Wittgenstein and Ethics

Christensen
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings, ethics takes a central place.

This Element investigates his engagement with ethics in both
early and later thinking. Starting from the remarks on ethics in
the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the framing of these
remarks, this Element presents two influential approaches
to Tractarian ethics before it develops a coherent reading of The Philosophy of
ethics in the early thinking, focusing on ethical silence and
the relationship notions of world and the philosophical ‘I’. Ludwig Wittgenstein
The reading of ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ focuses on the critique
of ethical theory and the personal dimension of ethics, two
themes also running through Wittgenstein’s later thinking. It
considers Wittgenstein’s later ethical investigations, of ethical
Wittgenstein and Ethics

Wittgenstein
examples, ethically relevant language uses of language, and the
connections between reflections on ethics and living. It also
considers the role of the other in Wittgenstein’s later thinking.
and Ethics
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Christensen
Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of

the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Josef Johann
Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
by Moritz Nähr, 1930
(IanDagnall Computing /
Alamy Stock Photo). ISSN 2632-7112 (online)
ISSN 2632-7104 (print)
Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
edited by
David G. Stern
University of Iowa
WITTGENSTEIN
AND ETHICS
Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

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Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
DOI: 10.1017/9781009439817
First published online: February 2024

University of Southern Denmark
Author for correspondence: Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen,
[email protected]
Abstract: In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings, ethics takes a central place.

This Element investigates his engagement with ethics in both early and
later thinking. Starting from the remarks on ethics in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus and the framing of these remarks, this Element
presents two influential approaches to Tractarian ethics before it
develops a coherent reading of ethics in the early thinking, focusing on
ethical silence and the relationship notions of world and the
philosophical ‘I’. The reading of ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ focuses on the
critique of ethical theory and the personal dimension of ethics, two
themes also running through Wittgenstein’s later thinking. It considers
Wittgenstein’s later ethical investigations, of ethical examples, ethically
relevant language uses of language, and the connections between
reflections on ethics and living. It also considers the role of the
other in Wittgenstein’s later thinking.
Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein, ethics, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

moral philosophy, ethical/moral language
© Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen 2024

ISBNs: 9781009467780 (HB), 9781009439770 (PB), 9781009439817 (OC)
ISSNs: 2632-7112 (online), 2632-7104 (print)
Contents
1 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics 1
2 Remarks on Ethics in the Tractatus: Guides

and Interpretations 4
3 The Tractatus Remarks on Ethics Again: A Reading 17
4 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ and Continuities in Wittgenstein’s

View of Ethics 32
5 Wittgenstein’s Later Writings on Ethics 43
References 64
Wittgenstein and Ethics 1
1 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics

1.1 Wittgenstein on Ethics: Interpretative Challenges
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a morally serious person. His diaries attest his aspiration
to be morally decent and his regrets and embarrassment over what he sees as his
own moral failings as well as his reflections on the task of meeting his own ethical
ideals. As he writes in an entry in 1937, ‘life is far more serious than it looks like at
the surface. Life is frightfully serious’ (PPO: 175).1 For Wittgenstein, the hardest
challenge was to escape the temptation of moral self-delusion and come to see his
own moral standing clearly. In the diaries, he exclaims: ‘How difficult it is to know
oneself, to honestly admit what one is!’ (PPO: 221). But even at such moments, in
the middle of the pursuit of self-understanding, Wittgenstein also often doubts his
own sincerity and commitment, reproaching himself: ‘Self-recognition & humility
is one. (These are cheap remarks.)’ (PPO: 105).
We find testimonies of the same aspiration for moral earnestness and deter-
mination in many recollections of Wittgenstein. His student and friend Norman
Malcolm writes that ‘Wittgenstein had an intense desire for moral and spiritual
purity. “Of course I want to be perfect!” he exclaimed. This was not arrogance –
for he knew he was far from perfect’ (Malcolm 1993: 21). And Wittgenstein’s
close friend Paul Engelmann also notes Wittgenstein’s uncompromising
approach to his own moral standing, describing him as having an attitude of ‘an
ethical totalitarianism in all questions, a single-minded and painful preservation
of the purity of the uncompromising demands of ethics, in agonizing awareness
of one’s own permanent failure to measure up to them’ (EN: 109). Wittgenstein’s
moral seriousness is also reflected in his philosophical work and his conception of
the activity of philosophy, which he sees as guided by not just ideals of clarity of
thinking but also ethical ideals of attention and integrity. ‘Don’t apologize for
anything, don’t obscure anything, look & tell how it really is – but you must see
something that sheds a new light on the facts’ (CV: 45 [39]).2 Philosophy comes
with an obligation to exercise rigorous and truthful attention to the phenomena
in one’s interest, but for the philosopher to live up to this ideal, they need
continuously to reflect on their own expectations and preconceived ideas of
what may deserve attention, be important or valuable and so on. ‘Work on
philosophy . . . is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On
how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)’ (CV: 24 [16]). In this way,
Wittgenstein thought that his philosophical work should influence his own moral
standing: ‘The movement of my thoughts in my philosophizing should be
1
For abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s works, see References.
2
I refer to the 1998 edition of for Culture and Value, but references to the 1980 edition are added in
square brackets.
2 The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
discernible also in the history of my mind, of its moral concepts & in the
understanding of my situation’ (PPO: 133).
The centrality of ethics in Wittgenstein’s life and its intimate connection to
his way of doing philosophy seem to be a promising starting point for an
Element such as this. There is, however, one challenge that faces any attempt
to write rather concisely about Wittgenstein’s view of ethics, which has shaped
the surrounding interpretative landscape and will also influence the layout of
this Element – the challenge that Wittgenstein wrote only little on ethics. In his
own writings, the remarks that explicitly address topics of ethics and moral
philosophy consist mainly of a group of remarks towards the ending of
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a manuscript published under the title ‘A
Lecture on Ethics’ from 1929, one remark in the Philosophical Investigations
(§77), and a number of rather scattered remarks in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and
diaries, most of which are published in Public and Private Occasions and
Culture and Value. To this, we can add at least two other sources. These are
first and foremost discussions of issues related to ethics, the word ‘good’ and
value recorded by students in notes from that Wittgenstein’s lectures; now
edited and published in several volumes (see e.g. LC, AWL, MWL).
The second additional source is remarks that Wittgenstein made in public or
personal conversations, documented by students and friends (see e.g. Waismann
1965, 1979; Rhees 1965; Malcolm 1984, 1993; Bouwsma 1986). At first sight,
this may seem to constitute the foundation on which an interpreter will have to
build an understanding of Wittgenstein’s view of ethics. We do, however, also
have a third and much more abundant resource, namely Wittgenstein’s writings
on other subjects such as the activity of philosophy, meaning, logic and gram-
mar, and inner and outer. As we will come to see, these writings play a central
role in the attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s view of ethics and its place in
the context of his wider philosophical endeavours.
The scarcity of textual resources and the challenges connected to the devel-
opments in Wittgenstein’s work generally have led to extensive and compli-
cated interpretative discussions about how to understand Wittgenstein’s view of
ethics and related issues (for overviews, see e.g. Johnston 1989; Lovibond
1998; Christensen 2011a). In fact, scholarship in this field is still growing
significantly and involves substantial disagreement about many central issues,
even about whether it makes sense to talk about something like Wittgenstein’s
‘view’ of ethics. Scholars also disagree about whether Wittgenstein’s own
remarks on ethics should take centre stage in the attempt to develop
a Wittgensteinian view of ethics, or whether the more important project is to
develop the ethical implications of Wittgenstein’s (early or later) philosophical
work, more or less independently of an understanding of his own, admittedly,
rather elusive view of ethics. Some scholars taking this stance simply turn to the
task of developing the ethical implications of parts of Wittgenstein’s writings
that do not directly address ethical issues such as aspect seeing or his remarks on
certainty (for examples, see Kober 2008; Pleasants 2008). In this Element, I will
attempt to work out the best interpretation of Wittgenstein’s own view of ethics,
but discussions of how to understand Wittgenstein’s work in philosophy more
generally will inevitably also seep into and influence this interpretation.
1.2 Why Bother with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics?

As work on Wittgenstein’s view of ethics faces considerable interpretive chal-
lenges, it is reasonable to ask why we should take the trouble to even consider
this view. This Element and other interpretative efforts put into Wittgenstein’s
remarks on ethics are, in a certain sense, attempts to answer this question, and
whether these answers are sufficient is above all something for readers to
decide. Still, I find it possible to offer at least two general reasons for why it
may be fruitful to put in the effort of engaging with Wittgenstein’s approach to
ethics. The first is that the extensive interpretative debate surrounding this
approach has made substantial contributions to Wittgenstein scholarship.
The second is that Wittgenstein’s approach differs radically from most other
available approaches in moral philosophy in a way that gives us cause to
challenge and rethink dominant conceptions of ethics in fruitful ways.
Still, the challenges in engaging with Wittgenstein’s view of ethics persist, and
they have influenced the basic interpretative principles guiding my approach as
well as the way this Element is composed. The first guiding principle is to focus
primarily on Wittgenstein’s own sparse remarks on ethics, through close readings

of central passages and consideration of their place within his wider oeuvre. This
approach best reflects the importance of the original writings and enables me to ask
whether and how Wittgenstein’s remarks constitute a comprehensive approach to
moral life. My second guiding principle is to try to place my own reading of
Wittgenstein’s remarks in relation to existing interpretations of Wittgensteinian
ethics, especially in relation to the early writings. I thus begin the investigation of
ethics in the Tractatus by quoting the remarks on ethics and presenting the two
dominant approaches, the metaphysical and the resolute readings, before I develop
what I think is the most coherent and loyal interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early
view of ethics. In chapter 4, I present a close reading of Wittgenstein’s most
sustained engagement with ethics in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, together with two ideas
that remain constant throughout his engagement with ethics, a critical approach to
moral theorising and an emphasis on the personal dimension of ethics. In chapter 5,
I discuss remarks on ethics from Wittgenstein’s later writings. I will argue that
while some aspects of Wittgenstein’s view of ethics stay the same throughout his
thinking, the changes in his later work also result in changes in how he thought
philosophy could engage with ethics, making him give up the Tractarian view that
ethics is not an appropriate subject for philosophical inquiry (contrary to e.g.
Richter 1996, 2019).
2 Remarks on Ethics in the Tractatus: Guides and Interpretations

2.1 Wittgenstein’s Main Contention
At the outbreak of the First World War, Wittgenstein volunteered as a soldier in the
Austrian army, and during this time, serving first behind the front and later at the
very frontline, he did much of the writing of what eventually became his first main
book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Monk 1991: 137–66). Wittgenstein devel-
oped the work on the role of logic in thinking and language that he had begun as
a student at Cambridge, but during his wartime experience, his philosophical
writings changed character and new themes began to appear (Klagge 2021). We
can follow this development in Wittgenstein’s notebooks, when in June of 1916,
after a month with no entries, he suddenly writes: ‘What do I know about God and
the purpose of life?’ (NB: 72). After this time, Wittgenstein’s entries are almost as
much concerned with questions related to meaning of life, self, God, and value as
they are with logic, and it is writing from this period that was eventually trans-
formed into the very last part of the Tractatus where we find the remarks on ethics.
The aim of this section and the next is to present Wittgenstein’s early approach to
ethics, and entries in the Notebooks offer us a valuable insight into the development
of this approach. Still, I will not discuss these for two reasons. Most importantly, the
Tractatus is comprised of remarks chosen and organised by Wittgenstein for

publication, and it thus constitutes the most authoritative presentation of his view
of ethics at this time. Moreover, involving the Notebooks almost inevitable gives rise
to a discussion of whether or how the Notebooks remarks, the result of
Wittgenstein’s immediate and unedited first struggles with ethical issues, relate to
the published work, and these reflections will inevitably divert attention from my
main aim of trying to unfold the view of ethics that Wittgenstein intended to offer to
readers of the Tractatus. I therefore focus on remarks published in the Tractatus
together with remarks made by Wittgenstein in discussions following the publica-
tion of this work as well as the manuscript ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, which in my view
marks the end of and a partial departure from the early period of Wittgenstein’s
thinking on ethics.
Even if Wittgenstein wrote very little on ethics in the Tractatus, it is also
evident that he considered ethics important and, in some way, central to his
philosophical work. After finishing the manuscript for his book, Wittgenstein
searched – for a period in vain – for the right place to publish it, and in a letter to
a potential publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, he highlights the central importance
of ethics for his work:
The book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface
a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you
here . . .. My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that
I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important
one. My book draws limits to the ethical [das Ethische] from the inside as it
were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing
those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing,
I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent
about it. (EN: 143; translation amended)
The letter is quite surprising. Wittgenstein writes that, despite the fact that he
has written only a few pages relating to matters of value and ethics at the very
end of Tractatus, the engagement with these issues is a driving motivation
behind the work. Moreover, he insists that the best way to honour this motiv-
ation is by not writing about ethics, and in contrast to others writing about
ethics, that this is the only way to draw limits to what is ethical and to do so in
the right way, by being silent.
To take Wittgenstein’s letter seriously is to develop an interpretation of the
Tractatus that begins from the acknowledgement that he approaches ethics as
something that is quite distinct from what we normally talk about when we take
ourselves to be talking about moral matters in an ordinary sense of ‘talking about
something’. It is also to acknowledge that in developing such an interpretation, we
are in a sense working against Wittgenstein’s concern with staying silent, because
we will only be able to engage with his remarks on ethics by talking – or writing –
about them. The present interpretative endeavour thus comes with an inbuilt conflict
or even inconsistency at its very core because it, like other attempts to understand
ethics in the Tractatus, necessarily goes beyond the silence recommended by
Wittgenstein. In fact, a similar dilemma arises in relation to the Tractatus itself
because, as Chon Tejedor notes, ‘if ethics cannot be put into words . . ., how can
a book – something that is, on the face of it, made up of words – have an ethical
dimension?’ (2010: 86). I will return to this tension between investigation and
silence continuously in my engagement with the Tractatus.
The letter to Ludwig von Ficker is also interesting because Wittgenstein goes
on to offer a form of ‘guide’ for reading his work, writing: ‘Only perhaps you
won’t see that it is said in the book. For now, I would recommend you to read
the preface and the conclusion, because they contain the most direct expression
of the point of the book’ (EN: 144). Wittgenstein thus seems to assume that it is
possible – at least to some extent – to approach his view of ethics without having
to engage in any substantial way with the main part of the Tractatus. This advice
comes with an interpretative challenge, however. It is quite easy to identify the
preface of the Tractatus, to which we will turn in a moment, as this is clearly
marked and quite distinct in character from the rest of the work. However, the
rest of the Tractatus consists of main remarks marked with numbers from 1 to 7,
each followed by commenting remarks marked with decimal numbers. The
problem is that none of the numbered remarks is singled out in any way; there is
no special section titled ‘Conclusion’, and there is no other indication of what
Wittgenstein could be alluding to here. One convention within Wittgenstein
scholarship is to understand ‘conclusion’ as referring to the remarks beginning
from 6.4, where Wittgenstein turns to discussions of value, ethics, the problem
of life, death, God, what is mystical, and the right method of philosophy. In my
view, an equally viable interpretation is to understand Wittgenstein’s mention of
conclusion as covering all of the remarks from 6 and onwards, both because the
6s constitute a whole section and because 7 is solitary, not followed by any
remarks. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Wittgenstein, after the
introduction of the general form of a proposition in 6, has a general undertaking.
He works through the implications of his logical analysis for philosophical
treatments of logic (6.1s), mathematics (6.2s), law (or necessity) and contin-
gency (6.3s), and value (6.4s). In what follows, I therefore take all these remarks
to constitute Wittgenstein’s ‘conclusion’, and I place my main focus here, even
if I also draw in other sections of the Tractatus.
There are other places where Wittgenstein mentions his general aim in
writing the Tractatus. In response to some questions from Bernard Russell to
a draft of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes that his ‘main contention’ is ‘the
theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions – i.e. by language –

(and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what can not be
expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown (gezeigt)’ (CL: 124), and he goes
on to say that this is also, in his view, ‘the cardinal problem of philosophy’ (CL:
124; for discussion see Anscombe 1959: 161; Kremer 2007). This brings us to
Wittgenstein’s most important mention of the aim of the Tractatus, in its
preface. This is important, not only because the preface has the textual authority
of being Wittgenstein’s most direct instrument in framing readers’ approach to
the Tractatus, but also because of his advice to von Ficker that attention to the
preface is vital for an understanding of its ethical dimension. In the preface,
Wittgenstein notes that ‘the book deals with the problems of philosophy’
(TLP: 3), and that he is confident to have found the solution to these problems
but also that the Tractatus ‘shows how little is achieved when these problems
are solved’ (TLP: 4). Furthermore, Wittgenstein again highlights the need to
draw limits, now the limit of language, of ‘the expression of thoughts’ (TLP: 3),
and he writes that the ‘whole sense of the book might be summed up in the
following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and of what we
cannot talk we must pass over in silence’ (TLP: 3; translation amended). This
remark mirrors the very last sentence of the Tractatus: ‘Of what we cannot
speak we must pass over in silence’ (TLP: 7; translation amended).
If we compare Wittgenstein’s guides for reading, it becomes clear that they
all present the Tractatus as revolving around a distinction between what can be
said, and said clearly, and what cannot be said and not only has to be but also
ought to be left in silence. Moreover, we learn a little more from each of the
three guides, that this distinction sums up the ‘sense of the book’; that ethics,
as part of what cannot be expressed, can only be shown; that ethics is among
what should be left in silence; and that in drawing attention to a connection
between ethics and silence, Wittgenstein is trying to draw limits to the ethical
‘from the inside’, without assuming it possible to somehow see ‘beyond’ it (cf.
CV: 22 [15]). These are Wittgenstein’s suggested points of attention that we
will take with us in the attempt to understand the role that ethics plays in the
Tractatus.
2.2 The Remarks on Ethics

