Logic, Ethics and Existence in Wittgenstein&#39;s Tractatus

Eli Friedlander

Brief work on Wittgenstein’s approach to ethics. He wants to draw the boundaries of ethics and ethical propositions. Wittgensteinian ethics (if so can be called, since it has not been systematically enunciated by Wittgenstein himself) is very peculiar and different from the formulations of other philosophers in this field, in fact it does not dictate maxims of behaviour or moral norms, it is not prescriptive. This conception is marked by the idea that the world is all that is the case: value judgements cannot be formulated to evaluate ethically correct actions or not, because if there was a value it should be outside the world.

I wrote this review a couple of years ago not knowing yet the excellent book "Wittgenstein's Notes on Logic" written by Michael Potter and devoted to the same issue roughly. If I had read it, my review of Morris' work would have been much more severe.

Readers beware! This book is other than it first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s latest philosophical offering is unlike anything that we have had from him to date. Its preface warns that the Tractatus is no textbook. This is an extreme understatement; really it is a deep puzzle – one that must be handled with great care. However it is best read, there can be no denying that, in its own special way, the Tractatus powerfully makes us focus afresh on deeply problematic assumptions at the very heart of the major approaches in today’s analytic philosophy. It forces us to fundamentally review and possibly rethink our self-understanding of our methods and what it is possible to do in philosophy.

Logic, Ethics and Existence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus1 Eli Friedlander §1 Skepticism and the Unquestionable Wittgenstein’s engagement with the problematic of skepticism is mostly found in his later writings, in the Philosophical Investigations as well as in On Certainty.2 I want to begin here by considering skepticism in the context of his early work, the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. For sure, skepticism does not appear to be central to the progress of the Tractatus. It does however figure toward the end of the book in what is, thematically speaking, a long stretch of propositions that broach the topic of questioning, roughly from proposition 6.4312 to 6.521. How are we to understand Wittgenstein’s intense preoccupation with questioning? Why does he use variations on the attitude of questioning, expressing it in such diverse terms as question and answer [Frage – Antwort], riddle [Ratsel], problem (in singular and in plural)[Problem], task and solution [Aufgabe – Losung], as well as the questioning doubt [Zweifel]?3 We could stride directly to the assertion of the nonsensicality of skepticism, that is focus on the non-existence of an ultimate skeptical 1 I discussed earlier versions of this paper with Johnathan Soen. I have learned much from his work on logical form and am indebted to him for many enlightening clarifications of difficult points in my argument. I am grateful to Edmund Dain and Reshef Agam-Segal for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I thank the students in the GIF workshop “Life and Mind” at Tel Aviv University, as well as the participants in the conference “Skepticism as a Form of Experience” at the University of Chicago, for their comments and questions on a draft of this paper. In conducting the research for this paper I have benefitted from a grant of the Israel Science Foundation. The prevalence of the problematic of skepticism has been a theme of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work. He has tied the form of Wittgenstein’s writing in the Philosophical Investigations most closely with the ever-present skeptical voice. 2 3 We could add to this the use of ‘wonder’ from the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, which is essential to the elaboration of the aesthetic dimension of the unquestionable. I will address this term and this dimension towards the end of my paper. 1 question. And yet the occurrence of the supposed dismissal of skepticism in the vicinity of the ethico – religious themes of the book, and specifically in relation to what Wittgenstein calls “the mystical”, should raise for us the question of the truth in skepticism. Our willingness to engage such an idea as the truth in skepticism would depend on (and would bear on) what we take the nature of nonsense to be, and in particular it might affect how we read the end, or ethical point of the Tractatus. One could adopt, what I would call, a “dismissive” reading of Wittgenstein’s pronouncement on skepticism, namely that in showing that skepticism is nonsensical, we have merely done away with the need to be preoccupied by one of the philosophical positions which Wittgenstein includes unceremoniously in the term “metaphysics”. In the present essay I want rather to suggest another way of reading this stretch of propositions that coheres with a fundamental ethico-religious attitude, and in particular which hinges on the recognition of “the unquestionable” (as I will call this moment)4. Subjectively speaking, we might say that the unquestionable is what one is certain of. Certainty is an epistemic matter and is a characterization pertaining to knowledge. But in using this term to delineate a moment in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I would like to take the unquestionable as the ground of absolute recognition understood at the same time substantively. What is unquestionable cannot be approached through an answer to a question, the fulfillment of any intention of questioning or as the object of an investigation. All of these remain too much within the sphere of the activity of a subject. But Wittgenstein speaks in this moment of what makes itself manifest rather than of what is certain (TLP 6.522). 5 We might speak of the unquestionable as a matter for acknowledgment and it would even be closer to identify it in what we call faith. Faith counters doubt, not by refuting it, but in constituting one’s existence in terms of what has the highest reality. Even though it might appear otherwise, I take my reading to be in fundamental agreement with the resolute reading of the Tractatus that has been articulated in groundbreaking essays by Cora Diamond and James Conant. 4 This is to be compared to the proposition on the truth of solipsism in which Wittgenstein equally speaks in terms of manifestation: “For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest.” (TLP 5.61) The significance of the moment of solipsism for the dimension of the unquestionable will become clear in what follows. 5 2 “Doubt can exist only where a question exists”. But spiritual suffering that takes the form of doubt seems to be taken seriously enough by Wittgenstein in a further proposition that clarifies the statement: “Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life become clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?” Finding peace, rest, or absolute safety (to put it in the terms of the ‘Lecture on Ethics’), presupposes doubt and the suffering for which no precise question can be articulated and no specific answer can be given. And surely, in resolving that “long period of doubt”, it would not be sufficient to say something like “it was all nonsense, get over it” if only, because any resolution must be true to the suffering that led to it. For it to be accepted as resolution, it must ‘answer’ to the character of depth of the problems. To be able to let go of our highest spiritual struggles as nonsensical, must involve a reorientation or opening up anew of the relation to the world. Yet, this in no way can be expressed in terms of the appearance of a new contentful possibility for one’s life. My paper is then an attempt to move from the dismissive reading of the nonsensicality of skepticism to the recognition of the “the unquestionable” as the resting point secured by the ethical will in Wittgenstein. One might have initial qualms as to this being a moment that has any specificity at all. What is the justification to use the definite article in speaking of “the unquestionable”? Indeed, doesn’t Wittgenstein stress that we cannot make sense of the ultimate question: “The riddle does not exist. [Das Rätsel gibt es nicht]”. I will try to argue that uniqueness is at issue, yet uniqueness which is not the particularity of a determinate sense or content. Not surprisingly, it has to do with recognizing how Wittgenstein thematizes what individuality or the uniqueness pertaining to the subject comes to. But this would not reduce the unquestionable to a species of subjective certainty for Wittgenstein will equally speak of the moment in terms of the uniqueness of the world. To point ahead, to uniqueness that encompasses both subject and world, the unquestionable as an ethico-religious moment would emerge as the disappearance of doubt, identified with realizing the essence of will as what Wittgenstein calls in his Notebooks “being in agreement with the world”. §2 A Virtual Question 3 In order to present the standpoint of the ethical in the Tractatus in the light of the unquestionable, we need first to go back and seek an anchor for the centrality of the problematic of questioning and the unquestionable in earlier parts of the book. Indeed, if we remain merely with reflections about the ending of the book we would be almost inevitably be drawn to a simplistic understanding of what Wittgenstein calls the “mystical” moment of his reflection. But how do we relate mysticism back to logic? The propositions about mysticism themselves might provide a clue: How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. (TLP 6.432) The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution. (TLP 6.4321) It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (TLP 6.44) The domain that can be opened through questioning, the domain answering to the “how?” (how things stand) has no bearing on what is highest. Moreover, Wittgenstein does not contrast such questions as “how things are?” to “what is a thing?” or “what things (there) are?” All of these are seemingly treated in the Tractatus as part of an investigation of logic (Roughly speaking these would correspond to the investigation into the general form of the proposition and to the investigation into simple objects or elementary propositions). The unquestionable is rather identified in terms of the dimension of existence. But can we establish a connection between the questions pertaining to logic and the unquestionable dimension of existence? And is the latter conceivable itself as a dimension of logic? A related moment can be singled earlier in the Tractatus. The problematic of questioning and with it the distinction between the questionable and the unquestionable, appears as Wittgenstein broaches the issue of application of logic in the context of delineating the task of the recognition of elementary propositions: Our fundamental principle is that whenever a question can be decided by logic at all it must be possible to decide it without more ado. (And if we get into a position where we have to look at the world for an answer for such a problem, that shows that we are on a completely wrong track.) 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. Logic is prior to every experience – that something is so. 4 It is prior to the question “How?”, not prior to the question “What?” (TLP 5.551-5.552) It is significant that though Wittgenstein rephrases the registers of facts and of objects in terms of questions: the “How?” and the “What?”, he has no question for the ‘experience’ of existence. No wonder, one would like to say, for it is not an experience. But wouldn’t that mean then that at the heart of logic, there is what I earlier called “the unquestionable”? What is that to which there would correspond no question and yet is “what we need in order to understand logic”? We might suggest that Wittgenstein could find in the metaphysical tradition a formulation of his ‘missing question’ pertaining to existence. It is the question of metaphysics, namely “Why is there something (rather than nothing)?” We are tempted to formulate the ultimate question pertaining to existence as a “Why?” question. We formulate the question of existence as one of seeking a ground that pertains to the value or purpose of what exists (rather than merely asking “Is there something rather than nothing?”). Moreover, the object of such questioning is not a thing or a fact but rather the world as such: “Why is there a world rather than nothing?” If there were a question of existence it would be answered by the ‘purpose’ of there being a world. But in order to make some progress with these vague intuitions, we need to further note that in the continuation of the series of propositions quoted above, the existence of the world (rather than nothing) is related by Wittgenstein to the problem of the application of logic: “ [Logic] is prior to the question “How?”, not prior to the question “What?” And if this were not so, how could we apply logic? We might put it this way: if there would be logic even if there were no world, how then could there be a logic given that there is a world?”