the second section of this paper. I conclude, in the paper’s third section, by considering the late Wittgenstein’s often passionate remarks on religion. These remarks accord religious beliefs a unique
linguistic, cultural, and psychological status that cannot be accounted for within the framework of the Investigations or On Certainty. They may have been the attempt of a person with deep moral sentiments to
emotional y compensate for, or even to momentarily escape from, the
amoral character of his rigorous philosophical work.
1. The Incoherent ‘Ethics’ of the Tractatus
In his “Letter to Ficker”, a potential publisher of the Tractatus, the young Wittgenstein claims that the work’s main point is ethical,
but that it addresses the Ethical by delimiting it from within, which
“strictly speaking”, is the only way that he believes it could be
delimited. The letter reads in part:
I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword [to the
Tractatus] which now actual y are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted
to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is
here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited
from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that,
strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.5
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German text, with a revised English translation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
5 Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 33.
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However, despite Wittgenstein’s claim in this letter, the so-called
“ethics” of the Tractatus is b
oth ineffectual and incoherent, especial y when one traces its origins to remarks within Wittgenstein’s wartime
Notebooks of 1914-1916.
At the core of the ethical problem of the Tractatus is its model of an isomorphic, or one-to-one, relationship between linguistic
propositions and worldly facts. The correspondence between any
statement and the facts that it intends to represent is reducible to
one between elementary propositions and states of affairs, and
these are in turn respectively reducible to simple names and simple
objects. “Meaning” in the sense of “sense” is a function of the way
that simple names intend or point to certain simple objects that
are elementary constituents of states of affairs. The names out
of which all propositions are ultimately constituted function as
proxies for objects. We use them in lieu of having to find and point
to something every time we want to make reference to it. It is in
this sense that a name is supposed to (proximal y) mean an object.
The early Wittgenstein says that “we feel that the world must consist
of elements” that are its non-composite “substance”, all change
being precisely describable in terms of the “configuration” of these
“unalterable and subsistent” objects.6
The tractarian Wittgenstein rejects any nexus of necessary
connections outside of those constitutive of logic. Like Hume, he
views the relationship between empirical ‘causes’ and their apparent
‘effects’ as a contingent one. “Causation” is no more than a useful
concept employed under a given paradigm of representation, not an
absolute ontological reality true of the world in itself.7 This means
that there is no logical y necessary connection between my willing
p and the fact that p actual y does come about as an empirical event.
According to Wittgenstein, this is true at a level more fundamental
than that which differentiates the movements of voluntary and
involuntary muscles.8 My body is a mere phenomenon that cannot
6 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 2.02, 2.021, 2.0271; Notebooks, 62.
7 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 6.33-6.341, 6.36f., 6.362.
8 Ibid., 5.631.
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be ontological y separated from the rest of the phenomenal world
over which I have no control.9
If Wittgenstein had not gone on to make any explicit references
to ethics, the straightforward ethical implications of such a
worldview would clearly be that propositions concerning rape,
pil age, and genocide have the same status as those referring to an
avalanche. To talk of such ‘terrible’ incidents in ethical terms cannot even be “false”, because the statements involved are not reducible
to simple names of elementary particulars that stand in precise
relations to other such simples in order to constitute a certain state of affairs that either obtains in fact or is found not to be the case, by means of scientifical y precise empirical observation. Propositions
that cannot be translated into scientific statements of fact do not
even refer to possible but factual y false states of affairs — they are, according to the Tractatus, quite literal y sense-less. In other words, Wittgenstein assumes that no sensory experience could serve to verify or falsify them. Such statements violate the isomorphism
of language and reality: “the limits of that language (the language
which I understand) mean the limits of my world.”10
Though it is whol y non-ethical, this position is clearly
comprehensible. However, the tractarian Wittgenstein descends
into incoherence when he tries to salvage ethics by means of an
ill-defined transcendental mysticism concerning the relationship
between Will and the World. Wittgenstein acknowledges how
profound dissatisfaction with the inhuman doctrine above could
motivate a recourse to the mystical: “The urge toward the mystical
comes of the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all. ”11 Although this sounds like a warning against taking recourse to the mystical, if that is what it is Wittgenstein
himself apparently fails to heed it.