After having looked at Wittgenstein’s guides for reading the Tractatus, it is time to
turn to the remarks on ethics. These remarks are part of what I earlier singled out as
part of the ‘conclusion’ of the Tractatus, the remarks from 6 onwards. We find the
remarks on value in the 6.4s, and in the main sentence of this section, Wittgenstein
writes that: ‘All propositions [Sätze] are of equal value’ (TLP 6.4). In the Tractatus,
propositions or Sätze are meaningful sentences saying something about the world,
and according to this remark, whatever we say about the world cannot stand out in
terms of value. In the first commenting remark to 6.4, Wittgenstein elaborates on
this point, writing: ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world
everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen; in it no value
exists – and if did exist, it would have no value’ (TLP 6.41). On the picture of the
world presented here, whatever happens in the world is a fact, and as such, it is
contingent and does not matter in terms of value because value is something other
than, and distinct from, contingency and facts. If we managed to find value in the
world, it would also be contingent and thus not of value at all. Instead, Wittgenstein
continues, value ‘must lie outside the world’ (TLP 6.41), connecting it to the sense
or meaning of the world (TLP 6.41). As Iris Murdoch observes, it appears as if
Wittgenstein is trying to avoid a devaluation of value by keeping it out of the world,
‘to segregate value in order to keep it pure and untainted’, separating ‘the area of
valueless contingency . . . from the thereby purified ineffable activity of value’
(Murdoch 2003: 25 and 34). I think Murdoch’s analysis is just right, and that one
key to a satisfactory interpretation of ethics in the Tractatus is to reconstruct more
specifically how Wittgenstein takes himself to be keeping value ‘pure and
untainted’.
The second line of commenting remarks after 6.4 is the only section where
Wittgenstein uses the words ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical’, and I quote the main part of
this section, as I return to it in this and following sections:
6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics [Sätze der Ethik].
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words [nicht aussprechen lässt]
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
6.422 When an ethical law of the form, ‘Thou shalt . . .’, is laid down, one’s first
thought is, ‘And what if I do not do it?’ It is clear, however, that ethics
has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the
terms. So our question about the consequences of an action must be
unimportant. – At least those consequences should not be events. . . .
6.423 It is impossible to speak about the will as the bearer of the ethical [Willen
als dem Träger des Ethischen].
And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only to psychology.
(Translation amended)
Wittgenstein here introduces ethics as being in line with value and, in a similar
way, tries to ascertain that ethics is not conflated with facts, even facts about
consequences of actions or punishment and reward often considered central to

ethics. That is, whatever Wittgenstein is doing, he is not presenting a run-of-the-
mill understanding of ethics – ethics is not about right principles for action,
good character or maximising the good, or anything else that is familiar or easily
recognisable from the main traditions in moral philosophy. These traditions
therefore cannot serve as a starting point of an interpretation of his remarks. In
fact, when Wittgenstein writes that ethics cannot be put into words, he is
presenting a view of ethics that, in Martin Stokhof’s words, ‘from the point of
view of modern moral philosophy hardly deserves the name’ (2002: 24).
Without any obvious frame of reference and struggling with the difficulty of
trying to engage with a view of ethics that cannot be put into words, readers
have found it difficult to work out a satisfactory interpretation of Tractarian
ethics. This has led to a wealth of different readings, but one illuminating way to
organise these readings is to divide them according to how they interpret
Wittgenstein’s point that there cannot be ethical sentences (TLP 6.42), and
whether they connect this point to (1) Wittgenstein’s view of what meaningful
sentences can and cannot say, (2) his unusual, even radical view of philosophy
in the Tractatus, or, finally, (3) the presentation of ethics as transcendental in
a way parallel to logic. The first group of interpreters focuses on the idea that
Wittgenstein in the Tractatus indicates or points to something specifically
ethical while also insisting that this ‘something’ is not in the world, which
means that it cannot be captured in meaningful sentences. They thus connect
ethics to Wittgenstein’s remark that the ‘sense of the world . . . must lie outside
the world’ (6.41), and their approach is by now often called metaphysical. In
contrast to this, a second group of interpreters, now often called resolute
readers, rejects the idea that the Tractatus specifies criteria for meaningful
sentences. They rather think that Wittgenstein, in writing that ‘ethics cannot
be put into words’, is working to show that silence is the right response to
a proper understanding of the role that ethics plays into our life. The final group
of readers finds a third starting point for interpretation in the parallels between
the presentation of ethics and logic as transcendental in the Tractatus. This
logical approach is, in my view, the most constructive way to approach ethics in
the Tractatus. In the next chapter I will develop such a reading, but first,
I present the two other approaches that have, until now, been most influential.
2.3 Metaphysical Approaches to Ethics

In the commentary literature on ethics in the Tractatus, there is a great variety of
interpretations and a significant lack of consensus on most interpretative issues.
I cannot discuss all interpretations but will present the two most influential
approaches, the metaphysical and the resolute approaches just introduced. Both
are concerned with the question of how to understand another of Wittgenstein’s

enigmatic guides for reading the Tractatus, when he, in its second to last remark,
writes: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone
who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical [unsinnig],
when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them’ (TLP 6.54). In
relation to these instructions, readers face a dilemma similar to that arising from
the remarks on ethics: How are we to understand what Wittgenstein is doing in
the Tractatus, if all of his sentences are in fact just plain nonsense and have no
meaning for us to understand?
One of the earliest examples of a metaphysical approach can be found in
Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal work An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
(1959). Anscombe wants to take seriously the idea that the sentences making up the
Tractatus are nonsensical, while also acknowledging the importance that
Wittgenstein places on such nonsense when produced by philosophical activity.
Anscombe finds a way out of this conundrum by focusing on Wittgenstein’s
idea that ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’ (TLP 4.1212), also highlighted in the
letter to von Ficker. She argues that even if ‘attempts to say what is “shewn”
produce “non-sensical” formations of words’ (1959: 163), there is indeed ‘some-
thing’, some form of insight, that we can only approach through showing. On this
view, the notion of showing is (among other things) meant to elucidate how
nonsensical sentences can be used to point to ‘truths’ about the world that we
cannot meaningfully say. In relation to these attempts to say what shows itself,
Anscombe notes that ‘it would be right to call them “true” if, per impossibile, they
could be said; in fact they cannot be called true, since they cannot be said’,
continuing a little later: ‘It would presumably be because of this that Wittgenstein
regards the sentences of the Tractatus as helpful, in spite of their being strictly
nonsensical according to the very doctrine that they propound’ (1959: 162).
According to Anscombe, philosophical and ethical ‘sentences’ are attempts to
say what can only be shown that result in pseudo-truths and therefore are
nonsensical.
Anscombe’s idea of sentences indicating truths that cannot be said has been
taken up by other interpreters, developing metaphysical approaches to the
Tractatus. One such interpreter is Peter Hacker. He argues that Wittgenstein is
trying to draw attention to a type of metaphysical ‘insights’ different from
knowledge of facts, while at the same time thinking that ‘sentences’ presenting
these ‘insights’ violate the rules of logical syntax, which means that attempts to
express them result in a specific form of illuminating nonsense (cf. 2021: 18).
Hacker thus develops a distinction between ‘ordinary’ meaningless sentences,
which are plain nonsense, and a special type of meaningless sentences, which
elucidate by ‘showing’ or ‘pointing’ to something outside of the world and
outside language. Such illuminating, nonsensical sentences are unsuccessful

attempts to express ‘true’ insights through illegitimate, sentence-like, but fun-
damentally meaningless linguistic constructions. In Hacker’s words: ‘What one
means when one tries to state these insights is perfectly correct, but the
endeavour must unavoidably fail. For the ineffable manifests itself, and cannot
be said’ (2000: 382). In a more recent defence of a metaphysical approach,
Roger M. White presents the Tractatus as being ‘concerned to specify precisely
those features of reality that cannot be put into words and at the same time to
bring out why they cannot be put into words’ (2011: 22). Thus, central
to metaphysical approaches is the idea that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus had
to resort to illuminating nonsense to make readers aware of insights about the
world that lie outside of language.
Metaphysical approaches to ethics share the ideas that the Tractatus presents
a view of language that establishes a limit of meaning within which ethics
cannot find a place, and that Wittgenstein uses the notion of showing to allow for
the possibility that nonsensical sentences can still indicate insights related to
ethics. Hacker also draws on this in his interpretation of ethics in the Tractatus,
arguing that when Wittgenstein writes that ethics cannot be put into words, he is
denying, not the existence of ethical insights or truths but rather that such ‘truths’
can be expressed in ordinary language because ‘the philosophy of logic which
[Wittgenstein] propounded drew the limits of language at the boundary of all that
is “higher” – ethics, aesthetics, and religion, as well as philosophy itself’ (2021:
105). According to Hacker, Wittgenstein’s treatment of language, meaning, and
logic in the Tractatus establishes an understanding of the limits of language
according to which ethics falls outside the scope of what we can meaningfully
say. David Wiggins also represents this approach, when he writes that
‘Wittgenstein found himself driven to suppose that some kinds of apparent
nonsense . . . might show that which could not be said. Or, in the idiom I prefer,
they might point’ (2004: 385). Along similar lines, Allan Janik and Stephen
Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus wanted to present a general
critique of language and use this critique to show ‘both that logic and science had
a proper part to play within ordinary descriptive language . . ., and that questions
about “ethics, value and the meaning of life” by falling outside the limits of that
descriptive language, become – at best – the object of a kind of mystical insight,
which can be conveyed by “indirect” or poetical communication’ (1973: 191; see
also Collinson 1985: 270).
Among metaphysical readings, there are various suggestions for the kind of
mystical insight indicated by the Tractatus. Hacker turns to entries from the
Notebooks in 1916 to suggest that ethics, for Wittgenstein, is connected to
a view of the subject that is inspired by Schopenhauer’s concept of the tran-

scendental ego. In the only remark mentioning Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein
writes: ‘It would be possible to say (à la Schopenhauer): It is not the world of
Idea that is either good or evil; – but the willing subject . . . not a part of the
world but a presupposition of its existence’ (NB: 79). Hacker connects this and
related remarks to Tractarian remarks on ‘the metaphysical subject, the limit of
the world – not a part of it’ (TLP 5.641) and on will as the bearer of ethics
(6.423). He argues that Wittgenstein is presenting a doctrine termed by Hacker
‘transcendental solipsism’ that concerns the metaphysical self as ‘the constant
form of all experience’ (Hacker 2021: 103) and involves a number of ‘obscure
theories about ethics, the will, aesthetics, and religion’ (100). According to
Hacker, the insights or theories connected to transcendental solipsism cannot be
said but Wittgenstein thought them to be evident because all other propositions
‘manifest the transcendental truths that cannot be said’ (104).
A related, and somewhat more enthusiastic, reading of Tractarian ethics as
inspired by fundamental Schopenhauerian insights is developed by Martin
Stokhof, who also sees Wittgenstein as attempting to convey insights into the
metaphysical subject as a condition of, among other things, ethics (see 2002:
191–6). Central to Hacker’s and Stokhof’s readings of Tractarian ethics is the
focus on special ethical insights that cannot refer to the world but must instead
allude to something at the limit of the world. Stokhof even says that ethics must
be placed outside the world, as ‘both value and its expression belong to another
realm’ (2002: 212), which could be interpreted as, in Wittgenstein’s terms, an
attempt to see beyond the limit of language. In general, metaphysical
approaches consider ethical and mystical insights as somehow placed ‘beside’
the world of facts and language, finding in the Tractatus an expression of ‘the
feeling that the world is not everything, that there is something outside it’
(Ramsey 1923: 478).
There are at least three challenges facing metaphysical approaches to ethics.
The first concerns the idea that ethics involves insights pointing to something
that cannot find a place in the world but is somehow placed ‘outside’ of it. This
amounts to a reading of ethics as transcendent, and it finds some support in
Wittgenstein’s remark that the ‘sense of the world must lie outside of the world’
(TLP 6.41), but it conflicts with the presentation of ethics as ‘transcendental’
(TLP 6.421), that is, not as somehow beyond the realm of the real but as part of
what conditions engagement with the real. Several observations support the idea
that Wittgenstein upholds this distinction between transcendent and transcen-
dental. His use of ‘transcendental’ in relation to ethics reflects a central remark
earlier in the Tractatus, stating that ‘Logic is transcendental’ (TLP 6.13). This
shows that the roles played by logic and ethics are at least in some respects
parallel, but it is much harder to make a case for the idea that logic (and not just
ethics) should be seen as transcendent, placed somehow outside the world.
Moreover, the idea that the Tractatus involves metaphysical insights about
ethics also seems to be in tension with the preface of the book. Wittgenstein
writes here that he has found the solution to the problems of philosophy, but he
could hardly have stated this with such confidence if he saw the Tractatus as
presenting transcendent insights representing ‘an exotic variety of metaphysics
that generates new philosophical problems’ (Engelmann 2021: 8).
The second challenge, relevant to only some metaphysical readings, is
exegetical and concerns the claim that ethics in the Tractatus is somehow
influenced by Schopenhauer. This relies heavily on remarks from the
Notebooks, most of which do not appear in the Tractatus, making it hard to
assess whether Wittgenstein held on to the more Schopenhauerian ideas con-
sidered in the summer of 1916 (see Tejedor 2010: 90–1, for an overview of
textual connections between Notebooks and Tractatus). The final challenge
facing metaphysical approaches is not exegetic, but general, and it concerns
the attempt to hold a view according to which nonsensical sentences are devoid
of meaning but may still (in some way or other) be used to show or point to
fundamentally inexpressible insights. Critics object that metaphysical readers
try to hold two incompatible claims: that meaningless sentences are just plain
nonsense, and that some forms of nonsense may still have some kind of
‘meaning’ conveying ‘insights’. When trying to understand Tractatus 6.54,
metaphysical readers are, in Cora Diamond’s delightful phrase, ‘chickening
out’ (1988: 181). They waver irresolutely between two different understanding
of nonsense, unable to accept that nonsensical sentences are characterised
precisely by saying nothing at all, and that Wittgenstein’s sentences in the
main bulk of the Tractatus therefore are just plain nonsense (cf. TLP: 6.54,
see e.g. Conant and Diamond 2004; Conant and Bronzo 2017: 180–1).
2.4 Resolute Approaches to Ethics

A rival to the metaphysical approach is the resolute approach, which is primar-
ily concerned with interpretating Wittgenstein’s ‘guide’ for understanding in
Tractatus 6.54. The resolute approach covers many different readings and is
more a framework for understanding the Tractatus than a full interpretation,
even if the shared origin of resolute readings makes them somewhat more
aligned than metaphysical ones (see e.g. Read and Deans 2003; Conant and
Diamond 2004; Kuusela 2011). Resolute readers agree that when Wittgenstein
writes that his sentences in the Tractatus should be recognised ‘as nonsensical’
(6.54), we should accept this description and see his sentences as exactly that,
just plain nonsense. When engaging with the Tractatus, readers should not
attribute to Wittgenstein the contradictory endeavour of attempting to alert us

to metaphysical but ineffable ‘insights’ or ‘doctrines’ while claiming that these
cannot be said; instead readers should, resolutely as it were, accept ‘that the
elucidatory sentences of the Tractatus must ultimately be recognized as simply
nonsensical, i.e., as forms of words that neither say nor quasi-say anything’
(Conant and Bronzo 2017: 176). It is a form of confusion to attempt to quasi-talk
or use nonsense to point to insights, and when Wittgenstein distinguishes
between saying and showing, he takes showing to apply only to meaningful
sentences, not to irresolute attempts to hint at some form of ‘content’ that really
cannot be said (cf. Conant 2005: 67).
Resolute readers also agree that whatever strings of language are to be
identified as meaningful or nonsensical depends, not on applying some special-
ised Tractarian doctrines specifying criteria for meaningful language, but rather
on the capacities involved in ordinary ways of speaking and thinking (Conant
2005; Conant and Bronzo 2017). In a presentation of the core assumptions of
resolute readings, Cora Diamond and James Conant emphasise that this non-
theorical understanding of meaning also applies to the philosophical method of
logical clarification adopted by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (see TLP 4.112).
That is, Wittgenstein ‘did not take the procedure of clarification, as he then
conceived it, to depend on anything more than the logical capacities that are part
of speaking and thinking’ (Conant and Diamond 2004: 64).
By simply accepting Wittgenstein’s own description of Tractarian sentences
as nonsense, resolute readers avoid the uncomfortable idea that he tries to
indicate some ‘insight’ with his uses of words, but they instead face the
challenge of having to give an alternative answer to the question of what his
purpose could be in producing the intricate nonsense presented in the Tractatus.
Diamond and Conant emphasise that an answer to this question can be devel-
oped differently by different resolute readers, but that it will be an answer
according to which the nonsensical sentences of the Tractatus offer the reader
the possibility of engaging with claims that philosophers may want to come to
make but that philosophers also, as they work through these apparent claims,
come to recognise as really not claims at all. By engaging with the Tractatus,
readers come to realise that ‘the very questions that we are initially inclined to
take [Wittgenstein] to be addressing are themselves not questions at all’ (Conant
and Diamond 2004: 64). Wittgenstein is not trying to make us show or point to
what we cannot say but nevertheless claim is true; he is rather trying to bring us
to realise that our attempts to show or indicate something that cannot be
expressed are just empty gestures, thus enabling us to give up these attempts.
The nonsense making up the Tractatus offers a therapeutic journey that reveals
to readers the paradox involved in something like the metaphysical approach.

If we accept the resolute rejection of the possibility of metaphysical non-
sense, this allows us to turn to a different question, namely why we are so easily
tempted by the idea of quasi-saying something that we cannot straightforwardly
express. One possible answer is that this temptation arises because we are
undecided about what we want to say while still wanting to insist that there is
some insight hidden in our unsettled attempts to talk. Cora Diamond points to
this tendency of projecting our own undecidedness onto the possibilities of
language: ‘We are so convinced that we understand what we are trying to say
that we see only the two possibilities: it is sayable, it is not sayable. But
Wittgenstein’s aim is to allow us to see that there is no “it”’ (Diamond 1988:
198). Through engagement with the kind of nonsense making up the Tractatus,
we come to realise that our attempts to show something that cannot be said are
futile because they are indeterminate; because ‘there is no coherent understand-
ing to be reached of what [we] wanted to say’ (Diamond 1988: 198). The idea of
‘the ineffable’ becomes attractive because we cannot make up our mind about
what we want to say, and the way to come to give up this idea is by realising that
the problems we have with expressing ourselves are not produced by some
inability of language but rather by our own indecisiveness.
There are at least two ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s method of using
nonsense as a means of elucidation in the Tractatus, which I will term strong and
mild resolutism respectively (cf. Kuusela 2011). Strong resolutist readers hold
that Tractarian elucidation always proceeds in a piecemeal way, addressing
specific philosophical problems or confusions with the linguistic methods
needed in that specific case (cf. Read and Deans 2003). This exclusively
piecemeal approach rejects the idea that the Tractatus offers a general method
of clarification, and because of this, it rules out the possibility of general logical
achievements of the Tractatus (cf. Kuusela 2011: 127). It thus has difficulties
explaining why Wittgenstein thought the Tractatus offers a method of clarifica-
tion that can address and solve all ‘the problems of philosophy’ (TLP: 3).
These problems have made mild resolute readers suggest that the discussion
of logic in the Tractatus is intended to culminate in a general method of
philosophical clarification that revolves around the logical analysis of the
general proposition. On this view, Wittgenstein is trying to develop ‘an
allegedly universally applicable method of logical analysis that embodies
a conception of the essence of propositions . . . and is intended to be universally
applicable in the clarification of any logical unclarity’ (Kuusela 2011: 132).
Instead of presenting criteria of meaning (as assumed by metaphysical readers),
the discussion of logic in the Tractatus is intended to establish a general
philosophical method. Relatedly, Cora Diamond notes that the Tractatus ‘is
metaphysical in holding that the logical relations of our thoughts to each other
can be shown, completely shown, in an analysis of our propositions. . . . What is
metaphysical is not the content of some belief, but the laying down of require-
ment, the requirement of logical analysis’ (1991: 18–19). Mild resolutist inter-
pretations of logical clarification thus see the Tractatus as Wittgenstein’s
attempt to set up a general framework for logical analysis of philosophical
nonsense – a general, logical method of elucidation.
Common for resolute readings of ethics in the Tractatus is that they can
acknowledge the connection that Wittgenstein establishes between ethics and
silence in his various guides for reading. Resolute readers hold that the main
achievement of the Tractatus is to make us realise that our attempts to talk about
metaphysical or ineffable ‘insights’ are misguided because the questions we
take ourselves to be addressing are not really questions at all, and they thus give
substance to the idea that engagement with Wittgenstein’s work should end in
silence. Furthermore, as this achievement is brought about through a change in
our relation to our words and in what we expect of them, reading the Tractatus
does seem to have an integral ethical dimension – its ultimate aim is

a transformation of the reader. As James Conant writes:
reaping the ethical teaching of the book would consist not in one’s having
learnt something from what it says about matters (about which one thinks one
wants to learn), but rather in one’s having allowed the work to transform one’s
conception of what it is that one really wants (from a book about philosophy
or logic or ethics) – where this, in turn, requires a transformation of one’s self.
(2005: 46)
For resolute readers, the ethical aim of the Tractatus is to draw a limit to
language (as Wittgenstein writes to von Ficker) by making the reader give up
metaphysical aspirations and come to recognise ways of making sense that are
already available with their everyday mastery of language.
In his resolute reading of ethics in the Tractatus, Michael Kremer argues that
Wittgenstein is concerned to deflect deeply rooted but ultimately misguided
needs for absolute justifications, also in relation to our ethical lives. When
Wittgenstein in 6.422 writes that our first reaction to an ethical law is ‘And
what if I do not do it?’ (TLP 6.422), he shows us that if something can be
established as a definitive justification in ethics, it can also be contested, and if
we develop this line of thought, we come to realise that whatever may be
intelligibly asserted as an ethical justification may also be intelligibly denied.
The right response to the need for ethical justification is to realise that this need
does not have an ‘answer’ because really there is no ‘question’. In relation to
value and ethics: ‘The riddle does not exist’ (TLP 6.5). Wittgenstein’s aim is
that this realisation can bring about a form of ethical conversion that frees the
reader from the conflicted and confused motivations leading to the need for
ultimate justifications. In this way, Kremer claims, engagement with the
Tractatus gives us ‘knowledge-how’ and enables us to turn to the real task of
living our lives: ‘To understand this book and its author is to learn how to live.
The book shows us how to live, but does not tell us this’ (2001: 62, cf. 58, 61).
Resolute readings of Tractarian ethics have many merits. They align with
Wittgenstein’s guides for reading and the description of his remarks as non-
sense, just as they can make sense of the aim to draw limits to ethics and
language from the inside and to respond to ethics with silence. Still, these
readings face a challenge that connects with the way that Conant and Kremer,
in presenting the aim of the Tractatus, move from philosophical to ethical and
existential problems. They both start with Wittgenstein addressing a reader in
the grip of philosophical illusions, but they move from there to Wittgenstein
addressing a reader engaged in existential challenges, facing everyone, of how
to transform oneself or live rightly. This is problematic because Wittgenstein
never presents the Tractatus as offering practical ethical guidance. In the

preface, he says clearly that his ‘book deals with the problems of philosophy’
(TLP: 3) and that the value it may have consists in showing ‘how little has been
done when these problems have been solved’ (TLP: 3). This is not
a presentation of a book providing a guide for living, and it indicates that we
should look for an interpretation according to which the Tractatus is addressing,
not existential, but specifically philosophical confusions about ethics.
There is, or so I am arguing, more work to be done in order to unfold the
specific forms of philosophical confusions about ethics that Wittgenstein is
addressing. Strong resolute readers may see no need to do this, as elucidation
is piecemeal and the philosophical confusions about ethics addressed by
Wittgenstein may be quite different from those haunting us now. But mild
resolutist readers, by assuming that the Tractatus presents a general method
of elucidation, seem obliged to address the question of what kind of philosoph-
ical therapy that Wittgenstein is offering in relation to ethics in the Tractatus.
This is the question to which I turn in the next chapter.
3 The Tractatus Remarks on Ethics Again: A Reading