. Logic cannot contain in itself the form of its application to the world. There is no applicability of logic as such irrespectively of there being a world. This is expressed in a convoluted way in TLP 5.5521 by saying, in a first moment, that if there were logic without a world to which it applies, we wouldn’t be able, in a second moment, to account for its applying, given a world. The applicability of logic cannot be separated from the existence of a world. (This is not the trivial claim that the application of logic implies there being a world to which it applies). We should not conceive of logic as a realm that has in itself the ‘resources’ or “capacity to apply”, irrespectively of whether a world existed or not. This is why Wittgenstein claims that 5 though logic is prior to any fact, to the “how”, it is nevertheless not prior to the “what”. Logic does not determine out of itself, the form of what there is. But neither is what there is merely a matter of fact, left to contingency. The elementary, that is the form or condition of facts, is realized in the application of logic. It is the actuality of the existing world, thus can be called ultimate content, but is equally the condition of facts, thus can be called form. The existing world is where form and content can come together in elementary propositions. §3 Logic, Application and Existence How do we understand the claim that logic does not determine the “what”, i.e. the form of objects and yet their form belongs together with logic? Answering this question would be interpreting the claim in TLP 5.557 that “the application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What belongs to its application, logic cannot anticipate. It is clear that logic must not clash with its application. But logic has to be in contact with its application. Therefore logic and its application must not overlap”. So as to avoid the mistaken reading that logic in itself determines applicability or that application is just left to the facts, we need to develop the insight that existence is the point of contact of logic and its application. It is the fulcrum around which our use of logic hinges. Existence, as the term appears here, is not to be conceived in terms of something existing, as an instance of a previously determined form. It is not to be identified by way of the existential quantifier for the latter is an operation assuming the space of form. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein further suggests this ontological difference between his use of existence and there existing such and such beings by using a term we would usually attribute to another tradition of philosophy, namely “Being” (Sein). “My whole task” he writes “consists in … giving the nature of all being.” And he adds so as to draw the distinction from existence claims falling within the scope of logic: “(And here Being does not mean existing – in that case it would be nonsensical)”. (NB, 39) We might have wished to interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks on existence and on the relation of logic to its application as the more familiar claim that logic always applies, that is holds of any world we could conceive of. There cannot be a logically “disordered” world (as though even God is bound by the laws of logic, or could not 6 create an illogical world). Yet, then we would have to conceive of logic as providing form, say what all possible worlds have in common and each such world, including the actual one, being distinguished by something like the specific contingent content, which ‘fills up’ that a priori form. Other possible worlds would have other contents. But this would be to misunderstand what elementary propositions are. For objects are not just contingent content, but constitute the very form of the possible: “The substance is what subsists independently of what is the case. It is form and content” (TLP 2.024, 2.025) The primacy of existence, could be called also the primacy of the actual. But such actuality is not one position in the space of the possible. It is rather to be conceived as the origin of our possibilities. To recognize what is such an origin of possibility is to recognize the core of reality in the space in which our thinking operates. This primacy of actuality, properly understood, can be seen to be at issue already in the very opening of the Tractatus, that is in terms of how we conceive of the relation between facts and states of affairs. We are tempted to conceive of the reality that we have through facts to be constituted by a basis of content of states of affairs to which is added some logical construction material to create compounds that go beyond the original atoms. But, as Wittgenstein shows, this is precisely a misguided way of thinking of logical connectives, as though they are real relations that make an addition to the content of reality. In effect logical constants are operations that move us between different places in a space of form of the objects. Similarly, in language, what we are tempted to conceive as logical analysis is rather to be understood ultimately as a move to what is has reality in our representation of facts in logical space, what those representations really come to. Logic does not provide a general form of reality but is the medium that permeates our world and through which is allowed the recognition of its unique actuality. “Logic”, Wittgenstein writes “pervades [erfüllt] the world”(TLP, 5.61). The expression is peculiar. Not only would it be pervasive, meaning, there would not be any extra-logical matter which to which we could attribute the source of the specific contentful concreteness of the actual world, but it would be further through this pervasiveness of logic that we are to conceive of recognizing the world as uniquely and fully delimited, as the highest actuality. Logic, one can say, fulfills [erfüllt] the world. Existence is not articulated, or it is not a matter of what and how. Waving our hands in exasperation we might say: There is a world, the world is one, and it is this one, 7 in its actual existence. And maybe hand-waving is all we can do with this impossible experience of existence (maybe Moore thought so and maybe this temptation is what proved to be the impetus for Wittgenstein’s remarks collected as ‘On Certainty). But we can also say that the consideration of the application of logic does not open onto surveying a totality of possible languages, nor to the most general standpoint on reality, but rather to our everyday language as that wherein the uniqueness of actuality can be recognized. This is why Wittgenstein writes a bit further in that same group of propositions in which he discusses the problem of application, that: “Everyday language is in perfect logical order”. He does not mean to say that even everyday language is in logical order. That is he does not argue that because it is one of countless number of possible languages, and, since no language can be illogical, therefore everyday language is in perfect logical order. Nor is the privilege of everyday language in allowing the recognition of existence, a matter of its having a certain specifiable character that distinguishes it, as it were objectively, from other, say, constructed languages. The point and force of the claim is different. Everyday language is language in use, logic in application, and only thereby is it the medium of acceding to the elementary or concrete ground of meaning. Rather than speculating a priori about what could be the ultimate constituents of analysis, we need to ask ourselves how everyday language is the medium for recognizing that which is most real, the actual uniqueness of world. Existence is unique. Existence and non- existence are not two positions in a formal space of possibilities. As Wittgenstein emphasizes in 5.61, I cannot say “this” exists but “that” does not exist in the world. This bears on our understanding of the nature of limit. The term “limit” used in various contexts earlier in the book, receives a new inflection at this stage of the argument. To reach a limit in language is to recognize unique actuality, the world as unique. This uniqueness is not the immediacy of a brute non-conceptual given. But nor can it merely be captured as a determination in a space of form. The actuality of the world as concrete content is, one could say, the limit of forms. That limit is where forms converge or come together in the complicated field of living meaning, in everyday language, that Wittgenstein identifies in 4.002 with “the human organism”6. For a discussion of proposition 4.002 in line with the reading presented here see (Friedlander, 2014: 46-49) 6 8 Actuality or utmost concreteness is not to be taken as an instantiation of previously given concepts or forms but as the convergence of forms. But, how would forms come together uniquely? The centering of forms assumes a subject, which is to say, the limit can only be recognized insofar as I am in language. Only in my use of language, can I seek what in the world does my language come to. My share of world (which is not a part of the world) only appears as the unique convergence and condensation of my own existence in meaning. In other words, the dimension of existence we are seeking, and whose uniqueness and concreteness one can call the ‘convergence of form’ as well as ‘pure content’, cannot be separated from the recognition or acknowledgment of a subject. That limit sought is internal not to language in general, not even to everyday language in general, but only appears as a limit internal to my being in meaning. Without the first person, the uniqueness of the world is wholly inconspicuous. Seeking it would be like trying to say what existence is in general. It is because of the internal relation of language to the first person that this moment in the discussion of application involves a simple truth of the most concrete significance, why it is the key that properly directs us to the ethics of the Tractatus. It is why Wittgenstein introduces an ethical pathos precisely at this moment, long before the so-called propositions on the ethical: “That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)” (TLP, 5.5563) §4 Limits, World and Ipseity Put in terms of the progress of the book, we try to explore the passage from the use of language or the application of logic to the introduction of ipseity into the argument of the Tractatus. We must explain why and how Wittgenstein moves from the claim that “The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are”(TLP, 5.557) to the claim: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (TLP, 5.6). The proposition “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” seems to establish meaning on a subjective ground. Yet, the subject is not in language by deciding, choosing or constituting its ultimate forms. Wherever the consideration of 9 language allows room for choosing forms, we would not be at a fundamental enough level: “… is it really possible that in logic I should have to deal with forms that I can invent?” Wittgenstein writes “What I have to deal with must be that which makes it possible for me to invent them.” (TLP, 5.555) Thus, in relating subject and limit of the world by the locution “the limits of my language” Wittgenstein should not be interpreted as arguing that the subject determines the most general form of experience, even if this constitutive act is taken transcendentally rather than empirically. Indeed, in denying that elementary propositions can be given a-priori, Wittgenstein denies that one can have a characterization of a transcendental form of the unity of experience that would reflect the oneness we seek for the subject. The subject is inherently unique, not by being an agency of formal synthesis, but in the capacity to agree with the world. And this would demand a realistic just as much as an idealistic moment. A limit in that sense is what I must willingly recognize or I can recognize through willing. The subject does not constitute the limits of language, yet, the opposite mistake of simple realism is just as fatal to an understanding of the unity of subject and world. For one could begin reading the Tractatus as though limits of the world are merely an objective matter and are determined by all the facts there are, or by the totality of objects that constitute the conditions of possibilities of all those facts. Wittgenstein even writes: “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest in the totality of elementary propositions.” (TLP 5.5561) But, we would have no uniqueness, the uniqueness essential to the being of a subject, that could be delimited merely realistically, in terms of facts and objects. Uniqueness is only in the concrete delimitation of meaning that makes the world my world. Wittgenstein refers to this peculiar identity with oneself, in willingly submitting to the highest concrete actuality, through the locution “the world is my world”. In other words, realism is the truth of solipsism, or solipsism thought through is realism. This famous moment of the Tractatus is sometime taken to mean that since two opposite metaphysical positions are identified, they are both shown to be nonsense. But, such a reading is not dialectical enough. Existence, or world is that wherein idealism and realism come to the same7. 