9 Ibid., 5.641; Notebooks, 2.9, 12.10, 4.11.16.
10 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 5.62.
11 Wittgenstein,
Notebooks, 51; cf. Tractatus, 6.52.
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In the Tractatus, from 5.62-5.641, Wittgenstein lays out a doctrine of a metaphysical subject that lies at the “limits of the world”. In
6.373 and 6.374, Wittgenstein attributes a “wil ” to this metaphysical subject, but claims that the facts of the world are independent of this so-called “wil ”. In 6.423 he draws a distinction between two senses
of “wil ”, namely, the will as a mere phenomenon, and “the will as
the bearer of the ethical”. The former would be part of the world of
facts, which, according to 6.4 and 6.41, means that it can have no
value. However, “the will as the bearer of the ethical” is something
of which “we cannot speak” because: “It is clear that ethics cannot
be expressed. Ethics are transcendental.”12 Most significantly,
Wittgenstein does not take this to mean that the ethical will does not exist: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”13 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”14
Despite this injunction to reverent silence, Wittgenstein does try
to use words to gesture towards the significance of the ethical wil .
Presumably, this is one of the instances of his using propositions that are, strictly speaking, nonsensical, as a ladder that can be cast away once it has been used to see the world rightly.15 What Wittgenstein
abuses his own criteria of proper language use to mumble about
the ethical will is that, while it cannot change the facts of the world, the true self circumscribes the world in such a way as to allow one
to encompass the amoral facts of the world and assume an ethical
attitude towards them.16 This attitude, in turn, somehow qualitatively changes one’s experience of the world as a whole.17 What supposedly
makes this possible is that, ultimately, the only world is one’s own
world of experience, which is why Wittgenstein believes that the
entire world comes to an end at the death of the true self.18
12 Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 6.421.
13 Ibid., 6.522.
14 Ibid., 7.
15 Ibid., 6.54.
16 Ibid., 6.422.
17 Ibid., 6.43.
18 Ibid., 6.431-6.4311.
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This true “I” is neither the physical body nor the psychological
character (the individual ego). It is, rather, a microcosm of
some “God” consciousness that can contemplate the world “as a
limited whole” from “outside of space and time”.19 It seems that to Wittgenstein, this is somehow synonymous with living whol y
in and for the present moment, which is a kind of eternal life that
relinquishes any regret over the past or hope to change the future.20
Thus the qualitative change wrought by the ethical wil , whereby
one’s life becomes “happy” rather than “unhappy”, occurs on account
of aligning
one’s will with the divine will that the facts of the world be just as they are. This can only be read from in between the lines of the Tractatus, but it is repeatedly stated in wartime Notebooks that were obviously the matrix for all of those passages in the Tractatus that are cited above:
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am
completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of
the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing
any influence on happenings.21
The thinking subject is surely mere il usion. But the willing
subject exists. If the will did not exist, neither would there be
that centre of the world, which we call the I, and which is the
bearer of ethics. What is good and evil is essential y the I, not the
world. The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious!22
The will is an attitude of the subject towards the world. The
subject is the willing subject.23
And in this sense Dostoievsky is right when he says that the man
who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence. Or again we
19 Ibid., 6.4312-6.45.
20 Ibid., 6.4311-6.4312.
21 Wittgenstein,
Notebooks, 11.6.16.
22 Ibid., 5.8.16.
23 Ibid., 4.11.16.
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could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who
no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say,
who is content.24
To believe in a God means to understand the question about
the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the
facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in
a God means to see that life has a meaning. The world is given
me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside
as into something that is already there... That is why we have the
feeling of being dependent on an alien wil . However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God... In order to live happily I must
be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy”
means. I am then, so to speak in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will
of God.’25
In these passages, as in the propositions of the Tractatus that emerge from out of them, Wittgenstein claims that the ethical will
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