3.1 Ethical Silence Re-visited (TLP 6.42)
In the last chapter, I introduced the remarks on ethics in the Tractatus together
with two influential approaches to these remarks. In this chapter, I present the
reading that I find best does justice to Wittgenstein’s text. I do so by reading the
remarks on ethics slowly (cf. CV: 65 [57]), focusing on one remark at a time.
Any investigation of the remarks on ethics must, of course, take into account
Wittgenstein’s presentation of his philosophical method in the Tractatus as ‘the

logical clarification of thoughts . . . not a body of doctrine but an activity’, as
well as his idea that a philosophical work consists ‘essentially of elucidations’
and results in ‘the logical clarification of thoughts’ (TLP 4.112). In my view,
Wittgenstein sees logical clarification as elucidations of conditions of language
that can be appreciated by reflecting on ordinary uses of words, in line with the
understanding of elucidation developed in Marie McGinn’s logical interpret-
ation of the Tractatus, where its philosophical method is understood as anti-
metaphysical while still ‘aiming to present positive philosophical insights into
the nature of language’ (2006: 6). McGinn thinks that we can best substantiate
Wittgenstein’s claim to have provided ‘the final solutions of the problems’
(TLP: 4) of philosophy by connecting it to the assumption that he in the
Tractatus delivers a general method of elucidation that can be applied to any
philosophical problem and solve it permanently, more specifically, the assump-
tion that ‘once the nature of a proposition has become clear, then everything will
be clear’ (McGinn 2006: 15–16). My approach is thus also related to mild

resolutism by acknowledging that Wittgenstein’s sentences in the Tractatus
‘serve as elucidations’ and are ‘nonsensical’ (TLP 6.54), and that he also wants
the work to establish a general method of elucidation ‘once and for all and in
advance of the latter’s employments in particular cases’ (Kuusela 2011: 132).
In my view, an important background for any reading of ethics in the
Tractatus is the strikingly untraditional conception of ethics that appears more
generally in Wittgenstein’s early writings. As noted earlier, his engagement
with issues of value opens with an entry in the Notebooks in 1916 on God and
the purpose of life (NB: 72). Ethics is introduced some ten days later, when
Wittgenstein connects it to will and notes that a world without will would also
be ‘a world without ethics’ (NB: 77). The section on ethics in the Tractatus,
6.4n, also includes writings on value (TLP 6.4), the ‘sense of the world’ (TLP
6.41), ‘the limits of the world’ (TLP 6.43), and ‘the mystical’ (TLP 6.44). Ethics
is presented as ‘transcendental’ (TLP 6.421; cf. NB: 79) and is again connected
to will (TLP 6.423; NB: 77, 80) together with questions of aesthetics (TLP
6.421; NB: 77, 83; LE: 38) and God (TLP 6.432; NB: 72–9; LE: 42; CV: 5 [3]).
Almost all of these ways of characterising ethics are in play in ‘A Lecture on
Ethics’, where Wittgenstein first presents the definition that ‘Ethics is the
general enquiry into what is good’ (LE: 38), before he goes on to say that he
will ‘use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense’ (LE: 38) than is customary in
moral philosophy. Wittgenstein then presents his listeners with a row of syn-
onyms that he hopes will suggest to them a rough idea of what he finds are the
characteristic features of ethics: ‘Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or,
into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the
meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of
living’ (LE: 38). At the end of the lecture, Wittgenstein adds that ethics springs
from the need to address ‘the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the
absolute valuable’ (LE: 44).
Held together, Wittgenstein’s various characterisations reveal a view of
ethics that is very broad but revolves around a connection between subject
and will, on the one hand, and life and world, on the other hand, as Wittgenstein
brings into play notions of the sense of the world as well as the meaning, value,
and problem(s) in life. Ethics concerns a subject’s relation to their life and the
world in which this life is situated, and by including the will in this cluster of
characterisations, Wittgenstein also highlights that this subject is, at least
potentially, active. By drawing connections between ethics, questions of value
and meaning, and the task of having a life to lead, many of the questions that
Wittgenstein relates to ethics are closer to what academic philosophers today
would call questions of the meaning of life than to questions normally assumed
to be part of moral philosophy, such as questions concerning principles of right

and wrong action, good or bad character, or the consequences of our actions.
Wittgenstein’s inclusive understanding of ethics also goes some way to explain
why he connects ethics to questions about aesthetics and God, which are often
also considered central to the question of how to live a meaningful life.
One remark that deserves special attention is when Wittgenstein in ‘A
Lecture on Ethics’ says that ethics is the ‘enquiry into’ what is valuable and
so on. Wittgenstein does not identify ethics with what is valuable and so on;
rather, he identifies ethics with attempts to examine or investigate value and
morality, as we, for example, find them in philosophy. This is a significant
point, and it can help us understand Wittgenstein’s perhaps most striking
characterisation of ethics, when he in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ says that
engaging with ethics is ‘to run against the boundaries of language’,
a hopeless ‘running against the walls of our cage’ (LE: 44). Wittgenstein
here seems to paint a rather bleak picture of moral engagement, as hopeless
inexpressibility, but there is room for caution because it is, importantly,
enquiries into the meaning and value of life, such as philosophical enquiries,
that Wittgenstein describes as running against the limits of language, not the
practical, everyday endeavour of engaging in moral life. Wittgenstein insists
on silence in ethics in his philosophical work and in discussions with
philosophers, and what he criticises as hopeless is not the attempt to live
a life with meaning and value, but the ideas that moral life can meaningfully
be a subject of philosophy, and that we can enquire into why and how such
a life is possible (cf. Cahill 2004: 49). As Wittgenstein told a friend after
finishing the manuscript for the Tractatus, ‘The question is solved: philoso-
phy is silencing, the remainder is doing, [which] means: becoming a decent

person’ (Hänsel 2012: 51, emphases added; quoted from Engelmann 2021:
66). In line with this, I argue that we should also read the remarks on ethics in
the Tractatus to address philosophical confusions about ethics and read
Wittgenstein’s pleas for silence as pleas for philosophical silence about
ethics.
When engaging with ethics in the Tractatus, we thus need to remember that
Wittgenstein is engaging with us as philosophers. With this in mind, I return to the
first remark on ethics that ‘it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics’
(TLP 6.42) and the way it connects to Wittgenstein’s pleas for silence in ethics. In
my view, this remark thus addresses attempts to state philosophical insights about
ethics – what philosophers think they can say about what has to be in place for
there to be questions of right and wrong, good or bad, and so on. Wittgenstein is
simply taking it for granted that having a life to live is to engage with questions of
meaning and value, and what he wants to challenge, and dissolve, is what he sees
as certain philosophical confusions about what can be said about the background
of such activities. He thus criticises the inclination to try to explicate, explain, and
justify the conditions of the possibility of moral life, not moral life itself.
It is possible to bring out how this difference between philosophising and living
influences Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics by turning to a question not yet
considered in any depth: what does Wittgenstein mean by ‘propositions of
ethics’? As we saw, metaphysical readers assume that if there are no ethical
sentences, then any form of ethically relevant talk will result in nonsense.
However, this is not what Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus. He writes that
his own elucidations should be recognised ‘as nonsensical’ (TLP 6.54), but in
relation to ethics, he simply says that it ‘cannot be put into words’ (TLP 6.421)
and is ‘impossible to speak about’ (TLP 6.423). As we have now come to see,
these warnings concern enquiries into the conditions of ethics. To put it bluntly, it
is philosophical enquires into ethics that result in nonsensical sentences.
Furthermore, an important insight motivating the resolute approach is that inves-
tigations into whether a sentence has meaning or not are to be decided simply by
using the capacities involved in ordinary language, as Wittgenstein also reminds
us by writing in the preface that the ‘whole sense’ of the Tractatus is that ‘what
can be said at all can be said clearly’ (TLP: 3). The aim of the Tractatus is not to
exclude, as nonsensical, ordinary uses of language that are straightforwardly
meaningful for speakers in everyday circumstances, and this point of course
also applies to ordinary uses of language that concern ethics and value.
I will bring out this point by introducing an example. Let us imagine
a situation where I say to a friend that she was wrong not to tell her young
child about the death of a distant cousin, and she responds that even if she did
tell her son a lie, this was the right thing to do because right now, her son is
psychologically frail and worried about the finitude of life and the possibility of
death in a way that makes him unable to handle the truth. However, she will of
course tell him later when there is no risk that the news of the death of her cousin
will feed into her son’s general anxieties or shake his trust in life. In this
situation, when using our ordinary linguistic capacities, my friend and I have
no trouble understanding the meaning of our sentences – in fact, no questions of
the meaning of these sentences arise for us, and we would respond with
bewilderment if someone was to suggest that our sentences were nonsensical
or aiming to say something that cannot be put into words. That is, even if some
of our sentences could be labelled ‘ethical (or moral) propositions’, sentences
like these cannot be what Wittgenstein rules out in the Tractatus.
When Wittgenstein rejects the possibility of ethical propositions, he cannot be
thinking of ordinary exchanges of moral relevance. That is, he cannot be ruling out
the numerous perfectly meaningful exchanges that ordinary speakers have about
what is right and wrong, good or bad, virtuous or wicked or about how to establish
meaning and value in life, because these sentences obviously have meaning in quite
ordinary uses of language. Wittgenstein in fact makes it quite clear that he is not
trying to rule out such ordinary talk, including talk of something as valuable or
meaningful, writing that ‘all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they
stand, are in perfect logical order’ (TLP 5.5563). Wittgenstein must be elucidating
another set of difficulties, and my suggestion is that these difficulties concern
philosophical attempts to explicate how life and the world can come to have
meaning, or in more Tractarian terms, to explicate or say the conditions of ethics
or express what ‘is higher’ (TLP 6.42). Returning to Wittgenstein’s reading guides,
it is now clear that in relation to ethics, the distinction between what can be said and
what cannot be said and ought to be left in silence is a distinction between ordinary
ways of talking about and dealing with value and meaning in life, on the one hand,
and (philosophical) attempts to say what makes such dealings possible, on the
other. The ethical silence recommended by Wittgenstein is the right response to the
latter but not the former set of activities. It is impossible for there to be philosoph-
ical propositions of ethics (cf. TLP 6.42).
3.2 Logic and Ethics Are Transcendental (TLP 6.421)

I now turn to the remarks commenting on 6.42. However, to clarify these
remarks, I will go beyond Wittgenstein’s ‘guide’ to von Ficker – that an
understanding of the ethical importance of the Tractatus could be developed
by reading ‘the preface and the conclusion’ (EN: 144) – because the section that
introduces value and ethics, from 6.4 and onwards, revolves around a number of
words – will, world, life, and transcendental – which also appear earlier in the
Tractatus. This gives me reason to look at these earlier appearances to consider
how they connect to the remarks on ethics.
The Tractatus opens by introducing a notion of ‘world’: ‘The world is all that is
the case’ (TLP 1). This opening has sometimes been interpreted as an ontological
claim on Wittgenstein’s part, about what does and does not exist, but if we take
seriously that the Tractatus is offering elucidations, not metaphysics, the remark
must play another role. The most striking feature of the remark is that it is, in a sense,
devoid of information, almost like an entry in a dictionary, simply explicating the
meaning of ‘the world’ as the word we use to talk about everything there is. Looked
at in this way, Wittgenstein is not making a substantial claim but is simply
illuminating how we use the word ‘world’ to talk of all there is. Moreover, as the
world is ‘all that is the case’, everything that there is, this implies that if something
exists, it is (necessarily or a priori) in the world. In this way, the remark reminds us
of how we use the word ‘world’ and provides ‘logical clarification’ (TLP 4.112).
If we consider only the first remark of the Tractatus, the world may appear
simply as a grouping, assemblage, or heap of something, but in order for us to
talk about the world, the world must have some form of unity or organisation.
This clarification is offered in the very next sentence, when Wittgenstein writes
that the ‘world is the totality of facts, not of things’ (TLP 1.1). Facts are more
than just heaps of things; for us to talk of facts, they have to be unities with some
form of formal organisation, and this point equally applies to talk of the world,
which must also have some form of formal organisation. Wittgenstein brings
out this feature of talk about the world and facts, writing that the ‘facts in logical
space are the world’ (TLP 1.13). The world is a unity because it consists of facts
organised in logical space, and facts are separate unities because they take up
a specific place in logical space. Again, as Wittgenstein is only providing
elucidations, this is not a substantial or metaphysical claim about the organisa-
tion of reality but rather a clarification of what has to be in place for us to talk or
think about something as a fact or the world – what is logically necessary.
According to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, we do not have to make
specific discoveries to see that our ability to talk or think about the world is
dependent on the world being organised in a way that is available for language
and thought. Rather, the logical organisation of the world is something that can
be clarified independently of any actual understanding of or discovery about the
world. Logic is not dependent on the existence of specific facts or a specific
world; rather, it is connected to the very fact that something (anything) exists –
something that we can represent in language. ‘The “experience” that we need in
order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but
that something is: that, however, is not an experience’, Wittgenstein writes,

adding, ‘[l]ogic is prior to every experience – that something is so’ (TLP 5.552).
It is no accident that logic applies to the world because logic is a condition of the
possibility of talking about the world, and because of this, logic cannot itself be
a fact in the world (cf. TLP 5.5521). As Marie McGinn writes, ‘Wittgenstein’s
idea is that we can understand how logic applies to the world only if the world
and logic are reciprocal notions: there is no representation of the world without
logic and there is no logic without representation of the world’ (2006: 244).
World and logic are mutually dependent notions, neither of which is possible
without the other.
In the same way, it is no accident that logic applies to language. In any
meaningful uses of language, we rely on the whole of logic because a sentence
can only show its specific sense if the force of the sentence ‘reaches through the
whole of logical space’ (TLP 3.42). A meaningful sentence shows its meaning:
what would be the case in the world if the sentence is true, the facts we would
find there, and the sentence says that this is actually the case (TLP 4.022).
In doing so, the sentence also shows the logical form of the world, which is the
necessary condition for saying that anything is true (TLP 4.121). Logic shows
what is essential to the activity of engaging in meaningful language, and in this
way, our language use shows logic, but we cannot make logic the subject of this
use. ‘Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What
finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. . . . Propositions
show the logical form of reality’ (TLP 4.121). Here, we again encounter what
Wittgenstein, in his letter to Russell, calls the cardinal problem of philosophy,
the distinction between ‘what can be expressed by propositions . . . and what can
not be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown’ (CL: 124). In any particular
instance of language use, we draw on the whole of logic, which means that we
should see logic as a formal condition of language that cannot itself be
expressed in language. ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’ (TLP 4.1212).
As the structure of the activity of representation, logic cannot itself be repre-
sented; we cannot say or quasi-say logic; rather, logic shows as the condition of
whatever we choose to say.
Logic cannot be said and cannot be described in language because it is
completely uninformative and empty of content. Thus, there are no logical
doctrines or logical Lehre; rather, logic shows itself as the shared organisation
of world and language reflected in any instance of language use. For us to be
able to use language to talk about the world, we draw on what is common for
both, and this is logic: ‘Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also
its limits’ (TLP 5.61). Logic is neither in nor outside the world, neither factual
nor transcendent; instead, logic is what conditions our engagement with the
world in language. In this sense, logic is given a priori (TLP 5.473; cf.
Engelmann 2021: 55–6), and what is a priori cannot be factual, as
Wittgenstein notes, because all ‘we see could be other than it is. . . . There is
no a priori order of things’ (TLP 5.634). In general, this is what shows itself: the
a priori and necessary but formal and empty conditions for the representation of
the world in language and thought.
When Wittgenstein says that the relation between what we can say and what
only shows itself is his ‘main contention’ and ‘the cardinal problem of philoso-
phy’ (CL: 124), he is presenting a view of philosophy concerned with what is
known a priori, but that is, as such, purely formal and empty of content.
Moreover, when he in Tractatus 6 introduces ‘the general form of propositions’
(TLP 6, translation amended), this indicates his main aim of presenting
a general elucidation of logic is completed. This opens the question of what
Wittgenstein is doing in the following remarks – what I, in section 2.1, identified
as the ‘conclusion’ of the Tractatus – and I adopt Engelmann’s suggestion that
Wittgenstein here moves on to handle ‘various philosophical problems . . . in
a sequence of subjects according to kinds of Satz: logic (6.1n), mathematics