7 One way to describe the shift I aim to introduce to the reading of the Tractatus, is to speak of the work as involving three dimensions, each having its own unity and 10 Note that Wittgenstein speaks of solipsism leading to a pure realism (TLP, 5.64). It would be a realism that involves the recognition of what I call “pure content”, that is of the unique concreteness of the world, as the truth of that uniqueness sought for the I, which solipsism craves. The identity of solipsism and realism means that I am most uniquely myself, or individuated in partaking of the uniqueness of the world. Wittgenstein brings out how a vulgar realism or dogmatism is utterly problematic by relating the recognition of limit to a moment of ipseity, i.e. to the uniqueness of the I. Uniqueness makes sense only as the utmost concrete articulation of meaning, in which I have a delimited world. As Wittgenstein puts it in the Notebooks: “This is the way I have travelled: Idealism single men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so, on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.” (NB, 85, my emphasis) Idealism leads to solipsism, the subjective-individual version of the identity of limits of language and limits of world. But it ultimately eventuates in a pure realism, a higher realism. The realism that ensues, when the dialectic is followed, allows me to take myself, my body, to be part of the world (just like animals and plants are parts of it). But precisely thereby the locus of true spiritual realization is given expression. It has nothing to do with finding or identifying myself in the world. Rather, the unique world is the concrete limit with which I bring myself to agree, or which I avoid at the price of avoiding myself. The realization of the identity of I and world is also the key to the account of the will. §5. World, Life and Uniqueness Much hinges on developing properly the notion of world and this requires rethinking what we might associate with this notion in earlier moments in the Tractatus. rigorous elaboration. They form a hierarchy, or contribute to way the book is to be conceived as a ladder. They can be introduced by way of the following three terms: Facts, Objects, World. While most of the readings of the Tractatus recognize that there is a distinction between the consideration of facts and of objects (reflected for instance in the distinction in language between propositions and names), there is no similar attempt to rigorously bring out the internal complexity of the dimension Wittgenstein refers to through the term “world”. 11 For sure if we think of world through facts and objects we might have a conception of a world as a sum-total of facts or as an interconnection of objects in states of affairs. And we might be tempted to ask which of these facts circumscribe the subject (and thereby characterize how the subject is in the world). But to say that the world is my world is different from saying that I am in the world. Wittgenstein’s propositions on solipsism precisely bring out this distinction8. The subject is not a delimited part of the world, i.e. is not in the world, but rather is the limits of the world (See TLP, 5.631-5.632). But is there any basis for introducing the register of will or fulfillment in coming to recognize the world concretely delimited in meaning? For this is I take it what Wittgenstein implies by introducing the notion of life into the argument at this point. He writes: “The World and Life are One” and clarifies that “[p]hysiological life is of course not “Life”. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world.” (NB, 77) Life is self constituting or self-realizing. Wittgenstein neither wishes to speak of organic (physiological) nor or psychological life as inherently involving fulfillment or actualization, but rather of life in meaning or of the life of intelligence. But the role of meaning or thought in life should not be reduced to a rational being having purposes. Rather fulfillment or realization of the purposiveness of intelligent life is the uniqueness in meaning that is agreement with the world. What ‘drives’ thoughtful life as such and expresses itself in the forms of the highest human achievements is concrete meaningful individuality: “Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion – science – and art. And this consciousness is life itself.” (NB, 79). That striving is not something external to the human animal, but rather it is internal to the character of ‘intelligent’ life itself. Intelligent life, i.e. life in meaning, has its fulfillment in uniqueness, i.e. individuality. And individuality is the realization of uniqueness in agreement with the world. This moment of uniqueness could suggest conceiving of the ethical in perfectionist terms as being true to one’s own-most self. Yet, the uniqueness of one’s life is not to be sought in our usual ways of referring to creativity, genius or whatever one might place at the source of the highest human striving in religion science and art. Uniqueness is not my being or having something that is unlike anything else, or anyone else. It is not a matter of realizing the self’s talents, specific purposes and interests. 8 For an interpretation of these moments see (Friedlander, 2014: 57-62) 12 Almost the contrary: it is another name for the impersonal standpoint of a sober realism in the involvement with meaning. What makes it difficult to understand Wittgenstein’s inflection of this perfectionism is the further insight that actualizing life in meaning is submitting oneself to the highest actuality. Uniqueness is realized in the recognition of a limit internal to thoughtful living. This is why it is a realism that is not expressed, as is usually the case, in the dissociation of I and world, but a realistic spirit that can only be expressed in the first person, as uniqueness in coming to agree with the world. As Wittgenstein also puts it: “Mine is the first and only world” (NB, 82) One could, for sure object that my life is singled, by virtue of the facts ‘in’ it. Every person would have his or her own ‘perimeter of facts’. And seen this way my life is only a minuscule part of the facts of the total facts that make up the world (say when we think that “the world is the totality of facts”). But this would be to think of one’s life as one among many lives, and not as the capacity to agree with the world, or to be uniquely myself in having a uniquely concrete world in meaning. The “I, myself” is not the simple self-consciousness. I become myself in realizing through my life the uniquely concrete in the world. This identity would be conceiving of my life as participating or partaking of the highest reality, i.e. as having the uniqueness of the world as its background. It is only ‘from within’ that life can be that which involves me uniquely, that the world can be “my world”. This ‘within’ is not my private inner, mental space (although it is always a temptation to turn that way to look for uniqueness). It is out of my meaningful involvements with the world that I come to realize the internal limit of the articulation of form as concrete reality. The limit is manifest in the sober recognition, one could call it reconciliation to the concrete realities of my existence. One thing I do not choose is my life. Or, to put it slightly differently, conceiving of life as a matter of choice opens man to the mythical figuration of existence (This is part of what interests Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer’). §6. Uniqueness, Significance and Agreement In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein broaches his remarks on the ethical with the question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (NB, 72). (Given what we have established regarding the unquestionable character of existence, the framing of 13 the matter as a question here, as well as the suggestion that the question-form implies, namely that there is a contentful answer to it, should be seen as preliminary): To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. (NB, 74) The highest purposiveness of intelligent life is being towards the individual concretization of meaning. Since this state is identically subject and world, it can equally be referred to as “my world” or as a “significant world”. Thus Wittgenstein does not assume that human life can be understood in terms of an articulable purpose that gives it value. Rather being in significance is the mark of the fulfilled life. Having a significant world is what value ultimately comes to. Indeed, significance is precisely identified by Wittgenstein with uniqueness and world as he writes: “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant, as world each one equally significant.” (NB, 83 translation modified). When something is seen in or within the world, it is comparable to other things and, thus it cannot appear as unique, or as intrinsically higher (i.e. absolutely valuable). Value is absolute in being incomparable, unique: It is not of the form this is valuable, rather than that. Taking significance as a dimension of meaning that is not partitioning the world into contentful possibilities that are deemed significant and other equally present contentful possibilities that are rejected as insignificant, we precisely express what Wittgenstein called the standpoint of existence. Absolute value is expressed as the task of coming to agreement with the world. This is to be seen as the fundamental form of the will as intelligent life. It assumes a moment in which the world appears alien (call it the moment of doubt). At first, it would appear that Wittgenstein is stressing precisely the alien character of the world, or the separation of world and willing subject. The world is independent of my will. Even if everything that we want were to happen, this would still only be, so to speak, a grace of fate, for what would guarantee it is not any logical connection between will and world, and we could not in turn will the supposed physical connection. (NB,73) And further: The world is given me, [Die Welt ist mir gegeben], i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there. 14 … That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will. However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will. (NB,74) But this expression of separation of I and world, the sense that the will has to be exercised on alien ground, is merely a privation that the ethical will overcomes. Such overcoming is not the assertion or affirming of a freedom of the will that bends the world to the will, or that manages to express itself ‘despite’ what is given. Wittgenstein writes: “There are two godheads: the world and my independent I” (NB, 74). This doesn’t mean that there are two gods, but rather that the proper stance towards the divine is the recognition of the possibility of the two godheads coming to one, or agreeing with each other. This can be seen as a form of freedom or of the independence of the I out of the sense of finding oneself in a given world: I can make myself independent of fate. … I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will of God’ (NB, 75) There appear to be insuperable difficulties with articulating this ultimate ground of value and will. In particular we could point to three issues, some aspects of which I will engage sketchily in the remaining parts of the essay: First, understanding how this ground of the will relates to the will that acts specifically, i.e. that has a particular content or object as it were ‘in the world’. Secondly, relating the dimension of agreement with the world with our intuitions concerning the ethical sphere. In particular, thirdly, explaining how others figure at this ground of what is valuable identified through what is my world. §7 Wanting, Willing and Acting It is necessary to develop an account of willing specific actions in and through which we conceive of expressing our striving for agreement of world, or giving expression to the ethical will. Thus the question is in part how to connect the account of the ground of will as agreement with the world with the sense that the individual will manifests itself in specific actions, having specific contents (or objects) that we represent to ourselves in putting ourselves into action. In other words the individual will seems at 15 least to be relating itself to some parts of the world. What does it mean then to will specifically yet in view of the identity of will and world? How are the two moments, equally essential to recognize the full form of the will, internally related? And can we make sense of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that it is the ethical will that has logical primacy in that account (““What really is the situation of the human will? I will