(6.2n), science (6.3n), ethics and value (6.4n), and the riddle of life (6.5n)’
(2021: 54). Running through this treatment of philosophical problems is the aim
of elucidating the distinction between what concerns the facts and is accidental
but informative and what concerns the a priori and is necessary but uninforma-
tive and only shows itself. Wittgenstein’s rejection of the idea of a priori truths
has important implications for philosophy. In his view, philosophy is concerned
with necessary conditions for world and language, and when these cannot be
said, it follows that philosophy has no independent field of study, and that there
are no philosophical sentences. Instead, philosophy clarifies the formal condi-
tions of representation and is, in this way, inextricably linked to the difference
between what can be said and what can only be shown.
In the first set of remarks on philosophical problems of logic (6.1n),
Wittgenstein writes that the ‘propositions of logic are tautologies’ (TLP 6.1)
and continues ‘[t]herefore the propositions of logic say nothing’ (TLP 6.11).
Wittgenstein here opposes the idea, prominent in the work of Bertrand Russell
and Gottlob Frege, that logic is a special group of necessary truths, because if
logic is purely formal and uninformative, it does not have any content and thus
can be neither true nor false. In fact, Wittgenstein calls this his ‘fundamental
idea’ that ‘there can be no representatives of the logic of facts’ (TLP 4.0312). In
elucidating logic, we learn nothing about the world; that is, we learn nothing at
all. ‘Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is
transcendental’ (TLP 6.13). Wittgenstein thus uses the word ‘transcendental’ to
signal that logic is a necessary condition of language, which is reflected in
meaningful uses of sentences but does not have content and cannot be talked
about. This is the reason why the ‘correct method in philosophy would really
be . . . to say nothing except what can be said . . . i.e. something that has nothing
to do with philosophy’ (TLP 6.53) and why the sentences of the Tractatus really
are ‘nonsensical’ (TLP 6.54).
With this in mind, I return to the second remark on ethics in the Tractatus,
stating ‘It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental’
(TLP 6.421), to explore the connection between the presentation of ethics and
logic as transcendental (cf. TLP 6.13). Wittgenstein shows how logic, as the
necessary condition of representation, does not connect to specific facts but to
how ‘something is’ (TLP 5.552), just as he remarks that in the world ‘no value
exists’ (TLP 6.41), that value and ethics do not connect to specific facts, ‘how
things are in the world’, but to ‘that it exists’ (TLP 6.44). Logic and ethics are
similar insofar as they do not concern facts and cannot be represented in
language, and when ethics is presented as transcendental, just like logic, this
means that ethics is also (in some way or other) a formal condition of having
a world. As transcendental, ethics must, like logic, concern the way the world
have to be organised in order to be a world, making it a priori and empty of
content.
There is, however, one notable difference between logic and ethics. While
there are no propositions of ethics, there is indeed a special form of propositions
of logic, tautologies. Tautologies have ‘a unique status among all propositions’
(TLP 6.112) because they say nothing (TLP 5.43, 6.11) and rather represent ‘the
scaffolding of the world’ (TLP 6.124) or the ‘logic of the world’ (TLP 6.22).
This difference arises because logic is connected to the possibility of represen-
tation, while ethics must concern some other aspect of our relationship to the
world. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s broad view of ethics and the preceding
remark, 6.41, stating that value and meaning cannot be in in the world, the
best suggestion is that ethics is concerned with the possibility of organising the
world in terms of meaning and value. As Kristen Boyce notes, saying that logic
is transcendental is ‘to say that it is a virtue of logic . . . that our thinking hangs
together across different contexts in describing a world. To say that ethics and
aesthetics, too, are transcendental is to say that it is not solely in virtue of
a concern for truth that that our thinking transcends individual contexts and
hangs together’ (2019: 139–40). Organisation in terms of value and meaning is
part of what constitutes a world because without it, a world could not be a world
for someone – a point I return to in the next section.
This view of ethics as a condition of the organisation of the world in terms of
value can be elaborated on by comparing it with what Wittgenstein writes about
science in the Tractatus – also in the concluding section on philosophical
problems. In the set of remarks beginning with 6.3, Wittgenstein elucidates

the difference between law and accident, necessity and contingency, bringing
out how the various ‘laws’ of the natural sciences show themselves as a priori
because they determine the specific ways of describing the world that constitute
the natural sciences in the way that mechanics, for example, conditions a very
specific form of description – that of attempting to ‘construct according to
a single plan all the true propositions that we need for the description of the
world’ (TLP 6.343). As conditions of specific forms of descriptions of the
world, the fundamental laws of natural science are a priori and necessary, but
they are also not about facts and cannot be described in language. In a metaphor
offered by Wittgenstein, if the sciences are like various forms of nets used to
describe reality, a scientific law concerns the type of net used, not the facts,
‘what the net describes’ (TLP 6.35). To take one example, the notion of a law of
causality does not reflect some necessary fact about the world; rather, it presents
itself as a necessary condition of a scientific organisation of the world, and as
such, it ‘cannot be said: it shows itself’ (TLP 6.36, translation amended).
However, even if we cannot express the ‘law’ of causality, this does not mean
that we should stop talking in science; rather, in presenting scientific sentences
(that may turn out to be true or false according to the quality of our scientific
engagement), the ‘law’ of causality will show itself.
This is an important similarity between science and ethics. In the same way,
even if we cannot say or express ethics, this does not mean that we should stop
talking in moral life because when we talk about what we find right or wrong,
valuable or meaningful, ethics will show itself as the organisation of these ways
of talking. As long as we do not take the a priori conditions of the laws of
science or ethics to be ‘about’ some special sort of ‘facts’ (in or outside the
world), such as for example ‘facts’ of causality or value, and we do not try to
express or talk about these conditions, to say what ethics is for example, we are
not sentenced to silence (as brought out in the previous example of the discus-
sion between me and my friend). Still, Wittgenstein points to an important
difference between science and ethics by presenting ethics as transcendental,
without presenting science in the same way. In relation to science, we are free
either to engage in scientific investigations of the world or to refrain from doing
so. In this way, science is simply one system among others with which we can
approach the world, a ‘modern system’ (TLP 6.372), as Wittgenstein writes,
akin to older systems of God and fate. We do not, however, have the same
freedom in relation to ethics. When ethics is presented as transcendental this
indicates that we cannot choose whether or not to engage with value. Rather,
having a world necessarily means to relate to the world in terms of meaning and
value, that is, to engage in ethics. Why this is so will be the topic of the next
section.
3.3 World and ‘I’, Will and Ethics (TLP 6.423)

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein shows how for something to be the world, it has to
be organised in a way that is available for language and thought, and that logic,
as this form of organisation, is transcendental and cannot itself be expressed in
language. Wittgenstein also shows how ethics plays a similar role, and that
ethics, as the possibility of organising the world in terms of meaning and value,
is transcendental and cannot itself be expressed in language. Logic and ethics
are, however, not the only necessary conditions of a notion of the world. For
something to be the world, it also has to be the world for someone because only
with the introduction of an ‘I’ that can think and talk about the world does the
world appear as a unity that is available in language and thought. In this way,
the ‘limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (TLP 5.6). What brings
the subject into philosophy is that the world only comes into view from
a specific perspective, for an ‘I’, and the ‘I’ is, in this specific sense, nothing
more than a perspective on the world. The ‘I’ and the world are mutually
constitutive so that, really, the ‘world is my world’ (TLP 5.62).
Wittgenstein compares the relationship between I and the world with the
relationship between the eye and the visual field. The eye is the viewpoint from
which the visual field appears, and it is a necessary aspect of a visual field that it
appears from a particular perspective. However, as Wittgenstein notes, ‘really
you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it
is seen by an eye’ (TLP 5.633). The visual field is always seen from somewhere,
but the eye is not one of the facts presented within the visual field, and we do not
learn anything about the eye by searching these facts – not even whether the eye
is, in fact, an eye. In a similar way, the world is always approached from
somewhere and experienced from a particular perspective – and never, for
instance, from ‘nowhere’ – but this perspective is itself not part of the world,
and we do not learn anything about the source of this perspective, what
Wittgenstein calls the ‘philosophical I’ (TLP 5.641),3 by searching through
the facts of the world.
Wittgenstein uses the notion of the philosophical ‘I’ to show how the notion of
‘the world’ implies being experienced from a specific perspective. As Anscombe
writes, the ‘I’ ‘refers to the centre of life, or the point from which everything is
seen’ (1959: 168). Again, we do not learn anything new with the introduction of
the Tractarian notions of world, logic, ethics and ‘I’, and no matter how much we
investigate the actual world, there is, philosophically, nothing new to learn
beyond what is already given for us with the fact that ‘something is’. This is
key to one of Wittgenstein’s rather more difficult remarks about ‘how much truth
there is in solipsism’ (TLP 5.62). The notion of the world is available only for an
‘I’ who can think and talk about the world, and this may seem to support the
solipsistic point that the world depends on the ‘I’. However, as the formal notion
of the ‘I’ does not add anything to the world and simply leaves everything as it is,
the truth in solipsism turns out to coincide with what the ‘I’ experiences, the
world, and thus with realism, where, importantly, realism turns out to be just as
uninformative as solipsism. As Wittgenstein writes, the ‘I’ in solipsism ‘shrinks
to a point without extension and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it’
(TLP 5.64). Wittgenstein is making the conceptual point that the world has to be
a world for someone, but he is not introducing a substantial notion of self, because
as a purely formal feature of the world, the extensionless ‘I’ has no specific
characterising features, and it is not anything in the world, ‘not the human being,
3
In this and following remarks, I have changed the translation of ‘Ich’ from ‘self’ to ‘I’ because
I find it more loyal to the original German text.
not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals’ (TLP
5.641). The philosophically relevant ‘I’ is void of content and simply works as
a tool of elucidation that shows us how the world is always tied to a specific
perspective, which means that the ‘I’ cannot be expressed or described, but shows
itself as ‘the limit of the world – not a part of it’ (TLP 5.641). Just as the world and
language should be seen as reciprocal notions, we now come to see that the world
and the philosophical ‘I’ are also reciprocal notions.
The philosophical ‘I’ has ethical relevance because it shows how any
approach to the world is specific. It is part of the concept of an ‘I’ that it cannot
attend to anything, everywhere, all at once; rather, it has to attend to something
in particular. Furthermore, the ‘I’ cannot be a stationary perspective on the
world because in a strictly formal sense, an ‘I’ is someone who has a life to lead,
and its perspective on the world is shaped by the organisation established in this
life. In this sense, ‘world and life are one’ (TLP 5.621). The form of organisa-
tion constituted by the ‘I’s approach to the world is thus both particular and
active; an aspect of the formal notion of ‘I’ introduced in the remarks on ethics
as a formal notion of will: ‘It is impossible to speak about the will as the bearer
of the ethical. And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only to psychology’
(TLP 6.423). As the ethically relevant aspect of the philosophical ‘I’, the will, is
formal, it is impossible to talk about and cannot alter any facts, not anything
‘that can be expressed by means of language’ (TLP 6.43).
This idea can be illuminated by looking at earlier remarks on the will in
Wittgenstein’s treatment of philosophical confusions about necessity and law
(6.3n). Here, Wittgenstein considers whether the will has a necessary connec-
tion to the world, but he rejects this suggestion and underlines how anything in
the world is independent of the will of the ‘I’. Whether what we wish for
happens or not is accidental, and if it does happen, this is indeed just ‘a favour
granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion between the will
and the world’ (TLP 6.374). If someone were to object that they can in fact bring
about changes in the world by acting on their will, Wittgenstein would reply that
this objection misses the point. Even if there are, in some cases, causal connec-
tions between a person’s willing and specific changes in the world, there is no
necessary connection between what they will and what happens: even the best
laid plans may turn out differently than they wanted them to. Any possible
connection between the will and the world is accidental, and as such, these
connections – as well as specific objects of will – are irrelevant to philosophy.
What is philosophically relevant is that the will can only be moved by what the
philosophical ‘I’ can come to will. The organisation of the world constituted by
the will must thus be shaped by whatever the philosophical ‘I’ wills as relevant
in life or, in other words, by what the ‘I’ finds to be of meaning and value.
This is the background against which it is possible to understand the mention

of the will ‘as bearer of the ethical’ (TLP 6.423). Wittgenstein aims, in my view,
to show that for the ‘I’ to come to will something is to come to see it as
a valuable or meaningful object of will, something that is worth attending to,
worth saying or doing (akin to Plato’s point that we can desire only what we
consider to be good, cf. Plato 1997). Wittgenstein is making the conceptual
point that any approach to the world is shaped by active willing at the centre of
the life of the ‘I’. Moreover, relating to the world in terms of will makes some
things stand out as important and central (and others not) in the ‘I’s’ approach to
the world, resulting in an organisation of the world that must, in turn, be
understood in terms of value and meaning. This means, however, that whatever
is made the object of will comes to be central not only to the life of the ‘I’, but
also to the ‘I’s’ organisation of the world. Life and world really ‘are one’ (TLP
5.621) because they are both organised by the same pattern of value established
through the will of the ‘I’. This also means that, as the bearer of ethics, the
willing ‘I’ comes to take on responsibility for the way it organises the world in
terms of value (see also Christensen 2018). In this way, the purely formal notion
of the will of the philosophical ‘I’ introduces the possibility of ethics.
3.4 Is This Really Ethics? (TLP 6.422)

In the Tractatus, ethics arises because of the reciprocal notions of the world and
the willing ‘I’, and it concerns how the will of the ‘I’ establishes an ethical
perspective that organises the world in terms of meaning and value. As a way of
relating to the world, this perspective is not reducible to psychological content;
rather, it organises what the subject takes notice of, what facts it finds ethically
relevant, and what it responds to and acts upon. The resulting organisation of the
world shows in what the ‘I’ does and says, sees as valuable and what not, praises
and condemns. This is why Wittgenstein of the Tractatus insists that there are no
ethical sentences: ethics is not part of what we can describe and talk about but
conditions how we approach and respond to what we can describe and talk
about.
Ethics is indeed transcendental (TLP 6.421) because it is a condition of any
possible engagement with the world. As such, ethics is a priori and empty of
content, but it shows itself in what we say and think and in our dealings with the
world, if we just refrain from trying to express it. Wittgenstein makes this point
in a letter to his friend Paul Engelmann, remarking on a poem that ‘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’
(EN: 7). As some interpreters have noted, Wittgenstein saw indeed ethics as
‘more properly located in the sphere of the poetic’ (Jannik and Toulmin 1973: 193),
but it is important to understand why this is; not because in poetry, we can
‘kind of say’ the ethical, but because poetry shows how ethics is already there,
in the connection between ‘I’ and world, showing in everything we say, think,
and do.
As already noted, this picture of ethics is quite different from the most
influential views of ethics in moral philosophy, and this difference is in fact
reflected in the Tractatus. One common assumption in moral philosophy is that
ethics is normative and offers some form of action-guidance, but Wittgenstein
dismisses this idea: ‘When an ethical law of the form, “Thou shalt . . .”, is laid
down, one’s first thought is, “And what if I do not do it?”’ (TLP 6.422).
According to Wittgenstein, there are no necessary ethical laws or guidelines,
and even if we come to accept some such law, it is always, in principle, possible
to challenge it (see also section 2.4 and Kremer 2001). The presentation of an
ethical law does not in itself settle the question of whether to follow it.
Wittgenstein also rejects another idea common in moral philosophy, that ethics
aims at our individual moral improvement through an interpersonal system of
praise and blame, for example by establishing forms of ethical punishment and
reward. As he writes, ‘ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in
the usual sense of the terms. So our question about the consequences of an
action must be unimportant. – At least those consequences should not be events’
(TLP 6.422). At this point, Wittgenstein’s rejection of the ethical relevance of
consequences is no surprise: if ethics cannot influence anything in the world, its
purpose cannot be to bring about particular facts, not even consequences
traditionally considered to be morally good.

As Wittgenstein dismisses all attempts to connect ethics to anything external to
ethics, any particularly ethical dimension of our actions must be internal; there
‘must be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside
in the action itself’ (TLP 6.422). The idea is difficult, but Wittgenstein seems to
say something like this: ethics is a pattern of value established in a person’s
dealings with the world, and as such, ethics is completely dependent on and is at
stake in every single thing that person actually says and does. Ethics is not
something in the world or life of the ‘I’, rather it is the ‘I’s’ organisation of the
world in terms of value and meaning that sets the framework or ‘limit’ for how
this ‘I’ can meaningfully act and live. Ethics therefore does not change anything
or add anything to the world; it only changes the totality or organisation of the
world/life of the willing ‘I’. As Wittgenstein notes: ‘If the good or bad exercise
of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not
the facts’ (6.43). If someone feels compelled to object that the most
important thing in ethics must be to attempt to change the world, this would be
misguided because Wittgenstein neither supports nor contradicts this idea.

Rather, he is showing what comes before any attempt to change the world (or
anything else) because it conditions the possibility of talking about something as
ethically important or valuable, namely the reciprocal notions of the willing ‘I’
and unity of world/life.
In bringing out these notions, Wittgenstein also shows that the unity of world/
life is simply what is given for the ‘I’. This means that whatever the ‘I’ goes on
to do, this will have to begin from an acceptance of whatever contingent version
of world/life the ‘I’ is currently facing. ‘The facts all contribute only to setting
the task [Aufgabe], not to its solution’ (TLP 6.4321; translation amended).
Ethically, the willing ‘I’ has to accept world/life as it is, not because of some
lack of power, but because the ‘I’ is placed in a world that does not bend to its
will. This may come across as some form of ethical recommendation or advice
for life on Wittgenstein’s part: that we ought to stoically accept the facts as they
are given to us, but this is not Wittgenstein’s point. He is rather trying to counter
the temptation to think that one can bring about change in the world simply by
wishing it different. In my view there are completely everyday examples of this
temptation: a person waiting in a line may come to find themself trying in some
(magical) way to make their line move faster (or at least faster than the other
lines) or, in a more serious situation, a person tending to a terminally ill spouse
may find themself trying to change the world so that their beloved is not dying.
We can all experience this urge to attempt to will the world to be different, but
part of becoming a mature human being is to come to resist this temptation and
accept that one cannot somehow simply ‘will’ the world to be different. This is
what Wittgenstein is trying to clarify – that any engagement with the world will
have to begin with an understanding and acceptance of the world as it confronts

one. In Cora Diamond’s words, that we look ‘with clear eyes at the happenings
of the world, at the happenings of the world being whatever they are’
(2000: 154). Ethics is, in this sense, the task of finding out, without being distracted
by philosophical confusions, what to do with one’s world as it actually is.
Wittgenstein is trying to make us see that the ‘task’ to accept the world as it is,
is not really a task at all because the attempt to will change is the result of
confusions about our relationship with the world. Thus, we should resist the idea
that there is anything in the Tractatus aimed at telling us how to live.
Wittgenstein is rather trying to remove specific confusions that are diverting
us from the activity of acting and living such as the fantasy that we can
somehow will the world to be different than it actually is. Anything else is up
to us, because the ethical perspective constituted by the will of the ‘I’ is
a personal matter (as we see in the next chapter). In this sense, Wittgenstein
of the Tractatus rejects that philosophical enquiry, such as that of the Tractatus,
can settle any substantial ethical claims, and he opposes all forms of normative
moral philosophy. In fact, by insisting that philosophy can only remove logical
confusions, he also opposes all other forms of moral philosophy, even work on
conceptual or existential issues, but in sections 4.2 and 5.1, I will argue that
Wittgenstein later came to see this issue differently.
4 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ and Continuities in Wittgenstein’s View

of Ethics
4.1 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’
After publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein left academic philosophy to become
a teacher. In this way, he stood by his general plea for silence and his remark to
Hänsel that ‘philosophy is silencing, the remainder is doing’ (Engelmann 2021:
66). Still, as is well known, Wittgenstein in time came to question aspects of the
Tractarian framework, and he somewhat reluctantly returned to philosophy. His
only manuscript devoted exclusively to ethics, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, was written
and presented in 1929, shortly after his return to Cambridge and to serious
engagement with philosophy (see Monk 1991: 276–8), and it is the last text that
can be placed squarely within Wittgenstein’s early view of ethics. The reason that
I nonetheless discuss ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ in this transitional chapter is that
Wittgenstein here discusses two issues that remain more or less stable throughout
the intricate development of his thinking, the critique of theory in moral philoso-
phy and the emphasis on the importance of the first-person standpoint in ethics.
The lecture was presented to a Cambridge society called ‘The Heretics’ on
the 17th of November 1929, and it was written, not for philosophers, but rather
for a general academic audience. Wittgenstein alludes to this in the beginning,

when he says that as the lecture does not allow him enough time to explain
a scientific matter such as logic, and as he does not want to present a popular
science lecture, he will instead ‘speak about something that I am keen to
communicate to you’ (LE: 37). I have already discussed how Wittgenstein in
the lecture uses multiple synonyms to bring out an open-ended and inclusive
view of ethics, and how he rejects philosophical enquires into ethics as non-
sensical (see section 3.1). Here, I will focus on what Wittgenstein is ‘keen to
communicate’, bringing out continuities between ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ and
a Tractarian framework of elucidation, and how Wittgenstein in the lecture
comes to struggle with this framework.
In the main part of the lecture, Wittgenstein elucidates his view of ethics in
two quite different ways. First, he highlights a specific use of words as central to
ethics and as characterised by a special form of necessity. Wittgenstein brings
this out by contrasting two examples. In the first, he imagines playing tennis and
being told by a bystander that he is playing rather poorly. To this Wittgenstein

remarks that he can dismiss such a critique by saying that he has no wish to play
tennis any better, and the bystander would then have to accept this as a perhaps
regrettable but, in any case, acceptable reaction because it only makes sense to
demand of someone that they improve their game of tennis if they have some
interest in playing well. Wittgenstein then presents a second example, now
involving a moral judgement: ‘But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous
lie and he came up to me and said “You’re behaving like a beast” and then I were
to say “I know I behave badly, but then I don’t want to behave any better”, could
he then say “Ah, then that’s alright”?’ (LE: 39). This case is very different, as
Wittgenstein notes: ‘Certainly not; he would say “Well you ought to want to
behave better”’ (LE: 39). It is not possible to brush aside a reasonable moral
judgement simply by insisting that one does not have any interest in behaving
well or being good. In fact, Wittgenstein can only dismiss this judgement if he
can show that it is incorrect – that even if his behaviour seemed beastly it really
was not because the interlocutor was failing to take into account some relevant
aspect of the situation; for example that Wittgenstein was lying only to protect
another, vulnerable person involved.
Wittgenstein’s point is that while some judgements are relative to specific
interests and aims, others are not and ethical judgements are of this latter kind.
He thus distinguishes between two types of uses of words, ‘the trivial or relative
sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other’ (LE: 38),
and he brings out how the ‘ethical sense’ implies necessity in the form of being
non-dismissible. Wittgenstein here points to the familiar aspect of moral uses of
words that we consider some forms of (reasonable) moral judgements – such as
judgements that a person is being cruel, wicked or mean or doing what is

cowardly, cheap, or disrespectful – to be always and immediately relevant for
that person, independently of whether they actually care about these judge-
ments, and independently of their specific inclinations, commitments, aims, and
projects.
Wittgenstein illuminates this point by presenting a more peculiar example,
contrasting the ordinary judgement that ‘This is the right road to Granchester’
with the judgement of ‘the absolute right road’, which he describes as a road
‘which everybody, on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be
ashamed for not going’ (LE: 40). Wittgenstein calls the first judgement
a judgement of relative value, because ‘right’ here is tied to some external
and contingent aim, such as that of finding the fastest or prettiest road to
Granchester, and he contrasts this with a judgement of absolute value, which
would be relevant and binding for anyone, despite their aims or interest. The
distinction between relative and absolute judgements is not a distinction
between factual and evaluative judgements, because both types of judgements

are indeed evaluative. Wittgenstein is rather illustrating that the ordinary way
of giving meaning to evaluative judgements, by tying them to specific aims or
wants, is not relevant in ethics (cf. Diamond 2011: 260). Wittgenstein later
remarks: ‘In ethics our expressions have a double meaning: a psychological
one of which you can speak and a non-psychological one: “good tennis-
player,” “good”’ (WVC: 92). We can meaningfully talk about relative evalu-
ations and about any psychological facts that may happen to accompany
ethical evaluations, but we cannot state the meaning of ethical expressions
themselves.
Here, the continuity with the Tractatus becomes apparent. When
Wittgenstein says that an absolute judgement would be one that everybody
would ‘with logical necessity, have to go’ (LE: 40; italics added), this shows
that he still models all forms of philosophically relevant necessity on logical
necessity, seeing ethics, in some sense, as parallel to logic, as a formal condition
of the world. The lecture thus helps clarify the difference between logic and
ethics, as it ties moral necessity to action rather than to meaningful language,
implying that ethics relates to actions that we necessarily have to do or be
ashamed for not doing. Wittgenstein’s picture of the parallel between ethics and
logic thus seems to be something like this: if something is ethically right, we
face an alternative: either we abide by it (and stop behaving like beasts, for
example), or we necessarily fail in terms of acting and living, similar to how we,
when we use language, face an alternative: either we engage in language uses
that are logical, or we necessarily fail in terms of meaning and utter only
nonsense. However, even if Wittgenstein is implying some form of moral

necessity, this cannot be meaningfully expressed within his Tractarian
framework.
In the lecture, Wittgenstein still holds the view that all facts are on the same
level and that all meaningful language use concerns the description of facts,
what he now terms ‘natural meaning’ (LE: 40). Importantly, facts cannot be
binding or have any ‘coercive power’ over us; there are no facts ‘which
everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring
about or feel guilty for not bringing about’ (LE: 40, cf. Diamond 2000; Mulhall
2012: 26). As in the Tractatus, ethics is factless, and whatever form of necessity
we find in Wittgenstein’s examples, it does not concern facts and cannot find
expression in language. Ethics, ‘if it is anything, is supernatural’ (LE: 40), in
some way elevated beyond the world of facts. ‘What is Good is Divine too.
That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics’ (CV: 5 [3]).
Wittgenstein’s second major line of elucidation of ethics marks a departure
from the Tractarian framework by introducing ethically relevant experiences,
such as to ‘wonder at the existence of the world’ and ‘of feeling absolutely safe’
(LE: 41). By presenting inner states as ethically relevant, Wittgenstein seems to
move closer to the psychological side of the ‘double meaning’ of ethical uses of
the words mentioned earlier, but he still insists that the introduced experiences
cannot be captured in factual or psychological terms. If a person feels safe from
specific dangers in specific situations, we can describe the facts that go into
characterising this situation as ‘safe’, but no possible facts correspond to the
experience of feeling absolutely safe because it is always possible that some-
thing unexpected could happen. For Wittgenstein, this means that ‘it’s nonsense
to say that I am safe whatever happens’ (LE: 42). Similarly, no specific facts
correspond to the experience of wondering that the world exists because this
wonder concerns the very fact of existence, ‘that something is’ (TLP 5.552).
Again invoking a parallel between ethics and logic, Wittgenstein is ‘tempted to
say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or
not blue. But then it’s just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology’
(LE: 42). He also explores whether expressions of these experiences can have
meaning as forms of similes, but for an expression to work as a simile, it must be
‘about’ something that we can also talk about independently of the metaphorical
expression, and again, there are no facts of being absolutely safe or wondering at
the world. Expressions of ethically relevant experiences cannot come to have
meaning by comparison because there are no facts with which to compare them.
At this point in the lecture, Wittgenstein takes several rounds on what now
appears to be a form of Tractarian merry-go-round: he investigates attempts to
express the essence of ethics, explores whether these expressions correspond to
a state of affairs, and when they turn out not to do so, he concludes that they are
meaningless. In fact, the merry-go-round turns out to be inescapable, as
Wittgenstein ultimately claims that if any expression introduced to indicate
ethical value actually turned out to correspond to facts, he would then reject this
expression as ethically irrelevant on these very grounds. As a case in point,
when Wittgenstein reconsiders the experiences introduced earlier and notes that
as these experiences are indeed facts, he ‘must admit it is nonsense to say that
they have absolute value’ (LE: 43; cf. WVC: 93). These expressions of absolute
value were nonsensical, Wittgenstein notes, not ‘because I had not yet found the
correct expressions, but . . . their nonsensicality was their very essence’ (LE:
44). Ethics and absolute value on the one hand and facts and meaning on the
other are mutually exclusive, and the Tractarian merry-go-round set in motion
by the attempt to meaningfully express absolute value will in fact go on forever
because anything meaningful or factual is excluded from the very start.
Wittgenstein here echoes the Tractarian point that ‘it is impossible for there to
be propositions of ethics’ (TLP 6.42). Still, the lecture is driven by aspirations
radically different from those motivating the Tractatus. In the Tractatus,

Wittgenstein has the purely therapeutic aims to show that ethics is not given
with the facts, that acceptance of the facts conditions all ethical engagement
with the world, and that all forms of philosophical enquiry into ethics must be
rejected, making the Tractatus end with a recommendation of silence (cf.
TLP 7). In ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein still insists on rejecting philo-
sophical engagement with ethics, but he now seems to have trouble reconciling
that with his Tractarian framework. He continuously struggles against inclin-
ations to ‘indicate’ points about ethics, for example, by ‘characterising’ it as
‘necessary’ and ‘supernatural’. Furthermore, the descriptions of some of
Wittgenstein’s examples, such as calling someone a beast or wonder at the
existence of the world, do not seem to be nonsensical (on any sensible under-
standing of nonsense), and this points beyond the Tractatus to forms of philo-
sophical engagements with ethics that differ from those of wanting to express
absolute value or the essence of ethics.
When Wittgenstein in the lecture speaks from a first-person standpoint with
a motivation ‘to communicate to you’ (LE: 37), this seems to create tension with
the purely therapeutic approach of the Tractatus and the insistence that ethics
cannot be put into words. Wittgenstein is, of course, aware of this tension, and he
addresses it at the end of the lecture, writing that ‘the tendency of all men who
ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of
language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely
hopeless’ (LE: 44). Still, Wittgenstein talks on and adds that this need to talk
documents is ‘a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help
respecting deeply’ (LE: 44). Wittgenstein is still dismissive of theoretical and

philosophical approaches to ethics; here, silence remains the only right option
because ‘[e]thics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the
ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no
science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense’ (LE: 44; see
also WVC: 68–9). The only way to put into place what philosophers are ‘gassing’
about in ethics is still ‘by being silent about it’ (EN: 143). The tension between the
lecture and the Tractatus is thus to be explained with reference to the difference in
Wittgenstein’s standpoint; in the lecture, he is talking, not as a philosopher, but in
the first person, presenting his own concern with ethics.
Nonetheless, I still think ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ is a paradigm case of
a philosopher being held captive by a picture (cf. PI §115). Wittgenstein
is moving within the framework of the general method of elucidation
developed in the Tractatus that results in a picture of philosophy as caught
in a mutually exclusive dichotomy between facts, meaning, knowledge,
and science on the one hand, and world, I, value and ethics on the other
(with logic balancing somewhat uncomfortably in the middle). In the

lecture, this picture fuels the Tractarian merry-go-round that ultimately
makes Wittgenstein unable to understand and describe completely ordinary
phenomena, for example the role that moral judgements – such as ‘You’re
behaving like a beast’ – play in moral life. We can see Wittgenstein of the
lecture as taking a step in the direction that would later lead him to
acknowledge is that there are many other ways of engaging philosophically
with ethics besides that of trying ‘to say something about . . . the absolute
good’ (LE: 44). This insight is part of what makes Wittgenstein give up
the dichotomous picture on which the source of ethics is unrelated to facts
and somehow excluded from language, but before I investigate this change
in his engagement with ethics, I will develop two points of continuity
between his early and later writings on ethics.
4.2 The Critique of Ethical Theory

In ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein is critical of the possibility of a science of
ethics, and he emphasises the ethical importance of the first-person standpoint.
In my view, both points survive the many changes in the later periods of
Wittgenstein’s writings, and they thus deserve a closer look. A good place to
start is Wittgenstein’s comments on these two points in conversations with the
members of Vienna Circle, as recorded in notes by Friedrich Waismann.4
The conversations show that Wittgenstein’s reservations towards philosophical
engagements with ethics are directed primarily at attempts to develop ethical
theories and explanations of ethics. In a conversation in December 1929,
Wittgenstein says that it is ‘a priori certain that whatever definition of the good
may be given . . . that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter’
(WVC: 69). Much work in philosophy does not contribute to our understanding of
ethics, Wittgenstein insists, and this makes it ‘definitely important to put an end to
all the claptrap about ethics – whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values
exist, whether the good is definable’ (WVC: 68–9). Wittgenstein places himself in
opposition to the mainstream in moral philosophy as the questions, he dismisses,
were central to the form of the theory-driven moral philosophy practised in
Wittgenstein’s philosophical home in Cambridge, and they came to be at the
heart of meta-ethics in the twentieth century. Wittgenstein later returns to this
issue, admitting that science for example can record the way people make
valuations and connect this to certain feelings and preferences, but he also
immediately counters any attempt to use these psychological phenomena to
4
The relevant conversations take place between 30 December 1929 and 17 December 1930,
immediately after the presentation of ‘A Lecture on Ethics’.
explain value. According to Wittgenstein, no feeling is in itself more

valuable than any other, and ‘the fact of being preferred has equally little
claim to be something valuable in itself’ (WVC: 116). Wittgenstein is not
rejecting this or that explanation of values but rather the very possibility of
providing scientific explanations of values: ‘Is value a particular state of
mind? Or a form attaching to some data or other of consciousness? I would
reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the
explanation was false but because it was an explanation’ (WVC: 116).
Wittgenstein thus criticises scientific treatments of ethics because he thinks
it impossible that scientific explanations could play any role in the attempt
to substantiate or validate ethics.
In a similar way, Wittgenstein finds that theoretical approaches are simply
irrelevant to ethics. ‘If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No,
no! That does not interest me. Even if this theory were true, it would not interest
me – it would not be the exact thing I was looking for’ (WVC: 116). A possible
objection to this is that even if theories of ethics are not what we ‘are looking
for’ in our engagement with ethics, this does not in itself discredit them.
Wittgenstein is however making the stronger point that theories of ethics
inevitably misconstrue or disfigure the phenomenon in question as they cannot
grasp what is essential to ethics: ‘If I could explain the essence of the ethical
only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever’
(WVC: 117).
Wittgenstein also in other places opposes the idea of scientific discovery in
ethics. In a remark from the same period, he considers the hypothetical case of
someone (a philosopher, for example) who comes to think that he has somehow
solved the problem of life and, with this solution, made life much easier. This man,
Wittgenstein continues, ‘need only tell himself, in order to see that he is wrong,
that there was a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but it must
have been possible to live then too’ (CV: 6 [4]). The ‘solution’ cannot be what
makes it possible to live with meaning and value because this has always been
possible, and this makes the discovery now appear ‘like an accident’ (CV: 6 [4]).
Scientific problems call for discoveries that provide us with something new, new
information or new theoretical explanations, but in Wittgenstein’s view, ethical
problems are different. Discoveries in ethics are discredited simply by the fact that
we have managed to live and act well also before such discoveries were made, and
whatever is required to engage with ethics therefore cannot be some form
of discovery or specialised knowledge: ‘What is ethical cannot be taught’
(WVC: 117).
Wittgenstein’s rejection of scientific and theoretical approaches to ethics is in
line with his rejection of ambitions to develop theories and explanations in
philosophy, in both the early and later thinking. As he remarks in a lecture: ‘Are
the same sort of reasons [as in Aesthetics] given elsewhere except in Ethics?
Yes; in philosophy’ (MWL: 352). In the later thinking, he also presents ethics as
discontinuous with science, for example in a conversation in 1947 where he
notes that for an artist, ‘just the apparently trivial details of statement may seem
as important as anything else, and perhaps the most important thing’ and
continues: ‘So in ethics, too. Problems of morality are not like problems of
engineering. . . . A different sort of Betrachtungprocess (process of investiga-
tion)’ (WPC: 39). Ethical problems are about importance and value, and this
requires a perspective or way of looking where even the most trivial details can
be important and crucial – in ethics, as well as in aesthetics and philosophy – but
this importance, and here lies Wittgenstein’s point, is not available from
a scientific approach that emphasises precision, measurement, and causality
(WPC: 38).
There is, however, an important change in Wittgenstein’s view of the rela-
tionship between philosophy and ethics from the early to the later thinking. In
the early thinking, there is really no room for lasting philosophical engagement
with ethics because such engagements can only consist of confused attempts to
develop scientific ethical theories (all the claptrap) or in clarification of the
inexpressibility of ethics as a condition of our engagement with the world. It is
difficult to say whether Wittgenstein holds on to the idea that we cannot express
the essence of ethics because he does not discuss this question after 1930. What
we know is that after 1930, Wittgenstein investigates moral discussions and
ethically relevant uses of words in the very same way as he investigates all the
other things we do in language, approaching moral language use as (at least

potentially) meaningful and allowing for philosophical investigations of such
uses (see section 5.2). Even if Wittgenstein, also in the later thinking, opposes
ethical theories and discoveries in ethics, nothing indicates that he upholds his
earlier resistance towards all philosophical investigations of ethics (contrary to
Richter 1996, 2019).
4.3 Ethics Is Personal

In ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ we find another point of continuity between
Wittgenstein’s early and later thinking on ethics, as he connects ethics to a first-
person standpoint. When Wittgenstein in the lecture departs from the Tractarian
recommendation of silence in favour of an extensive and substantial engage-
ment with ethics, he does so as a person who has something to communicate and
who is speaking solely for himself. In the conversations with the Vienna circle,
Wittgenstein remarks: ‘At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first
person: I think that this is something very essential. Here is nothing to be stated
anymore; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first
person’ (WVC: 117). In the Tractatus, ethics arises from the abstract ‘I’, but in
the lecture Wittgenstein substantiates this by showing how ethics connects to
the perspective of a particular person. The change of perspective from the
impersonal, philosophical, and formal ‘I’ to the first person point of view of the
lecture allows for an opening towards language in ethics, as Wittgenstein
unfolds a specific ethical perspective and presents what is ethically important
to him, such as respecting the tendency ‘to say something about the ultimate
meaning of life’ (LE: 44).
Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the first-person perspective is connected to his
critique of explanations of ethics and theory-driven forms of moral philosophy.
By drawing attention to his own standpoint, Wittgenstein is also criticising the
idea that we can provide impersonal, rational foundations of specific ethical
claims and thus ground them philosophically, exposing the philosophical illu-
sion ‘of wanting ethics to speak with an unquestioned, absolute authority’ (Ong
2016: 220; see also Pianalto 2011). Considered from the perspective of philoso-
phy, this may look as if Wittgenstein is revealing ethics to be ungrounded, but he
is instead marking the place where we in ethics have to leave philosophy. As
Engelmann notes: ‘Without grounding, the choice of an ethical view amounts to
adopting it, living it, in contrast to trying to justify it by means of logic, science,
philosophy, or dogmatic religious views’ (2021: 66). For Wittgenstein, ethical
views or perspectives only come to have validity or grounding in the lives of
individuals – this is his idea of the personal dimension of ethics (see also
Christensen 2020a, pp. 111–28).