call “will” first and foremost the bearer of good and evil. (Böse)” (NB, 76, my emphasis)) 9? One cannot just will to be in agreement with the world. Or, more precisely, being in agreement with the world, cannot be a represented purpose, an object, of the particular will. And, with Wittgenstein, it would not help to resort to a ‘second order’ or meta-purpose, that organizes ‘first order’ actions of the specific will.10 It is rather by thinking through the possibility of specifying the will that we are to recognize how it meshes with the ethical will. The elaboration of the character of the specific act of will involves such terms as representation, belief, desire, body, action, purpose and realization. In relating these, it is particularly important to pay attention to the distinction Wittgenstein draws between “wanting” and “willing”. In her translation of the Notebooks Anscombe has sometimes Wünschen as “wanting”, and in others contexts the same term is translated as “wishing”. I will retranslate all the contexts in which Wünschen appears into the single more neutral term “wanting”. One reason for this choice is that wishing might too easily suggest something unrealistic, i.e. desiring objects that one cannot have merely by willing. Wittgenstein’s use of the terms Wünschen and Wollen, clearly suggest a distinction, as in the following: “Wanting is not acting. But willing is acting” [Wünschen is nich tun. Aber Wollen ist tun] (NB, 88). But what is the import of this distinction? Is willing what emerges out of wanting? What is it for wanting to turn into willing in 9 There is an important sense then that we do not understand what the will is by way of reflecting on actions or intentional acts that are neutral in terms of their ethical qualification of good and evil. Logically speaking what is more fundamental is the character of the ethical will and it is to it that our concepts of specific acts of will have to be related. I take it that it is always misguided, with regard to Wittgenstein, to resolve issues by postulating a meta-level – see in this context Russell’s Introduction to the Tractatus and Carnap’s attempt to resolve the ‘unsayability’ of logical form in his Logical Syntax of Language. The parallel issue appears also as we are tempted to a meta-perspective on the will. 10 16 action and when is that possible? We might want to flesh this distinction by separating representation from will. One would then say that it is possible to want or desire all kinds of things one represents to oneself, but this would be different than truly willing to act upon such representations or making them into purposes of action. Insofar as the act of will is specific, or must have an object, it involves representation or thinking: “The will seems always to have to relate to an idea [a representation – eine Vorstellung].” The involvement of will in the world presupposes the specificity given to it by the representation. “It is clear, so to speak, that we need a foothold for the will in the world… the will does have to have an object. Otherwise we should have no foothold and could not know what we willed. And could not will different things.” (NB, 87-88) Willing is a self-conscious manifestation of a capacity. I cannot will without being conscious that I am willing. And that consciousness of willing does not require ascertaining it by means of a further fact I obtain through observation: “We cannot imagine, e.g. having carried out an act of will without having detected that we have carried it out.”11 But then, should one say that I have various wants, represent to myself various objects of desire, and then in a further moment I need to check or decide, maybe based on various beliefs I have, which of these should, or even can, become willing? And do I then further decide to engage my body in action? Two issues need to be considered here: the first is the supposed ‘connection’ of the wanting in mere thought or in the sphere of representation to my body which must be ‘put’ in action when I truly will. The second concerns the supposed deliberation in which the represented object (or what we also call the purpose), becomes an object of willing rather than one which remains mere desire I do not act upon. Through such deliberation we would supposedly choose to will what we until then merely wanted. Take a simple case: I can want a chair to be in another place than it is (“I really wish the chair was in a different place!”). This would be distinct from willing it, which would involve acting to move it to another place. To account for the distinction we might want to say “My wish (want) relates, e.g. to the movement of the chair, my will to a muscular feeling” (NB, 88). But it is not as though a connection is made through a 11 Elizabeth Anscombe masterfully develops the implication of this Wittgensteinian point in Intention. 17 distinct moment between the representation of the movement of the chair and the body that is thereby moved to move the chair. There is no mental act, which connects mere wanting to muscular effort. It is not as though with wanting all there is would be a spinning of the mind without the gears being engaged in the body. The question Wittgenstein raises about the foothold for the will in the world, should be distinguished from the supposed need to identify a connecting act between representation in mere thought and a body that then is moved by that mental determination.12 There is no independent act of will separate from the acting, but rather that willing is wholly in the acting: “This is clear: it is impossible to will without already performing the act of the will. The act of will is not the cause of the action but is the action itself.” (NB, 87) and further: “The fact that I will an action consists in my performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action. When I move something I move. When I perform an action I am in action.” (NB, 88)) In that case how do we distinguish wanting from willing? Isn’t wanting something that occurs merely in thought, as opposed to willing the action in reality. One way to put this would be to say that “[t]he wanting [wish] precedes the event, the will accompanies it” (NB, 88). (I assume that the event to which Wittgenstein refers is the action.) So that to will to move the chair is to move myself to where the chair is, hold it and push it to the right place. The will would express itself specifically, in an articulate way, in all these movements. The denial of the separate moment of (mental) representation, does not mean that action involves no thinking, but rather willing is thinking in and through action. An action is one might say the expression of a thought in the medium of reality. (Remember that thinking itself is said to be an activity of picturing, of making to ourselves pictures of facts.)13 12 It is as though the specificity of the action in space and time tempts us to a picture that there must be a determinate moment and even a determinate place in which the mental makes connection to the body. For a reductio of this picture see Wittgenstein’s remark on raising one’s arm (NB, 86) 13 But can’t we ‘complete’ the determination of the will before we act? Can’t we distinguish the act of will as a mental determination from the action in cases where we will now to do something later? So for instance Wittgenstein asks: “But in that case how can I predict – as in some sense I surely can that I shall raise my arm in five minutes’ time? That I shall will this?” (NB, 87) But the realization of the complete action is not to be conceived as a prediction of the future, for which I now wait for independent 18 The will accompanies the action, but what if wanting had its own accompaniment in a bodily process: “Suppose that a process were to accompany my wanting [wish]. Should I have willed the process? Would not this accompanying appear accidental in contrast to the compelled accompanying of the will?” (NB, 88) Accompanying does no mean merely being side by side. The will does not just keep pace with the action, but permeates it, and constitutes so to speak its substance. Yet how do we distinguish a process that can come together with mere wanting from the way the will necessarily ‘accompanies’ an action? Wittgenstein dismisses the idea that it is a specific feeling of the activity of the body that would distinguish willing in action from some other process that is taking place: “Have the feelings by which I ascertain that an act of the will takes place any particular characteristic which distinguishes them from other ideas? It seems not.” (NB, 87). We could moreover, imagine a process that accompanies someone’s wanting and is manifest in bodily demeanor. Suppose the bodily process that I am conscious accompanies my wish consists in concentrating my vision on the chair unwaveringly and with clenched teeth express determination: “In that case, however I might conceivably get the idea that, e.g. this chair was directly obeying my will. Is that possible?”(NB, 87) One might of course respond that the chair doesn’t in fact move when I so concentrate. But couldn’t this just be taken as an indication that I have not wanted it hard enough? Indeed, is it not the case, our determined individual would retort, that not all our actions reach their desired completion (for something might always go wrong). This last example opens a deeper issue that pertains to our conception of the relation of wanting to willing, namely in what sense is there a possibility of being mistaken about what can be an object of the will at all. For indeed, by making the intuitive distinction between wanting in thought and a separate willing in action, we would be opening room for a contentful question whether there are things that can be wanted and only a further subset of these can really be willed. And if this is a contentful confirmation from observation. It is not as though there is an act of will at a specified moment and then after five minutes the action. The action itself has different moments, which together express the will. But then, is it the case that for my will to be present throughout, I need not be constantly and continuously on alert, waiting anxiously for the elapsing of the five minutes? This would be to confuse the logical moments of the action with psychological time. I can express my willing to raise my arm in five minutes by setting my alarm clock for five minutes from now. 19 distinction couldn’t we be mistaken about what can become an object of will? Wanting is for sure sometimes unrealistic. It seems like we can want anything at all. But, then, to take our earlier example, if I want the chair to be in another place, can’t I then also sensically believe that the chair or any other inanimate object, actually could obey my will. Shouldn’t we just try and see? Yet, this appears not to be a contentful possibility about which we could be mistaken, but rather nonsense. While holding to the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing, how can we avoid forming a gap between them that makes possible trying to will what turns out not to be an object of willing at all? “But I cannot will everything. – But what does it mean to say: ‘I cannot will this’? Can I try to will something?”