In 1931, Wittgenstein returns to the idea that we always speak from a personal
standpoint in ethics: ‘An ethical sentence [Satz] states “You shall do this!” or
“That is good!” but not “These people say that this is good”. But an ethical
sentence is a personal act. Not a statement of fact. Like an exclamation of
admiration’ (PPO: 85, translation amended). Wittgenstein still rejects the view
that ethical sentences record facts, including facts about what people call good,
but in contrast to earlier, he now readily engages in philosophical investigations
of personal statements of ethics. We may be tempted to interpret the character-
isation of ethical sentences as ‘exclamations of admiration’ as a commitment to
non-cognitivist, ethical expressivism in meta-ethics, but we should resist this
temptation, because it conflicts with Wittgenstein’s critique of ethical theories
and does not help us make sense of the idea that an ethical sentence is a personal
act. For Wittgenstein, ethical sentences are not only expressions of psycho-
logical states; they are also ways of doing something such as taking a stand on
some ethical issue or making a commitment to a particular attitude, relationship,
value, principle, or the like, which thereby becomes a part of what guides one’s
view of value in life and involvement with other people. In this view, ethics is
established in what a person does, and what counts as ethical for them is what
then shows in the ways they go on to talk, live, and act, for example in the ways
they respond to others, what they aim for, and what they prize and condemn.
This does not mean that we cannot find uniformity in ethics, or that a person’s
ethical convictions cannot be influenced by others or by what happens in their
life (cf. CV: 95 [84]). Still, in principle, it is only possible fully to understand an
ethical sentence by relating it to the person who says it, because its meaning
depends on the ethical perspective of that person, who, therefore, also takes on
ethical responsibility for what the sentence entails ethically.
By rejecting external justifications of ethical views, Wittgenstein rejects the
possibility of answering the ‘moral sceptic’ (whoever this may be), because
ethical justifications have to refer to something that has already made an ethical
‘impression’ on a person, that if, to their existing understanding of moral
relevance. This means that is a person finds nothing of moral importance, it is
not really possible to offer them moral justifications. The possibility of moral
scepticism does not seem to bother Wittgenstein, though. Throughout his
writings on ethics, he seems to take it as a stable feature of human life that we
make certain ethical views or values central in our lives in this way – he treats
ethics as part of our natural history, we might say (cf. PI 25). Wittgenstein
instead investigates how moral justification works in our moral lives, and here,
he notes, ‘Nothing we do can be defended definitively. But only by reference to
something else that is established’ (CV: 23 [16]). Ethical justification takes
place within the framework of ethical importance established in the life of an

individual person, and as this framework is upheld by – or simply is – what this
person considers ethically valuable, it cannot itself be justified.
The personal dimension of ethics also influences the way we engage in moral
discussions with others, as reflected in a Nachlass remark: ‘The ethical justifica-
tion of an action must appeal to the man to whom I want to make it understand-
able’ (TS 211: 207).5 Wittgenstein’s point is not that justification is more effective
if it relies on something that the other person actually cares about but that
a justification simply fails as moral justification if it does not rely on something
that the other already values or can come to see as morally valuable because the
fact that I myself see something as morally important is no guarantee that it carries
the same weight – or any moral weight – in the life of another person. If I am truly
concerned to justify something (a judgement or an action, for example) to another
5
In references to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, I use the classification by Henrik-Georg von Wright
(1969) and quote from the Bergen Electronic Edition (BEE). All translations from the Nachlass
are my own.
person, I have to engage with moral concerns that the other person already takes
to be (or can come to take to be) morally relevant, as Wittgenstein also notes: ‘Just
consider that the justification of an “ethical proposition” merely attempts to refer
the proposition back to others that make an impression on you. If in the end you
don’t have disgust for this & admiration for that, then there is no justification
worthy of that name’ (PPO: 85). In this way, actual moral justifications show us
something about the role of ethics in a person’s life: ‘What people accept as
justification, –shows, how they think and live’ (MS 130: 9). The personal
character of ethics means that it may prove difficult to understand the ethical
perspective of others, but these difficulties do not differ from the difficulties we
may have in understanding the perspective of others generally, and if we strive to
achieve at least a partial understanding of other people’s moral commitments, we
can from there engage in discussion about questions of ethical relevance.
Wittgenstein also touches upon the personal dimension of ethics in a discussion
on ethics with Rush Rhees in 1945, returning to the idea that ethical sentences
establish what a person considers to be of ethical importance in her life: ‘Well,
suppose I say Christian ethics is the right one. Then I am making a judgement of
value. It amounts to adopting Christian ethics. It is not like saying that one of
these physical theories must be the right one. The way in which some reality
corresponds – or conflicts – with a physical theory has no counterpart here’
(Rhees 1965: 24). Wittgenstein again notes that ethical views cannot, like scien-
tific theories, be tested by some independent method, such as checking the facts,
and that presenting something as the morally right view is a doing – it is to adopt
this view as one’s own. Wittgenstein also emphasises that ethical sentences are
personal commitments to certain values or views in another remark from the same
period: ‘Denying responsibility means, not holding anyone responsible’ (CV: 73
[63]; see also Bouwsma 1986: 16). To say that there is no such thing as ethical
responsibility is not to present a neutral, impersonal, or theoretical claim: it is to
do something that shapes one’s ethical perspective – in this case, that one does not
relate to other people as subjects of responsibility, for example, because that one
understands people’s actions primarily as the result of outside determining forces
such as genes or upbringing. Importantly, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the per-
sonal dimension of ethics does not imply that ethical sentences are essentially
private (contra to Kelly 1995) or purely subjective. To use jargon from the lecture,
Wittgenstein’s point is that in presenting an ethical sentence, a person is doing
something that has both an absolute and a personal dimension. On the one hand,
they treat something as having absolute value and, on the other, they anchor this
way of acting in their own way of living and talking. Ethics is both absolute and
personal, a point to be revisited in the next chapter, where I focus on the remarks
on ethics in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
5 Wittgenstein’s Later Writings on Ethics

5.1 Ethics in Wittgenstein’s Later Writings
On 18 January 1929, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in a letter to his wife
that ‘God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train’ (Monk 1991: 255). Keynes was
referring to Wittgenstein, who was returning to Cambridge surrounded by myths of
genius and acclaim for the Tractatus. However, more or less from this day,
Wittgenstein began to depart from this early work, as discussed already in the
previous chapter. In this context, it is impossible to give an exhaustive presentation
of the development from the Tractatus to the later thinking, so I will highlight only
a few changes, central to the development in Wittgenstein’s engagement with ethics.
In fact, Wittgenstein’s overall view of philosophy changes only little. He still
thinks that philosophical activity consists in the clarification of language, that
philosophical considerations are not scientific, and that philosophers rather
work by looking ‘into the workings of our language, and that in such a way
that these workings are recognized – despite an urge to misunderstand them’
(PI §109). What changes in the later philosophy is first and foremost
Wittgenstein’s view of language and, with it, his view of what is needed in
order to clarify language. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein aims to develop
a general method of elucidation, culminating in the general form of propositions
(TLP 6), but in his later thinking, he gives up the idea that all of language shares
the same logic and is available for the same form of elucidation. Instead, he
develops a view of language as structured by a multitude of different grammars
(cf. PI §90) established in our uses of words, but often lacking in perspicuity and
thus calling for a variety of different forms of philosophical clarification
(cf. §112).
In my view, a crude but ultimately correct way of describing this develop-
ment is that in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein sees us as using language primarily to
do one thing, to talk about something, but at the time of the Philosophical
Investigations, he has come to see that we do all sorts of different things in
language: we greet and count, name things, buy things (§1) and build things
(§2), give orders and make measurements (§23), and so on, almost ad infinitum,
because we live our whole lives in language. Wittgenstein introduces the term
language-game to make visible how uses of language are part of our actions and
activities, and how meaning arises in a ‘whole, consisting of language and the
activities into which it is woven’ (§7), thus emphasising how philosophers must
describe the many ways in which ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity,
or of a form of life’ (§23). Language is entangled with specific ways of acting
and living that are in turn shaped by the goals, purposes, and ideals of
human beings. Language is thus, ultimately, embedded in and framed by our
common form of life and the many forms of life we develop from this common
form (cf. Boncompagni 2022).
In this way, what human beings find important, interesting, challenging, and
ordinary is just as much part of what constitutes language as the need to talk
about the world. As Avner Baz notes, Wittgenstein at this point considers ‘the
meaning of words as a function of the use that the words are put to, or may be put
to – the work that the words perform, or are fit to perform – in particular
circumstances, by concrete human beings’ (2003: 482). An understanding of
what a person says cannot be detached from an understanding of what that
person is doing (or trying to do) and their reasons for saying what they do in this
specific context. Wittgenstein thus also changes his conception of language-
users, from the purely formal, philosophical ‘I’ of the Tractatus to a plurality of
speakers with various background and projects, who are grieving, hurting,
learning, and so on while communicating with and responding to each other.
By giving up the assumption of a unitary form of language, Wittgenstein also
gives up the idea that there is one, single solution to ‘the problems of philoso-
phy’ (TLP: 3) – which he now describes as a form of philosophical ‘dogmatism’
(PI §131) – and instead, he sees philosophy as engaged in continuous clarifica-
tion of language. In philosophy, ‘Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated),
not a single problem’, and because of this, there is ‘not a philosophical method,
though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were’ (§133).
Because language is diverse and dynamic, we often have difficulties under-
standing uses of language in specific cases, and philosophy addresses the
problems that arise when ‘we don’t have an overview of the use of our words’
(§122). The task of philosophy is to find relevant reminders (§127), to provide
descriptions (§109), to present ‘an object of comparison’ (§130) or

a ‘surveyable representation’ (§122) that may help us regain an overview of
how we use language in specific cases (for introductions to Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy, see e.g. McGinn 1997; Stern 2004).
In general, there are both changes and continuities in Wittgenstein’s view of
ethics across the many developments from early to later thinking. I have already
highlighted some continuities, but with the changes in his view of language,
Wittgenstein’s approach to ethics also changes. The dichotomous picture of
ethics and facts disappears from the later remarks on ethics, and as noted earlier,
his view of how philosophy can engage with ethics also changes. Wittgenstein
now thinks that philosophy can investigate ethically relevant language uses
beyond attempts ‘to say something about . . . the absolute good’ (LE: 44, italics
added). One example is that Wittgenstein, for years, returns to an investigation
of ethical uses of the word ‘good’; another is that he now also emphasises the
philosophical importance of attending to how ethics is embedded in specific
circumstances that give rise to actual ethical problems. Wittgenstein holds on to

the idea that philosophical engagement with ethics aims exclusively at clarifi-
cation of language, but he eventually comes to think that this form of clarifica-
tion can concern what is ethically specific and particular. As D. Z. Phillips sums
up this view, ‘What is general in ethics is conceptual elucidation and clarifica-
tion. A philosopher may bring out the character of a specific moral perspective’
(1992: 103). Wittgenstein’s later approach to ethics thus differs remarkably
from the purely formal elucidations of ethics in the Tractatus, as I will bring out
in the following sections.
5.2 Uses of ‘Good’ and Ethically Relevant Uses of Language

When writing about the view of ethics in the later philosophy, an obvious place
to start is the only place where the word ‘ethics’ appears in a manuscript that
Wittgenstein himself completed for publication, in a remark in part I of the
Philosophical Investigations. Interestingly, this remark has largely been
ignored, despite the fact that Wittgenstein here introduces a way of investigating
ethical concepts and thus goes some way to establish an approach to ethics in the
later philosophy (see e.g. Stern 2012; Richter 2019). Wittgenstein mentions
ethics in a section where he discusses the idea of family resemblance concepts,
bringing out how concepts such as ‘language’ (§65) and ‘game’ (§66) cannot be
defined with reference to one single feature shared by all the phenomena we call
language or game. These concepts are rather held together by overlapping and
criss-crossing similarities between phenomena, similar to ‘the various resem-
blances between members of a family – build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
temperament, and so on’ (PI §67). The interlocutor of the Investigations objects
that if we cannot clearly demarcate the application of a concept, it has no clear
meaning, but Wittgenstein shows that even if we can only give a general and
rough outline of a concept, if for example ‘the concept of a game is a concept
with blurred edges’ (§71), this does not undermine its meaning because in many
cases such rough demarcations are all we need, just as, in many cases, it makes
perfect sense to say: ‘Stay roughly there’ (§71).
Wittgenstein brings out the important reminder that we draw up demarcations
for specific purposes that call for more or less precise and determinate boundar-
ies. Some cases may resist the attempt to work out clear demarcations
altogether, as Wittgenstein points out by introducing an example where one
would have ‘to draw a sharp picture “corresponding” to a blurred one’, adding:
But if the colours in the original shade into another without a hint of any
boundary, won’t it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corres-
ponding to the blurred one? Won’t you then have to say: ‘Here I might just as
well draw a circle as a rectangle or a heart, for all the colours merge.
Anything – and nothing – is right.’ –And this is the position in which, for
example, someone finds himself in aesthetics or ethics, when he looks for
definitions that correspond to our concepts. (§77)
Wittgenstein clearly suggests that we should approach ethical – and aesthetical –

concepts as family resemblance concepts, and not try to define them based on
some shared, essential property or feature. As Wittgenstein writes in
a manuscript in 1934, ‘the use of the word “good” (in the ethical sense) is
composed of a very large number of related games. Facets of use, so to speak.
But it is precisely the connection between these facets, their kinship, that creates
a concept here’ (MS 140: 33). Philosophers need to attend to how ethical
concepts hold together a family of different meanings that may ‘shade into’
each other without us being able to draw a clear line around their individual
meanings.
This is not all that Wittgenstein says about ethical concepts in this context. In
response to the objection against family resemblance concepts that it would be
almost impossible to get an overview of the many meanings of such a concept,
Wittgenstein says: ‘always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word
(“good” for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then
it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings’ (§77).
We learn a word like ‘good’ in diverse circumstances and they all contribute to its
meaning. As Wittgenstein notes, ‘A child generally applies a word like “good” first
to food’ (LC: 2), and more ethical uses are learnt as part of evaluations of ways of
playing and hanging out with other children, as part of admonitions or encourage-
ments, prohibitions or ideals offered by authorities such as parents or teachers, and

in early discussions about what is involved in becoming a (remotely) good person.
Moreover, even if we try to limit investigations to recognisable ethical uses of good,
we find great variety of uses, as we use the word ‘good’ to talk about actions,
outcomes, and people, to praise, recommend, prescribe, or evaluate, and we, even in
ethical contexts, use ‘good’ to talk about instrumental as well as intrinsic value. This
variety challenges the idea, running through much of moral philosophy, that there is
one, distinct feature in play in all these ways of using ‘good’, and §77 is important
because Wittgenstein here provides us with an alternative in the form of ‘two clear-
cut proposals about ethical concepts . . .: they cannot be defined, for they have
a family of meanings [. . . and] we should look at how we learn the meaning of such
terms in order to appreciate this’ (Stern 2012: 59).
Another source of insight into Wittgenstein’s investigations of ethical
concepts are several sets of notes written by students and colleagues from
his lectures in the 1930s. In these lectures, Wittgenstein again shows how
ethical concepts like ‘good’ cannot be defined (AWL: 96, MWL: 324–5) and
recommends connecting investigations of their meaning to the learning of

ethically relevant uses of words (MWL: 325). Wittgenstein also suggests other
ways of investigating ‘good’ such as looking at the way its meaning is shaped
by what comes to be established as the shared meaning in actual discussion of
goodness. ‘Each way in which A can convince B that x is good, fixes
a meaning in which “good” is used – fixes the grammar of the discussion’
(MWL: 325). Wittgenstein is not implying that the meaning of good is
completely up to A and B; rather, that language users in specific discussions
for specific purposes settle on the grammar in play in their discussion and thus
on a meaning (or meanings) of ‘good’. In the investigation of the meaning of
‘good’, we have to distinguish between the diverse families that make up this
meaning, and one way to do so is thus to investigate how the word plays
different roles in discussions of different topics, for example how the meaning
of ‘good’ changes in discussions of actions or outcomes or people, because
‘[t]he way in which you use “good” in particular case is partly defined by the
topic you’re talking about’ (MWL: 325).
In one lecture, Wittgenstein criticises the search for a unified definition of
‘good’, dominant in the moral philosophy of his time, as an unproductive
approach to ethical concepts: ‘One way of looking at Ethics is to say meaning
of “good” must be what is common to all things we call “good” . . .: I said
this was far too simple’ (MWL: 332).6 The preoccupation with definitions
and the hunt for a common feature of the ‘good’ is problematical because it
blinds philosophers to the variety of uses of good, but also, and here
Wittgenstein adds a new point, because it blinds them to the possibility that
this common feature may not be what we need to understand the meaning of
‘good’ or its role in ethics. ‘We can’t find out meaning of “good”, by looking
for what all cases have in common: even if there is something in common,
we may never use “good” for that’ (MWL: 324). When we are uncertain
about how to understand ‘good’ or whether something is in fact ethically
good, these difficulties may not be helped by pointing to some shared feature
in everything we call good because this feature may not be relevant for an
understanding of good in the context in question. In a conversation
with O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein raises a related worry about the
philosophical preoccupation with definitions. Even if it is possible to
offer a definition of ‘good’, this definition may not be relevant to actual
struggles in understanding ethical goodness. Discussing a case about a person
in doubt about the good, Wittgenstein asks: ‘Would someone is such a case
6
When ‘Ethics’ is capitalised in the lecture notes, and often also in Wittgenstein’s own writings, the
word refers to the philosophical discipline of moral philosophy.
ask for a definition? If he asked for a definition, to what end would he do

this? Guidance? How could it guide him?’ (Bouwsma 1986: 40). According
to Bouwsma, Wittgenstein brooded over this question, but finally said that
a definition could be relevant for the person in doubt, but ‘in order for it to
serve him, it would have to do so as a resolution by which he would come to
alter attitudes’ (1986: 40). Even if a definition could be ethically relevant by
influencing the attitudes of a person (and I turn to Wittgenstein’s notion of
ethical attitudes in the next section), this definition is only a small part of the
language-game that surrounds the word ‘good’, and other, more important
parts, Wittgenstein goes on to say, are made up of concepts such as ‘ought’,
‘shame’, ‘conscious’ and ‘evil’, and so on (1986: 41).
In the lectures, as in §77 of the Investigations, Wittgenstein compares ethical
and aesthetical ways of talking and brings out how philosophical approaches are
shaped by some rather narrow and sometimes distorting assumptions. In
a discussion of how we choose between alternatives and justify such choices
in ethics and aesthetics, Wittgenstein notes: ‘Many people have said: One
always does what gives most pleasure’, adding: ‘Something queer happens
here’ (MWL: 336). The assumption that we choose based on comparison and
maximisation of pleasure is central in classic, British utilitarianism, and it also
dominated mid-twentieth century British moral philosophy. However, as
Wittgenstein points out, we can easily find cases where ethical action does not
involve overt, individual choice or reference to the maximisation of pleasure (or
anything else):
Sometimes you do choose an alternative because more pleasant; but very

often you don’t.

So when I jump into water to rescue someone, though very afraid of
getting drowned, I don’t weigh any alternatives at all. . . .
What ‘choice’ does happen, if there is one, when you jump in to save
someone? Not a choice between pleasures, nor yet between pains. There will
be pros & cons, & then something will happen. But there is nothing which
I compare, in the sense in which I compare 2 pieces of chalk to find which is
longest. (MWL: 337)
If a person jumps into the water to save another person from drowning, it is not
always clear that they actively choose to do so in any straightforward sense of
choice. Even if it makes sense to talk of choice here – and this is Wittgenstein’s
main point – this choice does not take the form of a process of weighing two
alternatives in terms of pleasure, and the decision does not depend on
a judgement of which alternative would be most pleasant, in relation to neither
the person’s own pleasure nor some more general perspective. Just as likely,
the person will not have cause for thought, as they already know what to do (if
they think anything at all, it may just be: I need to save that person), and we get
a wrong understanding of what moved them to jump in the water, if we
construed this in terms of a process of comparing or weighing alternatives.
Wittgenstein thus challenges the assumption that hedonism and maximisation
play a general role in ethical judgement. To this he adds that philosophers have
ascribed them this role only because of their preoccupation with the word ‘good’,
which has allowed parts of the grammar of comparative uses of ‘good’ to seep
into philosophical investigations, blinding philosophers to the fact that ethics, like
aesthetics, is not (at least not primarily) a comparative activity: ‘All ethics seems
to be based on this illusion. It is said that this human being is better than that and
immediately one believes that one is dealing with a series of quantitative deter-
minations like a series of weights’ (TS 219: 11). In aesthetics and ethics, we are of
course interested in what is beautiful and good, but this does not necessarily
entail, as philosophers sometimes assume, that we are even more interested in
what is more or most beautiful and best. As Wittgenstein notes: ‘You use beautiful
in: “Look how marvellous”. But you don’t say “This isn’t beautiful enough”. & so
you don’t in Ethics “This action isn’t good enough”’ (MWL: 340).
Wittgenstein reproaches moral philosophers for lacking attention to the
variety in ordinary language use, also in relation to ethics: ‘If I had to say
what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation,
including Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what
is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words’
(LC: 2). According to Wittgenstein, moral philosophers should shift their
attention away from the investigation of specifically ethical concepts towards
explorations of how we talk about ethical problems including the many different
ways that we talk about ethical problems without invoking any specialised
ethical vocabulary. By suggesting that the question of whether a sentence
belongs to ethics is to be settled, not by identifying specific ‘form of words’,
but rather by looking at the way we use words, Wittgenstein not only resists the
attempt to give definite definitions to ethical concepts but also refuses to
delineate ethics by restricting it to a specific vocabulary. He thus challenges
the idea that moral philosophy’s ‘subject matter’ can be specified and delineated
with reference to specifically moral concepts.
In one of the most influential articles on Wittgenstein’s later ethics, Cora
Diamond develops this point by considering the suggestion that ‘a sentence’s
belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter’
(1996: 237). Diamond argues that a sentence has an ethical use if it allows us to
do something that we want or need to do in moral life in different ways, for
example if it allows us to see something as morally relevant, shapes our moral
attention, or helps us understand how to act in particular situations. As Diamond

sums up:
Whole sentences, stories, images, the idea we have of a person, words, rules:
anything made of the resources of ordinary language may be brought into
such a relation to our lives and actions and understanding of the world that we
might speak of the thinking involved in that connection as ‘moral’. There is
no limit to be set. (1996, 248; cf. Mulhall 2012)
On this reading, Wittgenstein rejects the possibility of identifying ethical

relevance prior to investigations of ethically relevant forms of language-use.
This rejection is in line with the view of ethics, running through all of his
thinking, as a way of organising one’s life in terms of meaning and value
because on this view, ethics is not an area of life or the world that can be
delimited independently of whatever actually takes on value in our lives.
Wittgenstein thus uses the comparison between ethical and aesthetic uses of
language to call for a new way of investigating ethics in philosophy that goes
beyond investigations of specific types of words and sentences: ‘We are con-
centrating, not on the words “good” or “beautiful” . . . but on the occasions on
which they are said – on the enormously complicated situation’, Wittgenstein
says in one lecture and continues, ‘How far this takes us from normal aesthetics
[and ethics – T]. We don’t start from certain words, but from certain occasions
or activities’ (LC: 2–3). In moral philosophy, we should not just look at isolated,
abstract unities such as concepts and choices but also at the ways that concepts
and choices and other forms of moral concerns are embedded and unfold in
concrete situations in the lives of actual human beings. As Lars Hertzberg
presents Wittgenstein’s point: ‘We should look at the context: the nature of
the moral concern expressed is not determined by the use of certain words.
Everything depends on what the speaker is doing in uttering those words in
a context’ (2002: 256). In fact, Wittgenstein himself engages in such contextual
investigations of examples, and to these we now turn.
5.3 Context, Particularity, and Objectivity

A central source for an understanding of the later view of ethics is a set of notes
that Wittgenstein’s friend Rush Rhees made of their ongoing conversations
(Rhees 1965 and 2001: 410–11; WPC: 26–30). In one such conversation,
Wittgenstein remarks that ‘it was strange that you could find books on ethics
in which there was no mention of a genuine ethical or moral problem’
(1965: 21), thus recommending one way in which philosophical investigations
of ethics could proceed, namely by looking at people’s actual ethical problems.
In the conversation, Rhees suggests that they consider the example of a man
who considers himself faced with the choice of either leaving his wife or
abandoning his work within cancer research. Wittgenstein notes that the man
may adopt one of a number of possible attitudes towards these two options that
each highlight different aspects of the situation as the most important or
valuable, the man’s obligations to his wife or the importance of his research.
The man may also connect the options to his past actions and choices in
different ways, just as other people may have very different attitudes towards
the situation: ‘Suppose I am his friend, and I say to him “Look, you’ve taken this
girl out of her home, and now, by God, you must stick to her.” This would be
taking up an ethical attitude’ (1965: 22). To Wittgenstein, an ethical attitude
seems to involve a comprehensive, ethical perspective on the situation within
which one of the options comes to stand out as the right one that ought to be
chosen, while others fade in importance. If Wittgenstein, as a friend, had instead
observed that ‘your wife is a capable woman and would not want to stand in way
of your research’, the ethical attitude reflected in his remark would have led to
different moral recommendations.
Wittgenstein also remarks that if the man has already adopted some well-
established and comprehensive ethical system such as certain types of Christian
ethics, this would settle the question, as he would then have to stay with his
wife – presumably because Christian ethics, in Wittgenstein’s understanding,
cannot recommend leaving one’s spouse. Through reflection on his predica-
ment, the ethical attitude of the man may come to change, just as it may be
influenced by what he chooses to do – ethics is in this way not only personal but
also contextual and dynamic. ‘He may say, “Well, thank God I left her: it was
better all around.” Or maybe, “Thank God I stuck to her.” Or he may not be able
to say “thank God” at all, but just the opposite,’ Wittgenstein remarks and
concludes: ‘I want to say that this is the solution of an ethical problem’ (Rhees
1965: 23). The ethical problem arises when the man cannot settle on an ethical
attitude that provides him with a reason for one of his options as the right option,
and the problem remains until he establishes a coherent attitude of the value of
his choices and actions, past and future – even if this attitude may point to some
of his choices as wrong (if he is not able to say ‘thank God’ at all). The choice of
one option may not in itself be enough to solve his ethical problem as this
problem rather arises because of a tension in his own ethical attitude towards the
situation, for example the value he places on his marriage and his research
respectively.
Wittgenstein clearly thinks that there are many possible ethical attitudes as well
as more comprehensive ethical systems, and he also explicitly cautions against
the failure to acknowledge ethical variety in philosophy. In considering different
systems of ethics there may be ‘a temptation to interpret what adherents of
a different ethics are doing and saying in terms of some conception of good that
we ourselves hold, and to say that this interpretation is what they really mean’
(WPC: 28). In investigations of ethical questions, we should not assume that we
already know what is ethically relevant, and we should take seriously what people
actually present as ethical reasons, even if these reasons may be very different
from anything we would ourselves consider ethical or important. We should thus
refrain from ‘assuming that reasons must really be of a different sort from what
they are seen to be’ (Rhees 1965: 26).
In the conversations with Rhees, Wittgenstein elaborates on this inclusive
view of what can be brought to have ethical relevance. When Rhees mentions
a slogan by Herman Göring, ‘Recht ist das, was uns gefällt’ (‘Right is what
pleases us’), Wittgenstein remarks that ‘even that is a kind of ethics. It is helpful
in silencing objections to a certain attitude’ (1965: 25). This ready acceptance of
what many would see not as an ethical attitude but rather as a demonstration of
power – and an unethical one at that – may seem to imply acceptance of a form
of radical ethical relativism, challenging the objective character of ethics.
Wittgenstein does however reject this and argues that the existence of actual
ethical disagreement and various systems of ethics does not by itself amount to
a theoretical insight into the truth of relativism. Furthermore, when discussing
what could justify an action, Wittgenstein remarks that this variety of systems of
ethics does not undermine the individual systems because one’s awareness that
others have different ethical attitudes to an ethical question does not mean that
one must ‘cease to adhere to one system of ethics – and in this sense be
indifferent – and if I do adhere then . . . I will recognise reasons which are
decisive [for or against the action]’ (WPC: 28).

In a similar vein, Wittgenstein thinks it misguided when philosophers, moved
by fear of relativism, try to develop ethical theories to justify the right ethical
systems because, as ethics requires personal commitment, it can never be the
task of philosophy to evaluate the ethical validity of particular ethical attitudes.
One time, when Rhees mentions the opposition between Christian morality and
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, Wittgenstein remarks that if Rhees wants to
try to solve such a conflict between ethical systems, ‘go ahead and good luck to
you. It is nothing I could do or dream of doing’ (WPC: 52). In a philosophical
discussion, there is no way to decide between ethical systems because here, we
do not know what the criteria could be. Of course, the evaluation of ethical
systems is not complete arbitrary; there ‘is argument, and in the course of the
argument there are reasons for and against’, but ‘there isn’t generally proof’
(WPC: 28), as Wittgenstein observes, because the weight of arguments hinges
on the place and importance of these arguments in people’s lives, not on their
theoretical merits. We cannot provide general and impersonal proof of
a particular ethical system because we can only establish ethical importance by

adopting an attitude as the right one, and this move is very different from
making a theoretical argument – in fact, it is not a move in philosophy, but
a different form of activity, that of engaging in moral life.
In the later philosophy, Wittgenstein thus still rejects the idea, central in much
normative moral philosophy, that philosophy can develop justified normative
guides for right conduct (see e.g. Diamond 1996; Wisnewski 2007). For
Wittgenstein, the role of philosophy is not to decide which ethical system we
ought to adopt, or specify what kind of people we ought to be, but to clarify the
very possibility of an ethical attitude, showing how we relate to our world and
lives in ways that establish crucial differences between what we find good and
bad, valuable and neutral, right and wrong. In fact, Wittgenstein is trying to
make philosophers give up the idea that the objectivity of ethics depends on the
possibility of providing theoretical proof of some specific ethical system, and
instead turn their attention to investigations of the roles that objectivity plays in
ethical thinking and discussions, for example describing how adopting an
ethical system in itself involves a claim to objectivity: ‘If you say there are
various systems of ethics you are not saying that they are all equally right. That
means nothing. Just that it would have no meaning to say that each man was
right from his own standpoint. That could only mean that each judges as he
does’ (Rhees 1965: 24).
For Wittgenstein, the idea that ethical relevance is dependent on personal
ethical commitments does not challenge the idea of objectivity, because it is not
up to philosophy to secure or validate this objectivity. As Benjamin De Mesel
notes, it is ‘true that Wittgenstein, both early and late, saw ethics as deeply
personal and bound up with people’s deepest concerns and commitments. It

does not follow, though, that he saw ethics as essentially subjective. That only
follows if what is deeply personal and bound up with people’s deepest concerns
and commitments cannot be objective’ (2017: 13; see also section 4.3).
5.4 Ethics and the ‘Problem of Life’

In Wittgenstein’s engagement with ethics in his later thinking, two themes stand
out as central, the confrontation with the problem of life and the relationship to
the other, and I will consider these themes in this and the next section. Already
in the early thinking, we saw how Wittgenstein connects ethics to of the most
debated questions in philosophy, namely that of the meaning or problem of life,
and in a remark from the later period, he notes that the problem of life arises
when we cannot find a way to live that we find bearable, personally as well as
morally: ‘I may well reject the Christian solution of the problem of life
(salvation, resurrection, judgement, heaven, hell) but this does not solve the problem
of my life, for I am not good & not happy’ (PPO: 169). The problem of life relates
both to ethical considerations (of how to be ‘good’) and to considerations of
prosperity and fulfilment in a wider sense (of how to be ‘happy’), and the fact
that Wittgenstein thinks this problem could be given a Christian solution shows that
he sees an intimate connection between ethics and religion, as they both are relevant
to the question of how to live one’s life (see e.g. Schönbaumsfeld 2023).
In later writings, Wittgenstein more specifically connects the problem of
finding life meaningful and bearable with the ethical problems of establishing
value and importance by means of the notion of a person’s attitude (Verhaltens)
to life: ‘If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements (“a change of
situation”). But the most important & effective improvement (“change”), in our
own attitude, hardly occurs to us, & we can decide on this only with the utmost
difficulty’ (CV: 60 [53]). As we saw, in his discussions with Rhees, Wittgenstein
uses the word ‘attitude’ for the way we organise the world in terms of ethical
importance and value, and in this remark, he brings out how problems of life do
not arise from the circumstances of one’s life considered in isolation, but from
the way one approaches these circumstances, that is, how one understands them
as presenting possibilities, necessities, demands, and so on. This point is related
to the Tractarian idea of the ethical perspective of the ‘I’ on the world, but
Wittgenstein now presents the ethical attitude as a result of active engagement
in life and as something that we can reflect on and change, thereby changing the
way we approach our lives and the problems we face here.
When Wittgenstein says that the most important improvement is to change
one’s attitude, thus making the attempt to change the situation ethically second-
ary, this should not be interpreted as a recommendation of passivity. He is rather
offering a reminder that what is ethically relevant is the tension between the way
one approaches a situation – what one sees as important and how one thinks one
should act and respond – and what is actually at play in the situation, and
because of this, the ethically relevant change is a change in the way one relates
to the situation or the people involved, for example by moving from acceptance
to rejection or from being a bystander to active engagement. To flesh out
Wittgenstein’s point, if a situation presents me with an ethical challenge,
something I find unacceptable, unjust, or cruel, this only becomes an ethical
problem if I, despite my view of the situation, do nothing to change it. That is, it
raises an ethical problem for me if I for example notice injustice without
responding to it, but it does not raise an ethical problem if I notice injustice
and fight it – even though it may, of course, raise all sorts of other problems –
because this kind of coherence in attitude and engagement in life is what is
required for living ethically.
Wittgenstein also reflects on the problem of life in several remarks written in

1937. He notices that he has a vague, disruptive feeling concerning ‘the problem
of this my life’ (MS 118: ii), and this initiates a trail of reflections, culminating in
a remark now published in Culture and Value: ‘The solution of the problem you
see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear. The fact
that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life’s shape. So you must
change your life, & once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear’ (CV:
31 [27]). The problem of life arises because Wittgenstein lives in a way that does
not ‘fit life’s shape’, and the solution he is looking for does not come in the form
of a general theory of how to live, but in the form of a way of living that will
dissolve the tension between his way of living and ‘life’s shape’. To recall a point
made in connection to his early thinking, Wittgenstein is not calling for an
uncritical acceptance of ‘life’s shape’ – the circumstances of his life – rather, he
is drawing attention to the fact that, at any particular point in life, one is placed in
a life and a context that is, in an important sense, already there. One always finds
oneself at a certain place and time, with certain abilities and weaknesses, one
stands in certain relationships and has certain possibilities and challenges, and so
on. In this sense, the shape of one’s life is already given, and in drawing attention
to this, Wittgenstein is cautioning us that we should refrain from wishful thinking
about the possibility simply to live life from somewhere else. He is warning us
against moral escapism, we might say. As Wittgenstein writes in another context:
‘To be in the world – that is what counts . . . to be in it, as it is. That is: not to make
up a novel and then be astonished and outraged by the lack of correspondence
between it and the world’ (MS 120: 8 r).
In the previous remark, Wittgenstein also suggests that engagement with the
problem of life and the search for the right way of living is both an important
and a continuous undertaking, and he asks whether anyone who does not
realise this ‘is blind to something important, indeed to what is most important
of all? Wouldn’t I like to say that he is living aimlessly – just blindly like a mole
as it were; & if he could only see (“look up”), he would see the problem?’ (CV:
31 [27]). A person who does not see a problem in life is blinded, not just to
specific problems, but to the most important part of living, namely the task of
reflecting on this life. Wittgenstein’s remark thus resonates with the Socratic
point that the unexamined life is not worth living: ‘Or shouldn’t I say: someone
who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all
as a problem, but rather as a joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his
life, not a murky background’ (CV: 31 [27]). Wittgenstein is suggesting that it
should be an integrated and welcome part of life to continuously address the
problem of one’s life, but without being worried by it, that engaging with the
question of how to live is itself a part of the attempt to live ethically.
Together with his notion of an active and changeable ethical attitude towards
life, Wittgenstein thus introduces a demand for continuous reflection on this
attitude and our approach to the circumstances of our lives.
Wittgenstein not only introduces a demand to address and reflect on the
problem of life but also suggests that honest and genuine reflection on oneself
and one’s life will actually lead to an attempt to live better, writing: ‘Nobody can
say with truth of himself that he is filth. For if I do say it, though it can be true in
a sense, still I cannot myself be penetrated by this truth: otherwise I should have
to go mad, or change myself’ (CV: 37 [32]). In one sense, Wittgenstein is
making the grammatical point that if a person calls themselves ‘filth’ and
remains unaffected, they really do not mean what they say, but he also takes
this point to have practical implications by suggesting that a person’s honest and
serious acknowledgement of their shortcomings must lead to an effort to do
better – or they will need some kind of excuse to deflect the practical conse-
quences of their self-assessment. Honest self-assessment will in this way lead to
self-improvement. Wittgenstein continuously returns to this connection
between self-assessment and self-improvement in reflections on his own ethical
aspirations: ‘Let me hold on to this that I do not want to deceive myself. That is,
a certain demand which I acknowledge as such I want to admit to myself again
and again as a demand’, Wittgenstein writes and continues: ‘From that it follows
that I will either meet the demand or suffer from not meeting it, for I cannot
prescribe it to myself & not suffer from not living up to it’ (PPO: 175). In
Wittgenstein’s s view, if a person seriously acknowledges some ethical demand,
it becomes central to that person’s understanding of the right way of living, and
they are then also forced to consider their own ethical standing in relation to this
demand as well as their other ethical commitments.
According to Wittgenstein, it is in fact always possible to question one’s own
motives or to suspect oneself of not trying hard or seriously enough, ethically, and
he continuously struggles with this challenge, suspecting that what seem to
himself and others to be admirable motives really are the expression of something
more base: ‘It is hard to understand yourself properly since something you might
be doing out of generosity & goodness is the same as you may be doing out of
cowardice and indifference. To be sure, one may act in such & such a way from
true love, but also from deceitfulness & from a cold heart too’ (CV: 54 [48]). Any
understanding of one’s own ethical standing is characterised by inherent insecur-
ity, especially because one always faces a strong temptation to make oneself look
better than one is, to others as well as to oneself. This temptation to avoid
confrontation with one’s possible moral failings often stands in the way of
honest self-assessment. ‘Know thyself & you will see that you are in every way
again and again a poor sinner’, Wittgenstein writes and admits: ‘But I don’t
want to be a poor sinner & seek in all manner to slip away’ (PPO: 111).
Wittgenstein here touches upon a topic rarely treated in moral philosophy, that
we generally find it extremely difficult to acknowledge that we are somehow
morally in the wrong, and he also investigates some of the many strategies that we
use to avoid facing our moral flaws such as turning a judgemental eye towards the
weaknesses or transgressions of other people or invoking irrelevant justifications
to excuse our moral wrongdoings or sins of omission. ‘If someone prophesies that
the generation to come will take up these problems & solve them that is usually
a sort of wishful thinking, a way of excusing oneself for what one should have
accomplished & hasn’t’ (CV: 29 [25]). In many cases, where we insist that the
resolution of an ethical problem will have to wait to be taken up later, we are
really attempting to relieve ourselves of the nagging suspicion that we are
currently failing to act – this is, for example, a possible (and I think likely)
interpretation of some of our reactions to the problems involved in countering
climate change.
Throughout his life, Wittgenstein returns to the word ‘decency’, as when he,
after finishing the manuscript for the Tractatus, remarks to Hänsel that ‘the
remainder is doing, [which] means: becoming a decent person’ (Engelmann
2021: 66). For Wittgenstein, decency ties together an ethical aspiration for self-
betterment and honest self-assessment because, as he writes, anyone ‘who is
half-way decent will think himself utterly imperfect’ (CV: 51 [45]). To strive to
be a morally decent person is to acknowledge that one is less than morally
perfect and that there is still room for improvement in a way that moves one’s
attention away from the assessment or judgement of others and returns it to
engagement with one’s own moral standing. The idea of decency thus sums up
Wittgenstein’s idea that ethics involves a requirement to work towards a clear
understanding of oneself and one’s place in the world and to live in a way that
reduces the difference between one’s way of living and one’s ethical ideals. This
view of ethics is formal rather than substantial or determinate as it does not
provide any positive guidelines or requirements about what to do or how to live.
Thus, we cannot, for example in philosophy, etablish a general and substantial
‘content’ in ethics. ‘Look after making yourself more decent’ (CV: 35 [30]).
And: ‘You must strive’ (MS 120: 17 v), as Wittgenstein sums up his view.
According to Wittgenstein, ethics is the continuous struggle to keep trying to do
better, and to see this struggle not as a ‘sorrow’ but as ‘a bright halo round’ one’s
life (cf. CV: 31 [27]). Still, Wittgenstein does not ignore the difficulties involved
in striving ethically. As he notes in a diary entry, drawing on the idea of the
absolute, central in his early ethical writings, ‘the only absolute is, to battle
through life towards death, like a fighting, a charging soldier. Everything else is
wavering, cowardice, sloth, thus wretchedness’ (PPO: 197).
5.5 The Other in Wittgenstein’s Later Writings