(NB, 88) It is not the case that there are things in the world I can first only want, then ‘try’ to will, just to realize that in fact they cannot be objects of willing. The transition to willing cannot be conceived as a contentful specification out of the wealth of possibilities opened by representation in wanting. There is here a fundamental issue that relates to the account of what Wittgenstein calls willing agreement with the world. Indeed if we aim to think ultimately of the ground of willing as agreement with the world, we need to do away with the picture of willing as involving a deliberation and a choice within a space of possibilities opened in representation. This would imply that there are objects in the world that can be willed and others that cannot be willed. That among what is represented as possible wanting there is a distinction of scope between mere objects of wanting and objects of willing. This is why Wittgenstein writes: “For the consideration of willing makes it look as if one part of the world were closer to me than another (which would be intolerable). But of course, it is undeniable that in a popular sense there are things that I do and other things not done by me.” (NB, 88) How are we then to draw the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing? How would we express the recognition that it is only through willing that we have the concreteness of world? Wanting and willing would be distinguished precisely by what we called earlier meaningful concretization. Wanting is abstract or does not have a concrete object. In that sense there would not be one and the same determinate content that we first want and then realize it can or cannot be willed. Both wanting and willing take place in the medium of the permeation of reality by meaning, but wanting is not 20 thought through all the way to the concreteness of significance. Indeed, concretization is precisely thinking that is expressed as, and in, action. It is in concretizing meaning that we move from want to will. I so to speak express concretely the meaning of the will by acting, just as I can come to realize concretely what I mean in what I say. One could say then that meaning is fully concrete when it manifests itself in thoughtful activity. To have meaning be concrete for me is to be active. Conversely, significance is just the concreteness of meaning that calls for action. Significance emerges as the character of the world of the willing subject. We can also speak here of the unrealized state of wanting, wish or fantasy, as the avoidance of the meaningful, the retreat from the active life. (At its most extreme, as Wittgenstein sees it, this avoidance of meaning manifests itself in nonsense) §8. Willing and Thinking Our discussion above raises the question whether the usual way of distinguishing on the one hand wanting in thought and on the other hand willing as putting that thinking in action is sustainable. I have suggested that there is something like a continuum to be understood through degrees of concretization of willing agreement with the world. This is suggested as Wittgenstein writes: “Or is the mistake here this: even wanting (thinking) is an activity [Handlung] of the will? (And in this sense, indeed, a man without will would not be alive.)” (NB, 77) If we account for the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing in terms of the concretization of meaning in the medium of reality, then indeed, there is a sense in which an activity is involved in wanting that is not ‘separate’ from willing but should count as a lower grade or deficient manifestation of the will. There would be a continuity between the purposiveness of life and acts of will which are the highest concretization of the purposiveness of life itself in significance. Put differently, thinking and willing are not two different realms. We cannot draw a distinction between the sphere of the thinking subject that gives us the space of the possibility of reality and that of the willing subject, which realizes some of these possibilities. The actuality of the world manifests itself through the purposiveness of life in meaning itself, or the active thinking articulation of life. 21 And yet can’t we have a thinking subject that would not have the further capacity to will? “But can we conceive of a being that isn’t capable of Will at all, but only of Idea (of seeing for example)? In some sense this seems impossible. But if it were possible then there could also be a world without ethics.” (NB, 77) The case of seeing that Wittgenstein considers might be a good candidate for something that is potentially free from willing.14 Indeed, it is not a mere example, but rather must be read in the context of the propositions in which the place of the eye in its visual field comes to stand for how the subject is to be conceived as the limit of the world. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein writes: “I am placed in [this world] like my eye in its visual field.” And in the Tractatus he caricatures a figure of limits as a circumference of the visual field, or as a “bubble” blown out of a center, which is the eye. But what emerges from the previous considerations is precisely how delimitation as concretization of the will is key to do away with simplistic pictures of limits of meaning (and of the visual field). In that sense, seeing could partake in having a significant world. (Wittgenstein asks himself: “Is seeing an activity [Tätigkeit]?”) Seeing is a human capacity that can concretize as will. The living human being has different capacities that are manifested in a variety of activities, such as seeing, walking, eating and playing. Expressions of the will in actions are nothing but the thinking realizations that draw and weave together such capacities of life. 15 And in 14 I will consider what Wittgenstein calls viewing the world with a “happy eye” in the last section of the paper. 15 It would be worthwhile to inquire about cases where it would seem to be inevitable to appeal to the mere attention of a subject that is necessary to the very identity of an action. Wittgenstein gives the following simple example: “ In drawing the square in the mirror one notices that one is only able to manage it if one prescinds completely from the visual datum and relies only on muscular feeling. So here after all there are two quite different acts of the will in question. The one relates to the visual part of the world, the other to the muscular feeling part. Have we anything more than empirical evidence that the movement of the same part of the body is in question in both cases?” (NB, 87) We feel like saying that there is one action here that would take place in drawing the square directly on paper and when it is drawn by looking at the page through a mirror. It is the action of drawing the square. But then the mediation through the mirror requires further attention that can only be attributed to the thinking subject to perform the action (since the action judging by the body movement and the result is “the same”. But I take it that Wittgenstein precisely emphasizes that there are two actions, two acts of 22 particular seeing is not exempt from the possibility of realizing itself thoughtfully as will (Drawing something would for instance be a simple case of an activity of the eye which can be realized to different degrees all the way to a sublime realism in art.) Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus : “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas… The subject does not belong to the world: rather it is a limit of the world.” (TLP, 5.631-5.632) This might lead to some misunderstanding, for Wittgenstein does not merely rejects here the idea that the thinking subject is not in the world while retaining the notion of a purely thinking subject in some other sense. Rather, he understands limit through the characterization we have developed of thoughtful will as concretization of meaning. It is in that direction that Wittgenstein initially expresses in the Notebooks: “The thinking subject is surely merely illusion. But the willing subject exists.” (NB, 80) There is no distinct sphere of representations that are attributable to a thinking subject that would have beliefs, thoughts or wants without thereby willing.16 One might also say that thinking, believing and wanting, as we would be tempted to conceive of them as states of a thinking subject that then wills actions, are not distinct kinds of experiences, but pertain ultimately to the activity of life that is concretizing meaning: “Is belief a kind of experience? Is thought a kind of experience? ... All experience is world and does not need the subject” (NB, 89). The thinking that ‘goes into willing’ is not a specific domain of experience to which we could attribute a unity that delimits a subject. Ultimately, the rejection of the separation of representation and will similarly implies that “the act of will is not an experience.” (NB, 89) Willing is actively thinking through reality and thinking is willing concretely what one means. The task of such a will is agreement with the world expressed in “the world is my world”. Wittgenstein’s last remarks in the Notebooks regarding the character of willing returns to this fundamental characterization of the will: “What kind of reason is there for the will. This could be taken to be a case that has the same structure as that of the discussion of the Necker cube in 5.5423. For an account of this proposition and the problematic of the thinking subject see (Friedlander, 2014: 49-52). I thank Noam Melamed for his comments on the importance of this passage in the Notebooks. 16 Recall in this context Wittgenstein’s criticism of the understanding of propositional attitudes as relating a self-standing subject to a propositional content in 5.541-5.542. For a more detailed discussion of these propositions, see (Friedlander, 2014: 49-52). 23 assumption of a willing subject? Is not my world adequate for individuation [Individualisiering]?” (NB, 89) §9. Is agreement with the world an attitude that renounces willing? We must now try to think together the outcome of our survey of the problem of the specification of willing with our initial characterization of the ethical will as willing agreement with the world. A term that might appear useful in linking the two moments is to conceive of the ethical will as an “attitude” that manifest itself in and through our specific actions. Wittgenstein asks himself: “Is the will an attitude towards the world? … The will is an attitude of the subject to the world. The subject is the willing subject.” (NB, 87) This last formulation allows Wittgenstein to avoid some of the problematic implications of the use of the term “attitude”. If for instance we thought of an attitude as a way of seeing things, a world-view so to speak, then we might legitimately ask whether this would not reintroduce something like a thinking subject that is merely contemplative. But as the previous discussion attempted to establish, it is not as though we have a thinking subject and a willing subject and thereby two different attitudes to the world, the theoretical and the practical attitudes: “The subject is the willing subject”. Conversely, identifying the subject with willing does not mean that we can will an attitude to the world, as though an attitude is on a par with any specific action. We cannot ‘adopt’ an attitude, at least if this means having the attitude at will. 17 Speaking of an attitude would be another term for referring to a constancy or unity in willing concretely. The attitude would be as it were the guiding thread that concretization introduces into all the specificity of willing at different levels. In that sense it pertains to what we might want to call the character of the person. But this thread of character is not to be taken psychologically as something complex that is formed gradually through the encounters of life (“a composite would no longer be a soul” (TLP, 5.5421)). Willing concretely is what makes for the simplicity of character of a human life. It is one might say willing in a realistic spirit. Indeed, formulating the matter through the real side of 17 “Things acquire “significance” only through their relation to my will.” (NB, 84). This is not a matter of focusing my attention on a thing, or of subjective concentration. I cannot make something significant by attending to it. For a discussion of the issue and its bearing on artistic practice, see (Friedlander, 2017: 120-124) 24 the identity of subject and world, would do away with the temptation to ‘thicken’ the attitude to the world with contentful psychological characterizations. But another hidden temptation lurks in invoking the term ‘attitude’ to account for the character of willing. It is especially acute when one considers the possibility of failure in our actions. For one might ask oneself how is it possible at all to sustain agreement with the world if in willing something, it is always possible that one does not achieve one’s objective? Wouldn’t agreement with the world demand securing willing against all such contingencies, that is protecting the will from contingency. And wouldn’t that be achievable only in not desiring anything, in taking up everywhere the attitude of not-wanting?18 Is it possible to will good, to will evil, and not to will? Or is only he happy who does not will? But what would it be not to will? (NB, 77) 19 Given the continuity Wittgenstein establishes between willing and intelligent life as such, it is doubtful whether such negation of all willing could be possible at all. Moreover, it would not express the ethical stance, or the proper way to express the ethical as an attitude of the will to the world as such. Willing is unavoidable in bringing about agreement with the world. If agreement with the world is what we call happiness, then, as Wittgenstein puts it “Man cannot make himself happy without more ado.”(NB, 76). For the most part being in the world, or in meaning, involves dependence. This is not a matter of luck or circumstances, but should be seen an ontological characterization. It is out of it that ground that will or agreement with the world can be realized. But then how is the will protected from the misery of the world? Wittgenstein dramatizes the problem pertaining to the satisfaction of the will in the following: This would be the place to explore the temptation to conceive of what is sometimes called the quietist character of Wittgenstein’s ethics. 18 19 How do we imagine a case in which a person cannot exercise their will? Surely, this is not merely to be identified with the inability to move one’s limbs in action. “Let us imagine a man who could use none of his limbs and hence could, in the ordinary sense, not exercise his will. He could, however, think and want and communicate his thought to someone else. Could therefore do good or evil through the other man. Then it is clear that ethics would have validity for him, too, and that he in the ethical sense is the bearer of a will.”(NB, 77) We for sure need not resort to the case of paralysis and can think in this context of the ethical will of a sovereign leader that has his orders executed by others, but in a clear sense exercises will that can be good or evil. 25 “Suppose that man could not exercise his will, but had to suffer all the misery of this world then what could make him happy. How can man be happy at all, since he cannot ward off the misery of this world?” And Wittgenstein responds “Through the life of knowledge [das Leben der Erkenntnis]. The good conscience is the happiness that the life of knowledge preserves” (NB, 81). The appeal to a life of knowledge, might suggest again a contemplative, rather than active form of existence. And Wittgenstein even associates a kind of renunciation with the possibility of happiness (i.e. agreement with the world): “The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities [Annehmlichkeiten] of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.” (NB, 81). But renouncing the amenities of the world should be distinguished from not willing. What one renounces is the identification of one’s happiness with the satisfaction of wanting or desire that, in its abstractness, sets itself purposes. To show oneself to be independent of the world would mean precisely the capacity to make§ one’s will independent of the success or failure of that wanting. But this does not imply renouncing willing. To recognize that distinction, consider how Wittgenstein expresses the problem in terms of wanting rather than willing: But can one want [wünschen] and yet not be unhappy if the want [Wunsch] does not attain fulfillment? (And this possibility always exists) … And yet in a certain sense it seems that not wanting [wünschen] is the only good. (NB 77) It would be indeed precisely right to say that not wanting is the true attitude of the will. But, following our discussion, the stance of “not wanting” can be understood in two different ways. We could imagine an attempt to ‘shut down’ all wanting or desire (hopelessly, one should add, since this is tantamount to life itself). The other way not to remain with unfulfilled wanting would be to concretize the want into willing. To concretize want into will is to do away with wanting. And the highest state of being a willing subject that has a fully concrete will is willing agreement with the world. But this just is being in significance. This is the proper understanding of what Wittgenstein refers to as a life of knowledge, which is its own happiness. Agreement with the world cannot be conceived as an achievement of the will that brings about the state of affairs it wants or wishes for. It must be such as we recognize the world, or accept it as one’s own. And this cannot be expressed through the idea of 26 purposes that are realized in action. But our discussion of the relation of will and significance opens another possibility. For significance is precisely not a purpose of the will, but rather identified as what is recognized in the concretization of meaning in and through acting. Insofar as meaning is not a purpose, one could seek here the ground for an action that is its own object, or achieves satisfaction in acting itself. It is in that spirit that Wittgenstein writes: “If the will has to have an object in the world, the object can be the intended action itself.” (NB, 87) In determining oneself through the setting of purposes, one can always fail to achieve fulfillment, and yet there is a sense in which the ‘higher will’ or ethical will, whose task is defined by agreement with the world can be ‘unaffected’ by failure. For, in concretizing willing we move from desiring an object, to the thoughtful activity itself providing the occasion for recognizing significance. This would constitute action willed in and for itself. Indeed, in taking the action itself as one’s object one can precisely introduce the possibility of agreement with the world, of happiness, irrespectively of an action achieving its aim or purpose. The ethical will has the action itself as its reward – it does the action for its own sake. This dissociation from living through purposes is linked in the Notebooks to what Wittgenstein calls “fulfilling the purpose of existence”: And in this sense Dostoievsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence. Or again we could say the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content. (NB, 73) §10 The Place of the Other in Agreeing with the World Before further developing this characterization of the ethical will, I want briefly to consider how the primacy of agreement with the world in the consideration of the ethical is compatible with the common intuitions about the place of the other in morality. In particular I want to address the worry that Wittgenstein’s characterization is too selfcentered, as though, if the will were to be grounded in the world being my world, this would imply being callously unconcerned with others. That the ethical has to do with the possibility of internal agreement of subject and world means that the world ‘in itself’ cannot be good or evil: “If I am right, then it is not sufficient for the ethical that a world is given. Then the world in itself is neither good nor evil. For it must be all one, as far as concerns the existence of ethics, whether there is living matter in the world or not. And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead 27 matter can in itself be neither good or evil.” (NB, 77) But then, if value derives from the very coming to agreement of subject and world, wouldn’t ethics be a solipsistic endeavor? Wittgenstein asks himself in the Notebooks “Can there be an ethics if there is no living being but myself? If ethics is supposed to be something fundamental, there can.” (NB, 77) In other words, it would seem that the other does not enter inherently in the characterization of the ethical will as such. It is as though only subject and world (and the inner possibility of agreement) are of concern to ethics. For sure, the idea of agreement with the world is not tantamount to affirming the individual will as a form of mastering the alien world, but rather would be closer to what we might call “reconciliation” with it, which is the expression of true independence. But, even if we managed to distinguish the agreement with the world from egoistic selfconcern, there would still arise a question whether and how other human beings have a privileged place in what I call “my world”. Indeed, if the ultimate attitude concerns my agreement with the world, isn’t the proper ethical stance one of being indifferent towards others, neither wanting good nor evil for them? What is the relation of my will to the weal and woe of others? Is it, according to common conceptions, good to want nothing for one’s neighbor, neither good nor evil? … It is generally assumed that it is evil to want someone else to be unfortunate. Can this be correct? Can it be worse than to want him to be fortunate? (NB, 77-78) Arguably, common conceptions or moral intuitions would be to think that a good person wants good for other persons. One might wonder indeed, whether the sense of significance associated with agreement with the world can be sustained in the face of the misfortune of others. Wouldn’t my very sense that another is misfortunate call upon me to act? Shouldn’t my response to this misfortune count as an essential part of my ethical will, i.e. it would characterize this will as good or evil? But then this would imply that caring for the good of others (‘loving one’s neighbor’), has to be part of what it is to have oneself a good will. Wouldn’t that define the ethical will in terms of one’s relation to what is in the world, rather than as agreement with world, whatever its facts and objects? One way to dissolve the apparent conflict between our moral intuitions and Wittgenstein’s formulations is to deny that others figure in my world. For this would 28 parallel the mistaken attempt to locate myself, the subject, in the world (rather than as a limit of the world). Just as there can be a problematic conception of the subject, there would be a problematic conception of the other. This would imply that certain ways of relating to others (i.e. taking one’s relation to them to be determined by facts) would be problematic. We should further do away with various pictures of what it means for the other not to be a ‘part’ of the world. For instance we should not conceive this as though each person is in his own ‘bubble world’ (for this would be just reproducing the parallel mistaken picture of my world being identified as a circumference of all the facts that I encounter, as in the caricature of the limits of the visual field that Wittgenstein brings up in the discussion of solipsism). But how then, could there be a relation to another at all if the other is not “in the world”? If uniqueness is always a matter of the character of the articulated world, of the limits of the world, we must ask whether the very possibility of fulfilling willing concretely can, or even must, involve another. Maybe the first context that comes to mind here, so as to exemplify this codelimitation of reality, is love. The locus of uniqueness accessible to me in love should not be taken as the other person as such (as though uniqueness is some intractable quality they have to them, or in them). Thinking of uniqueness this way would lead to seeking the ground of love in what is special and unlike anyone else in the loved person. Uniqueness, even in the context of love, is rather brought out in the character of the reality willed in common. It would be against the deficiency of desire, passion, fantasy, or even affection to characterize love, that it would be possible to flesh out what the concretization of “wanting” into “willing” in love comes to. Indeed, one could speak here of stages of the erotic or of the wanting that becomes the will manifesting itself in love20: One can conceive of one such stage, in which potentially, every attractive person of the appropriate sex provides an indeterminate occasion for love. This is the condition in which another person is perceived as one among many others, that is a condition in which all are equally significant and equally insignificant. Living that standpoint would be immersion in an abstract fantasy and its paralyzing enchantment. Devotion demands the determination of the will and makes the attachment to a particular other into an 20 The following discussion might appear less peculiar if we remember the deep admiration that Wittgenstein had for Kierkegaard at the time of the composition of the Tractatus. 29 occasion for being in agreement with the world. It is in that particular life with another that the world is concretized or becomes a limit with which I strive to agree, only thereby is it a limited whole for me.21 But doesn’t that imply ultimately that agreement with the world cannot be achieved on one’s own? Does the fulfillment of a finite being essentially demand another, as though one cannot address the imperfections of one’s own existence by oneself? Addressing this issue at the most fundamental level, that is for Wittgenstein, at a religious level, would require asking whether the articulation of agreement with the world is not ultimately one that derives from a personal sense of that with which one comes to agree. In other words, the question is whether the articulation of what it means to be in agreement with the world is already to be understood as involving the sense of otherness that can be taken as subject as well as substance. To suggest that this is indeed a dimension of Wittgenstein’s account, consider that when Wittgenstein lays out the essential dimensions of the ethical in the Notebooks he writes: “The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.” (NB, 73) The comparison of God to a father means that it is only on the basis of the sense of the divine as personal that one can characterize the fundamental nature of agreement with the world. This is also why the relation to the finite other will be central to the ethical sphere. It is in this context that we will have to interpret such a remark as: “‘To love one’s neighbor’ would mean to will!” (NB, 77) Yet, the religious character of love of one’s neighbor would raise a question how the concretization of the world in willing can be brought together with love of mankind and does not express itself necessarily in a life concretized with a particular other. A fuller consideration of this matter cannot be elaborated apart from the investigation of Wittgenstein’s conception of the character of finitude. For the purpose of the present paper, the preceding discussion is sufficient to suggest how the question of the other would be introduced into Wittgenstein’s ethical standpoint. §11 The Ethical Will 21 I take it that the emphasis on the concretization of the will in a common reality is what will make this account different from considerations of mutual recognition that pertains to the logic of self-consciousness. 