In contrast to the thoroughly individualised perspective of the early writings on
ethics, the relation to the other plays a central role in many of Wittgenstein’s
later remarks on ethics, even if this aspect of his later thought has so far received
relatively little attention. In fact, the very activity of doing philosophy is
relational or dialogical in Wittgenstein’s later writings. In the Philosophical
Investigations, the exploration of a philosophical problem is a communal activ-
ity, where several voices strive to understand different approaches to and
perspectives on the problem at hand in a shared search for clarity. As David
Stern puts it, the ‘Investigations is best understood as inviting the reader to
engage in a philosophical dialogue’, and the ‘result is best understood, I believe,
as emerging out of the reader’s involvement in the dialogue’ (2006: 220; see
also Christensen 2020b). Wittgenstein’s later work is in this sense interpersonal
and takes the form of exchanges between the philosopher, the interlocutor, and
the reader.
This notable development away from the strict individualism of the early
writings is also reflected at the opening of the Investigations, as Wittgenstein
makes a striking contrast between an individualistic and a relational approach to
language. In §1, we are presented with the child Augustine, who approaches
language from an inner and purely individual perspective, as he tries to decipher
the odd sounds uttered by grownups and from there constructs some account of
the shared practice of language. However, in the next paragraph, as Wittgenstein
introduces his first language-game, the perspective changes considerably. In the
example of the builders in §2, language is presented primarily as a tool for
communication – as in the Augustine quote – but Wittgenstein shows how we

can only understand the meaning of the words of the language-game of the
builders if we understand the role these words play in their actions and the
responses these actions give rise to. The builders’ use of these words is thus
a part of a mutual activity with the relationship between the builders at its very
focus. Here, and in many other places in the Philosophical Investigations,
Wittgenstein begins with relations between humans, describing their shared
aims, activities, practices, and only from descriptions of this interdependency
does he then proceed to describe the possibilities and actions of individuals.
The change from an individualistic to a relational approach to language is
exemplified in many of Wittgenstein’s remarks on psychological concepts,
especially those surrounding the concept of pain. In general, Wittgenstein is
criticising an influential tradition in philosophy that accepts various forms of
Cartesian dualisms between body and mind and holds that the inner life of the
mind is essentially private, in principle cut off from the other. Wittgenstein
opposes this tradition by showing how the learning of the concept of pain is
embedded in and dependent on a context consisting of our natural expressions
of and reactions to pain, as we learn to make pain-assertions by developing the
instinctive cry of pain into more complicated ways of using language. In doing
so, however, Wittgenstein also brings out how the learning of pain-concepts is
intimately connected to normative and potentially ethical ways of attending to
the expressions of pain of others, taking them seriously or not, giving them
comfort or not: ‘A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and
teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-
behaviour’ (PI §244). Learning of pain-language is embedded in and intimately
tied to the ways that grownups respond to the crying of children, sometimes in
the form of help and compassion, maybe more rarely and definitely more
dishearteningly with scorn or ridicule. Our understanding of the inner life of
others grows out of the way we and others express this life and the ways we and
others respond to these expressions. In this way, the ‘human body is the best
picture of the human soul’ (PPF §25 [152]; cf. CV: 56 [49]; see Cockburn 2022
for an illuminating and detailed discussion of this remark).7
This remark is connected to a remark central to Wittgenstein’s view of our
relationship to the other: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.
I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (PPF §22 [152]). When we meet
another person, we may form specific opinions about what that person thinks or
feels, but we do not begin by making a judgement about whether or not the other
in fact has an inner life, because, under normal circumstances, meeting the other
simply does not raise any questions about this life. Our attitude towards the
other puts in play the full concept of a human being, including for example their
inner life, but the attitude is unmediated and does not depend on particular
knowledge. Instead, this attitude is the condition of the possibility of forming
specific opinions about the other – in this way, ‘the attitude comes before the
opinion’ (LWPP II: 38). The attitude towards a soul is in a sense given, and it
requires some effort on our part or some occasion on the part of the other to
disregard it. As given, ‘an attitude towards a soul’ cannot itself be justified, but,
as Peter Winch notes, it ‘is in the context of a shared life . . . that our
Einstellungen towards each other can be understood in the way they are. That
does not justify them, but it does provide the conditions under which they can be
called intelligible’ (1981: 14). Provided that Wittgenstein saw ethics as
a fundamental part of human life, we may even speculate that these attitudes
also involve an attitude towards the other as an ethical being, someone who
7
When referring to part two of the Philosophical Investigations, I use the abbreviation PPF from
the fourth edition (2009) but I also include page reference to the third edition (2001) in square
brackets.
takes on moral responsibility and for whom moral concerns matters. If this is so,
then such an ethical attitude conditions our relations to others, and any disregard
for the moral standing of the other is thus secondary and requires some effort on
our part or some occasion on the part of the other.
Wittgenstein repeatedly shows us how language grows out of and is dependent
on fundamentally given and ubiquitous interpersonal relationships. That is, even
if we seem to approach world, language, ethics as individual subjects, we are
already embedded in and dependent on relationships to others that establish
shared forms of normativity and shape our dealings with each other and the
world. This holds for forms of instrumental and conditional normativity such as
those involved in the praxis of the builders, but in the later writings, it also holds
for what is best understood as forms of unconditional, ethical normativity such as
those involved in our relations to children in pain. Throughout the Investigations,
Wittgenstein thus investigates the ways that our concepts depend on our attitudes
and relations to others, where others are understood not primarily as rational
persons or abstract agents but as embodied, fragile, and interdependent beings. In
line with this, Rupert Read has argued that Wittgenstein uses the so-called private
language argument to show ‘that others’ pain and suffering itself addresses us is
a relation between us, . . . a relation that is ordinarily direct/unmediated, though
not entirely unfragile’ (2019: 366). For Read, and I agree, Wittgenstein in the later
writing ‘situates us in our radical inter-involvedness. And that relates us intern-
ally. Such mutual internal-relatedness is basic – and yet vulnerable’ (2021: 318;
see also Christensen 2011b, 2015).
Wittgenstein also connects the relation to the other to the pursuit of self-
understanding central to the later conception of ethics, for example in this

reflection on his own ethical inadequacies: ‘And when I now consider what
others – who really were somebodies – had to suffer, then what I live though
is nothing in comparison’ (PPO: 183). Wittgenstein reminds himself that the
demand to become better while bearing his lot in life is not unreasonable
because others have met the same requirement in much more dire circum-
stances. The understanding of the suffering of the other thus establishes
a non-negotiable ethical standard, just as it introduces a non-negotiable
ethical demand. ‘A cry of distress cannot be greater than that of one human
being. Or again no distress can be greater than what a single person can suffer.
Hence one human being can be in infinite distress & so need infinite help’
(CV: 52 [45]). Wittgenstein presents the suffering of the other human being as
the greatest and most terrible form of distress and thereby something that
what must concern us ethically. A need for ‘infinite help’ is a need that we
necessarily have to respond to – even a refusal to help counts as such
a response – and as the need is ‘infinite’ it seems to raise an obligation that
is at least in principle unlimited (cf. Løgstrup 1956 and Lévinas 1961; for
comparisons with Wittgenstein, see Plant 2005; Christensen 2015).
Later in the same remark, Wittgenstein draws out how self-reflection may in
fact threaten our relationships to others, noting that ‘hate between human beings
comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other. Because we don’t want
anyone else to see inside us, since it’s not a pretty sight in there’. Wittgenstein
continues: ‘Of course you must continue to feel ashamed of what’s within you
but not ashamed of yourself before your fellow human beings’ (CV: 52–3 [46]).
Wittgenstein here seems to introduce a form of inevitable moral shame. When
the suffering of other people places unlimited responsibilities on us, it becomes
impossible for us to live up to these responsibilities and moral failure thus seems
unavoidable. Still, Wittgenstein insists that we need to embrace and accept the
shame that follows from this moral failure so that it does not make us hide or shy
away from other people. Our main fault is not that we fail – because we
obviously will – our main fault lies instead in our tendency to refuse to honestly
admit and acknowledge this failure because this refusal isolates us and makes us
turn away from other people.
The attempt to live ethically seems to require an (unsettled and unsettling)
acceptance of our moral imperfections because only such acceptance will
enable us to let the other person see us as we are. The relationship with others
thus involves a twofold demand to accept, first, unlimited ethical responsibility
towards the other and, second, that we will never be able fully to fulfil this
responsibility. Such acceptance may seem almost impossible. Still, in the
remark on infinite distress, Wittgenstein reflects, ‘You can open yourself to
others only out of a particular kind of love. Which acknowledges as it were that
we are all wicked children’ (CV: 52 [46]). The metaphor is striking by placing
the idea of children, often representing innocence, together with the idea of
wickedness, that is, the outright violation of ethical demands, and
Wittgenstein’s point seems to be that even though ethical failure is an irredeem-
able part of human life, we should approach this fact with the same readiness to
forgive with which we would approach the missteps of children. Wittgenstein
thus draws a parallel between love and ethics, implying that both types of
relationships help us see our dependence and shortcomings, just as both require
of us that we embrace these characteristics as inescapable features of ourselves
as well as others. In other words, for Wittgenstein the demand to stay open
towards others is a fundamental ethical demand.
The relational dimension of ethical reflection also stands out in a phrase that
occurs several times in Wittgenstein’s journals from a stay in Norway in 1937,
first as a comment on his attempt to pray: ‘After a difficult day for me I kneeled
during dinner today & prayed & suddenly said, kneeling and looking up above:
“There is no one here.” . . . But what it really means, I do not know yet’ (PPO:
193). A few days later, Wittgenstein returns to the phrase. ‘Now I often tell
myself in doubtful times: “There is no one here.” and look around. Would that
this not become something base in me!’ (PPO: 207). Wittgenstein repeats the
phrase twice more, before its last appearance, about a month later: ‘Today the
sun rises at 12 noon & now appears completely. . . . There is no one here: But
there is a glorious sun here & a bad person’ (PPO: 231). Initially, Wittgenstein
admits that he does not know what he means with this statement of absence, and
the fact that it follows an attempt to pray seems to indicate that it expresses some
sense of God’s absence or even some form of abandonment. Wittgenstein does,
however, distrust his own use of the sentence and hopes that repeating it will not
‘become something base’ in him, as if the simple expression of abandonment –
or of independence – could be corrupting. Given his view of ethical reflection as
relational, it may be that Wittgenstein sees this insistence on being alone,
isolated from others, as itself an expression of ethical indifference. Still, it is
crucial that Wittgenstein, in expressing his experience of absence, actually
presupposes the presence of someone, the one he addresses in talking, the one
told that there is no one there. Wittgenstein’s saying of the sentence thus appears
to be fundamentally contradictory; in one sense, he uses it to claim that there
really is ‘no one here’; in another, this very use reflects an insistence on the
presence of someone, namely the listener, the one Wittgenstein is addressing.
This apparently contradictory attitude may help us to distinguish between
two different conceptions of and relationships to the other. On the first concep-
tion, the other is a particular other – either a particular person or a particular
conception of God – that represents specific ethical ideals or demands, while, on
the second conception, the other is our addressee – the one with whom we are in
dialogue about our ethical responsibilities and self-assessments. What plays an
indispensable role in Wittgenstein’s view of ethics is not the first, but the second
conception of the other. Ethical reflection presupposes the relationship with the
‘someone’ that Wittgenstein is addressing, and in this sense, ethical self-
understanding is essentially relational. For Wittgenstein to see and note that
he (thinks he) is ‘a bad person’, he must have someone to whom he can address
this judgement, even if it is only ‘a glorious sun’.
In my view, the thoroughly relational character of Wittgenstein’s later think-
ing carries great promise, even if interpreters have as of yet failed to get it fully
into focus – maybe in part because of the tempting and influential picture of
Wittgenstein as the lonely and singular godlike genius on the 5.15 train. It may
be time to give up this picture. At the end of his life, what truly mattered for
Wittgenstein seems to have been community and friendship – at least according
to the moving anecdote by Norman Malcolm of Wittgenstein’s dying words:
‘Before losing consciousness he said . . . “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!”
By “them” he undoubtedly meant his close friends’ (1984: 81).
5.6 Coda
It is almost impossible to describe the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy
on moral philosophy today. The exegetical question of how to understand the
Tractarian remarks on ethics is still ongoing, but in many ways, the later
philosophy has come to have a more profound influence in ethics. While
Wittgenstein was still living, it came to be a central source of inspiration for
what is now often called the wartime quartet, the philosophers Iris Murdoch and
Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. Through her friendship
with Wittgenstein, Anscombe introduced the quartet to his later thinking, and
their engagement with this way of doing philosophy in rather different ways
influenced the work they would each move on to do in moral philosophy (cf.
Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Wittgenstein’s later philosophy also flowed into
moral philosophy through the work of Rush Rhees. He became a leading figure
in the ‘Swansea School’, a group of philosophers also including Peter Winch
and D. Z. Phillips that shared an example-based approach to moral philosophy
where especially literature was used to elucidate philosophical confusion
regarding the role of particularities in moral phenomenology (cf. Von der
Ruhr 2009).
The publication of Stanley Cavell’s seminal work Claim of Reason (1979)
also contributed to the foundations of what we may today call ‘Wittgensteinian
ethics’ by unfolding the importance of a Wittgensteinian concept of ‘the ordin-
ary’ in moral philosophy. In general, philosophers working in Wittgensteinian

ethics are critical of moral theories as well as attempts to generalise the diversity
found in morality or to justify actual moral reasoning in isolation from concrete
contexts. Instead, they take as their starting point the later Wittgenstein’s focus
on ordinary language use and turn to contextual and particular features of moral
life, providing detailed description of the many ways in which moral consider-
ations arise here. Some philosophers also draw on specific discussions in the
Investigations such as the rejection of the possibility of private language or the
remarks on rule-following (for an overview, see e.g. Christensen 2020a, 15–25).
Prominent proponents of Wittgensteinian ethics are Cora Diamond, Sabina
Lovibond, Raimond Gaita, and Lars Hertzberg, but today, the tradition is both
influential and widespread, covering philosophers working in most areas of
moral philosophy in most corners of the world.
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank the numerous people with whom I have discussed Wittgenstein’s
philosophy throughout the years. I especially want to thank the editor for the
Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein series, David Stern and two
anonymous reviewers for helpful and insightful comments on a previous ver-
sion of the manuscript. Earlier version of sections of this book has appeared in
Philosophia, The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (2011), edited by Oskari
Kuusela and Marie McGinn and Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (2018),
edited by Mihai Ometita, Timur Ucan, and Oskari Kuusela.
The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
David G. Stern
University of Iowa
David G. Stern is a Professor of Philosophy and a Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. His research interests include history of analytic
philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction
(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Wittgenstein on Mind and Language
(Oxford University Press, 1995), as well as more than fifty journal articles and book chapters.
He is the editor of Wittgenstein in the 1930s: Between the ‘Tractatus’ and the ‘Investigations’
(Cambridge University Press, 2018) and is also a co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2018), Wittgenstein: Lectures,
Cambridge 1930–1933, from the Notes of G. E. Moore (Cambridge University Press, 2016),
and Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
About the Series

This series provides concise and structured introductions to all the central topics
in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Elements are written by distinguished
senior scholars and bright junior scholars with relevant expertise, producing balanced
and comprehensive coverage of the full range of Wittgenstein’s thought.
The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Elements in the Series

Wittgenstein on Logic and Philosophical Method
Oskari Kuusela
Wittgenstein on Sense and Grammar
Silver Bronzo
Wittgenstein on Forms of Life
Anna Boncompagni
Wittgenstein on Criteria and Practices
Lars Hertzberg
Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
Genia Schönbaumsfeld
Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
Hanne Appelqvist
Style, Method and Philosophy in Wittgenstein
Alois Pichler
Wittgenstein on Realism and Idealism
David R. Cerbone
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EPLW


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­Christensen

In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings, ethics takes a central place.

Wittgenstein and Ethics

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009439817 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

ISBN 978-1-009-43977-0 Paperback

Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

Abstract: In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings, ethics takes a central place.

Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein, ethics, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

© Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen 2024

1 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics 1

2 Remarks on Ethics in the Tractatus: Guides

3 The Tractatus Remarks on Ethics Again: A Reading 17

4 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ and Continuities in Wittgenstein’s

5 Wittgenstein’s Later Writings on Ethics 43

1 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics

1.2 Why Bother with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Ethics?

primarily on Wittgenstein’s own sparse remarks on ethics, through close readings

2 Remarks on Ethics in the Tractatus: Guides and Interpretations

Tractatus is comprised of remarks chosen and organised by Wittgenstein for

theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions – i.e. by language –

2.2 The Remarks on Ethics

consequences of actions or punishment and reward often considered central to

2.3 Metaphysical Approaches to Ethics

are concerned with the question of how to understand another of Wittgenstein’s

outside language. Such illuminating, nonsensical sentences are unsuccessful

a view of the subject that is inspired by Schopenhauer’s concept of the tran-

2.4 Resolute Approaches to Ethics

attribute to Wittgenstein the contradictory endeavour of attempting to alert us

to readers the paradox involved in something like the metaphysical approach.

does seem to have an integral ethical dimension – its ultimate aim is

never presents the Tractatus as offering practical ethical guidance. In the

3 The Tractatus Remarks on Ethics Again: A Reading

Wittgenstein’s presentation of his philosophical method in the Tractatus as ‘the

be clear’ (McGinn 2006: 15–16). My approach is thus also related to mild

to be part of moral philosophy, such as questions concerning principles of right

phy is silencing, the remainder is doing, [which] means: becoming a decent

3.2 Logic and Ethics Are Transcendental (TLP 6.421)

that something is: that, however, is not an experience’, Wittgenstein writes,

a sequence of subjects according to kinds of Satz: logic (6.1n), mathematics

problems. In the set of remarks beginning with 6.3, Wittgenstein elucidates

3.3 World and ‘I’, Will and Ethics (TLP 6.423)

This is the background against which it is possible to understand the mention

3.4 Is This Really Ethics? (TLP 6.422)

traditionally considered to be morally good.

misguided because Wittgenstein neither supports nor contradicts this idea.

have to begin with an understanding and acceptance of the world as it confronts

4 ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ and Continuities in Wittgenstein’s View

for a general academic audience. Wittgenstein alludes to this in the beginning,

being told by a bystander that he is playing rather poorly. To this Wittgenstein

judgements that a person is being cruel, wicked or mean or doing what is

between factual and evaluative judgements, because both types of judgements

nonsense. However, even if Wittgenstein is implying some form of moral

radically different from those motivating the Tractatus. In the Tractatus,

respecting deeply’ (LE: 44). Wittgenstein is still dismissive of theoretical and

(with logic balancing somewhat uncomfortably in the middle). In the

4.2 The Critique of Ethical Theory

Christensen

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of