30 So as to bring this paper to a close, it would be helpful to gradually bring back the character of the ethical we have elaborated to our starting point with the unquestionable. I note that we can recognize the theme of questioning in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the attempt to characterize the ethical through the idea of universal law. Wittgenstein considers something like the possibility of raising a question with regard to the performance of one’s duty: The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt …” is: And what if I do not do it? But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For, there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (TLP, 6.422) The sphere of action is delineated in terms of a certain type of “why?” questions, for insofar as something to count as my action I must be able to give reasons for it. But Wittgenstein interestingly takes with regard to actions that are supposedly demanded as duty or as ethical command, the ‘defiant’ question - form: “And what if I do not do it?” This is close to “Why should I do it?” and yet expresses more clearly a skeptical attitude than seeking, in myself, reasons to do what is commanded. Which is to say: A skeptical question has a place to be raised when ethics is formulated by laying out a contentful law. Ethics rather has to do with locating the ground of the will in what we called the concrete uniqueness in agreement with the world. “Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be the condition of the world, like logic.” (NB, 77) Just as logic is ultimately not a realm of contentful laws but in pervading the world is the medium of the concretization of content, so ethics would not be understood on the basis of contentful ethical laws but rather in the concretization of the will that makes the world my world. Just as “logic pervades the world” [Die Logik erfüllt die welt] (TLP, 5.61, translation modified) so “my will permeates the world” [mein Wille die Welt durchdringt] (NB, 73 translation modified). The ethical will cannot be grounded in a contentful response to a why question which will not ultimately refer itself to the very action itself. I did such and such because such and such is the thing to do. The ethical action is willed in itself and can also be said to be its own reward. This may be made more intuitive if we start not with the good action but rather with the bad deed, and ask, in what sense is it its own punishment. In 31 explaining this we would no doubt need to turn to such a phenomenon as the call of conscience to which Wittgenstein refers in the Notebooks: “When my conscience upsets my balance [Gleichgewicht], then I am no in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” (NB, 75) But the call of conscience is not itself the punishment of the evildoer, at least if we mean by such punishment the mental torture of guilt feelings. The call of conscience is rather that which allows one to recognize that one’s action was, in view of what is most one’s own, already punishment. Similarly, we should not say that there is satisfaction in the consciousness of having acted ethically and this feeling of satisfaction is the reward of the one who has done good (for this is just the arrogant hubris of the moralist). The reward is the having acted itself. For example – someone acts in such a way as to hurt a loved one. This action is its punishment not insofar as it might cause guilt feelings and self –recrimination, which are obviously unpleasant. Rather it is punishment insofar as that person withdraws himself from the kind of significant life in which there is, say, a community of love (and more generally it is that which draws back from the possibility of agreement with the world). Unless I redeem myself through willing, my punishment will be to live a life in which I have denied myself human fulfillment. This is the sense in which, even on our common conceptions of morality, we can feel that a bad deed can affect everything in one’s life. That is, we find it meaningful to say that someone could be suffering from what he did all of his life, or, that someone’s life is made tasteless by what he has done. This is not to say that we need to seek a causal connection in space and time between the deed and the rest of the life, or that the deed has innumerable effects or consequences extending to the rest of one’s life. It further does not mean that the deed has left a particularly strong impression in memory. (The call of conscience does not depend on how good a memory you have. And its being unforgettable does not imply that it is not possible to repress or ignore it.) For, if the punishment is in the character of the life of the person who acts badly, it is something that person can be aware of or oblivious to. The call of conscience is that which directs us to will a transformation of that state. This is why Wittgenstein appears to identify “Act according to your conscience whatever it may be” with “Live happy!” (NB, 75) 32 But even though the bad deed can ‘affect’ all of life, it is only the good act for which there is a world. To be in agreement with the world is to have in view that unique consistency which is a world. The bad will veils the inner relation of life and world, whereas the good will opens that dimension. Put differently, the good action is one, which disappears in the agreement with the world. The good life is unique but at the same time impersonal and not ruled by extraordinary events. For the fulfilled space of significance is one and there is, so to speak, no contrast in it.22 Bad deeds leave one with an existence that does not bring out the impersonal uniqueness of the person, but one in which the events remain isolated and obtruding. Bad deeds so to speak stick out in life. It is because of its isolation in the world that the bad deed is essentially countering the possibility of significance pertaining to agreement with the world. In disagreement with the world, one loses the sense of being in a world. I take such considerations to be at the basis of one of the famous remarks of the Tractatus: “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 – not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” (TLP, 6.43) The world of the happy is that of a person having a world altogether (by agreeing with it). It is having the dimension of uniqueness or significance in one’s life. Indeed, an important variation of this statement appears in the Notebooks where Wittgenstein writes: “The world must, so to speak, wax or wane as a whole. As if by accession or loss of meaning (Sinnes).” (NB, 73) The waxing and waning of the world is to be understood as the acquiring or losing of significance, depending on the nature of one’s will. The good will has a world and is thereby lifted out of the o srder of fate whereas the bad will is lost in what is in the world, at the mercy of events. §12. Limits and Death In further seeking to specify what would pertain to leading a life toward the concretization of will in meaning, we can turn to the last remark of the Notebooks from 10.1.17: 22 This doesn’t imply that viewed as a whole, as it were from outside, such a virtuous yet ordinary life would not appear extraordinary. See in this context (Friedlander, 2017: 118121). 33 If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is so to speak, the elementary sin [elementare Sünde]. And when one investigates it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors. Or is even suicide in itself neither good nor evil? One could very generally argue that insofar as the fundamental ethical ‘commitment’ is concretizing the uniqueness of my life in meaning, then there is a sense that suicide would be attacking the very ground of the will. More specifically, we have characterized above the bad will as being determined through, or being at the mercy of, events in the world. The consideration of suicide might be motivated by the sense that an event or state is so terrible that it stands for the lack of possibility as such, nothing is possible anymore. It would be as if an event is made to stand for a limit condition. It’s happening would appear to preclude that delimitation of meaning, which is a matter of life as a whole. But, a limit condition, that is agreement or disagreement with the world as such, cannot be decided by something having happened or such and such being the case. This does not mean that one could change the course of the world so that the event would be avoided. Nor would it imply, that we need to find ways to forget or repress it. One must rather meaningfully will so that the contingencies of life are seen not to ultimately affect the capacity to bring oneself in agreement with the world. It is always possible to find ways to “dissolve” the sense of irrevocable limit that appears to attach to events, that is to reconcile oneself with the world. The consideration of the elementary sin of suicide thus would bring out a broader issue of one’s relation to the horizon of one’s own death, as something that can permeate the character of one’s actions. The propositions on death as the limit of life in the Tractatus follow, in the order of the text, after the characterization of the good will in terms of being in a happy world: Wittgenstein adds after “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” (TLP, 6.43) the commenting proposition: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” (TLP, 6.431). This suggests establishing a parallel between a bad life and having a problematic sense of one’s relation to one’s own death. It would be as though the relation to his own death is fundamental to the character of the unhappy world of the bad man. It is in that sense that Wittgenstein argues that acting out of fear of death would be a manifestation 34 of a problem with the will: “Fear in the face of death is the best sign of a false [falschen], i.e. a bad [schlechten], life” (NB, 75)) While bearing in mind that these remarks where written as Wittgenstein was a soldier in the front, I assume that in his reference to “fear in the face of death” he is not concerned solely with situations in which something like an immediate danger to one’s life is present. It is rather a question of how a certain way of ‘being towards death’ introduces falsity into one’s life. Falsity in that case would be identified in forms of avoidance or inactivity. This avoidance of recognizing reality in one’s action is correlative with a reification of the limit of life. For one might say that the false relation to death is that which constitutes it as an external limit to life (so to speak as a circumference of life). This is why Wittgenstein refers back to the caricature of limits of the limits of the visual field he introduced in the propositions about solipsism at that moment: “Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.” (TLP, 6.4311). This reification of the limit, could manifest itself in a variety of ‘bad ways’ to live (for while there is uniqueness to the good will, there are many variations of the bad will): for example, attempting to live by the principle of “making the best” of the time one predicts one might have until that event to end all events. We might add to these considerations important remarks from 1931 that are part of the material gathered in Culture and Value. These refer to another, more subtle, way of reifying the end of possibilities as such, namely what we conceive of as tragedy. Wittgenstein writes: “When I “have done with the world” I shall have created an amorphous (transparent) mass and the world in all its variety will be left on one side like an uninteresting lumber room…In the world (mine) there is no tragedy… It is as though everything were soluble in the aether of the world; there are no hard surfaces.” (CV, 9) To be “done with the world” suggests a way of departing this life in the right way. Arguably, it is one of the teachings of philosophy. Importantly this is described using the formulation that Wittgenstein adopts for characterizing the subject as limit, (that is Wittgenstein adds after “the world”, in parentheses, “mine”). What Wittgenstein envisages here is departing a life lived from the fundamental ‘imperative’ of being in agreement with the world. Such a life does not acknowledge the tragic. Tragedy would at first be characterized as the condition in which something happening becomes decisive for the character of one’s life as a whole. In another remark 35 from the same period he writes: “Every tragedy could really start with the words: “Nothing would have happened had it not been that …” (Had he not got caught in the machine by the tip of his clothing?)” (CV, 12) For sure, it is not the mere event, the encounter, that provides the form of the tragic, but rather one’s will, that is taking the event to stand in life, for the very limit of life. The event thus bears the weight of one’s very being as a subject, that is it bears on the very possibility of being in agreement with the world. Wittgenstein is aware that there is another way of understanding what the tragic comes to: “But surely this is a one-sided view of tragedy, to think of it merely as showing that an encounter can decide one’s whole life.” (CV, 12) Indeed, couldn’t we conceive of the tragic as a form through which we most starkly become aware of the possibility of agreement with the world no matter what. Tragedy, at least if its meaning is brought out in art by the Greek tragedies, would be the paradigmatic locus of an affirmation of the subject’s agreement with the world. It is in this sense that one speaks of the hero of tragedy as taking upon himself what was not a matter of his intention. To do away with the world, or to refuse tragedy is to refuse as it were this scheme of meaning as fundamental to what counts as agreement with the world.23 §16 An Aesthetics of the Unquestionable Through this last consideration of tragedy, we can engage the question what the aesthetic dimension in having a happy world is for Wittgenstein. For sure, the character of feeling would be essential to characterize what happiness comes to. The dimension of feeling is not lacking from Wittgenstein’s propositions devoted to the ethical. It is explicitly invoked as Wittgenstein conceives of the religious, or mystical dimension of the ethical: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.” (TLP, 6.45 - 6.5 23 Tragedy is an important context in part because it is central to the very questions of how to express the standpoint of identity of subject and world, or the identity of criticism and dogmatism in German Idealism. Thus for instance in Schelling’s early writings, the question of the tragic and the possibility of expressing the ‘independence’ of the subject that brings it to agree with the world even when fate concentrates on his person, is the subject of the final letter. This is probably something that Wittgenstein reflects on in relation to similar issues that arise in Schopenhauer’s account of the tragic character of the relation of the individual will and the world will. 36 my emphasis) In considering these issues, we are engaging the identity that Wittgenstein asserts: “Ethics and Aesthetics are one” [Ethik und Ästhetik sind eins]” (TLP, 6.421). The identity of ethics and aesthetics suggests that the work of art can give one the standpoint of agreement with the world. This capacity of the work of art to present us with the kind of concrete actuality or fulfilled delimitation in agreement with what there is, is suggested in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks. Given our starting point, it is significant that it is identified, there, aesthetically speaking, yet again with an experience of existence: “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is.” (NB, 86) So, is it given to us, ultimately, to recognize the impossible experience of existence in feeling? The term ‘miracle’ should not be taken to refer to an occurrence that appears to contradict the order of nature, the laws of nature. This is something that is emphasized in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the miraculous in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’. For thinking of the miraculous as contradicting the laws of nature would be thinking of it in terms of the space of facts, even if as a negation of its order. It would only afford us with something exceptional relative to that order discovered by science. The absolutely, rather than relatively, miraculous must belong to an order that is neither that of facts nor of objects, but rather to that of existence: “… I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.”24 The feeling at issue is further specified by Wittgenstein in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ as feeling wonder:25 “I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or 'how extraordinary that the world should exist.'” The specific character of wonder in expressing the affective dimension of 24 Importantly, in the same context Wittgenstein further expresses the same feeling by reference to the existence of language: “Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.” For another elaboration of wonder as the ground of questioning, see Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics’. It is against the background of the understanding of the ethical in the Tractatus presented here, that Wittgenstein’s short remark on Heidegger should be assessed. 25 37 the experience of existence suggests its connection to what we have called at the beginning of this paper “the unquestionable”. Wonder, affectively speaking, would be an identity of question and answer. Consider that we use term “wonder” as a verb in “I wonder” which would be one way of expressing the force of questioning. But then we also speak of a wonder as a manifestation. Think here for instance of the use of the term to speak of a wonder of nature such as the rainbow. Here the manifestation would so to speak be the response of the world to the wondering. Or better put we have a manifestation that is of itself both enigmatic and fulfilling our seeking. This affective identity of question and answer would be the sense in which Wittgenstein speaks of the miraculous. For sure, the miraculous cannot be explained, but it is not something that is associated thereby with an unanswerable question, enigma or riddle, for it is supposed to be at the same time the manifestation that answers all doubt or questioning. The unity of question and response, of which wonder is the aesthetic dimension, is agreement with the world, or what I have called “the unquestionable”. What I have attempted to establish in different ways throughout this paper is that the correlate of the ‘experience’ of existence of language, or the existence of world is the uniqueness of concrete individuality constituting itself in willing agreement with the world.26 When Wittgenstein speaks of wonder as related to existence “that there is what there is”, he points to the possibility inherent to the work of art of being a locus of agreement with the world. In the work of art, what there is most concretely, is totally affirmable. (One could also say that the work of art is the paradigmatic locus of significance, of total permeation of what is given by meaning.) The work of art translates the so-called experience of existence by its capacity to have one agree with what there is. It is a symbol of happiness or pleasure taken that there is what there is. Wittgenstein, indeed relates the happy world of the good will to the work of art: “It is the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a happy eye?” And he further quotes a phrase from Schiller’s prologue to Wallenstein: “Life is grave, art is gay”. This reference to happiness does not replace the identification of the essence of art through the beautiful, but rather establishes an identity of beauty The essential dimension of individuality is further evident in the way in which Wittgenstein describes his lecture to the members of the Vienna Circle and emphasizes the importance of speaking in the first person. 26 38 and happiness: “For there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful. And the beautiful is what makes happy.” The work of art would then be paradigmatic in allowing us to experience in feeling this fundamental form of agreement. To speak of the manifestation of agreement in feeling, is not to give up on meaning. For the only possibility of recognizing agreement is through a dimension of meaning. We therefore need to bring together the idea of the work of art as a locus of agreement with what there is, with the characterization of the work of art as “expression”: “Art is a kind of expression. Good art is fulfilled expression.” (N. 83) This remark is important insofar as it underscores that the kind of agreement that is achieved with the world in the work of art is an agreement in meaning. Indeed, the term “expression” here should be taken in the same way in which it appears, say when Wittgenstein discusses in the Tractatus the nature of a symbol in language. In other words the relation of expression to aesthetics is not to be read as though the beautiful is mere expression of feeling, but rather as identifying feeling that belongs to fulfilled expression in meaning. In the quote above, I have modified Anscombe’s translation, which has “complete” rather than “fulfilled” for vollendete. For complete might suggest that the work of art ‘in itself’ would express its subject matter completely, and the subject is just pleased by being given to contemplate such completeness of expression. But what we consider here is how art allows fulfillment of my agreement with the world. The understanding of what fulfilled meaning in art comes to, must make clear that what is at stake here is the standpoint of identity of subject and world. Fulfillment in meaning cannot be recognized apart from the agreement of a subject with what there is. Conversely, Wittgenstein’s reference to the “happy eye” might tempt one to speak here of an “attitude”, that is to place all the emphasis on the side of the subject. But the relation of the happiness in art and the striving of the will for agreement with the world in life must be understood precisely in such a way that the happy eye is that eye for which there is no more striving, but rather a place of repose in agreement with what there is. We might say, that when art fulfills expression, it reveals me in my movement towards unique intelligibility and allows a resting place in what it concretely presents. It 39 is in that sense, I take it, that Wittgenstein uses the term sub specie aeternitatis to characterize both the ethical standpoint and the work of art: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.”(NB, 83) One might object to the identification suggested between the happiness in art and the ethical as agreement with the world by pointing to an essential difference between them that is apparently implied in Wittgenstein’s own formulation. For Wittgenstein speaks in respect to the artwork of the object, rather than of the world, seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is an important point insofar as we sought, earlier to distinguish the standpoint of the form of objects from that of the existence of world. But, it brings out even more clearly that the standpoint of world is not to be understood in extensive terms, as so to speak out there. Just as one’s life is not part of the world, but the capacity for agreement with the world so, in art we do not experience an object in the world, but the object as world. This is what the view sub specie aeternitatis comes to: “The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.” (NB, 83). To have the whole world as background, precisely does not mean that something is seen in a surrounding, but rather with the surroundings: “Is this it perhaps – in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time?” The invocation of space and time here is, I take it, suggesting the form of the finite consciousness of things. But distinguishing the object “in space and time” from the object “together with space and time” is meant to suggest a standpoint that the work of art allows which would be that sense of the finite thing as the fulfilled and in that sense infinite. This reference to space and time and the possible incorporation of the conditions of finite existence is further taken as a figure to speak of the kind of unity of logical space, or of what Wittgenstein calls the logical world that can be recognized in a thing: “Each thing [Ding] modifies [bedingt] the whole logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak. (The thought forces itself upon one): The thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space.” (NB, 83). (I take it that there is an intentional play of word here in the phrase “Jedes Ding bedingt” which expresses the monadic character of the thing allowing fulfilled expression of agreement with the world) 40 This implies the possibility of having the object as a locus of, what I earlier called “significance”: “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one equally significant.” (NB, 83) Wittgenstein gives an example that dramatizes the kind of ‘concentration’ of world in thing: “If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world and everything else paled against it.” (NB 83, translation modified). Let me end with a question bearing on Wittgenstein’s reference to Schiller: In what sense is life serious and art gay? Is the happy eye an eye that is relieved from the seriousness of willing? Or, is it opened to art to prefigure the fulfillment of will? Should we say, then, that it is only in art that we can have a taste of, or as it were glimpse, in a delimited thing or work, of what is only a task of the will in relation to life as a whole? Addressing these questions would most probably require a more sustained exploration of Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of the work of art. It might also lead to ask about the character of the Tractatus itself, that is, of how it’s being a work that is “wholly philosophical and at the same time literary” is essential to the possibility to “see the world aright” (TLP, 6.54). 41

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