Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
The thread running through both Wittgenstein’s philosophies is a reverence for what lies beyond theory - ethics, value, the meaning of life - and a conviction that what matters most cannot be captured in doctrine but is shown in how one lives. We draw together the two philosophies, the man, and the legacy of a thinker who lived his philosophy to the end.
In 1919, trying to find a publisher for the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote a now-famous letter explaining what his book was really about - and his explanation startles anyone who has read it as a dry treatise on logic. The point of the book, he said, was ethical; and the most important part was the part he had not written. ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’ The whole rigorous logical apparatus - the picture theory, the limits of language, the analysis of propositions - existed, he explained, in order to draw the boundary of the sayable from the inside, and so to fence off and protect the realm of what cannot be said: ethics, value, the meaning of life, the mystical. By showing exactly what can be put into meaningful propositions (the facts of natural science), he had thereby marked off everything that cannot - and it was precisely that region, the unsayable, that mattered most to him. The silence at the end of the Tractatus was not dismissal but reverence; the book’s logic was in service of its silence.
This reveals the deep continuity beneath Wittgenstein’s two very different philosophies. Both are animated by a conviction that the most important things in human life - how to live, what has value, the meaning of it all, the ‘higher’ - are not capturable in theory, doctrine, or factual proposition, but are of a wholly different order: shown rather than said, lived rather than theorised, expressed in a life rather than stated in words. In the Tractatus this takes the form of the mystical that ‘shows itself’ beyond the limits of language. In the later philosophy it takes the form of the insistence that philosophy is an activity of clarification rather than a body of doctrine, that ethics and the deep things of life are woven into forms of life rather than stated in theories, and that ‘what people accept as a justification is shown by how they think and live’. Across the great change in his philosophy of language, this ethical-existential core remained constant: a reverence for what lies beyond theory, and a conviction that the deepest matters are matters of life, not of doctrine. To understand Wittgenstein, one must see that the austere logician and the patient therapist were, at heart, a single moralist of the unsayable.
The clearest statement of Wittgenstein’s view of ethics comes in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (1929), the only popular lecture he ever gave, delivered just as he was returning to philosophy. Ethics, he argues there, concerns absolute value - the genuinely good, the truly important, the meaning of life - as opposed to merely relative value (this is a ‘good’ chair if it serves its purpose; you ‘ought’ to take this road if you want to reach the town). Relative value is just disguised statement of fact (it reduces to: this serves that purpose) and can be said perfectly well. But absolute value - the kind ethics is really about, the absolutely good, what we ought to do come what may - cannot be reduced to any statement of fact, and therein lies the problem. For language, Wittgenstein maintains (here still close to the Tractatus), can only state facts; and no statement of fact, no description of how the world is, could ever be or entail a statement of absolute value. ‘If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world’ - because it would express the inexpressible, say what cannot be said. Ethics, in the sense that matters, cannot be a science, cannot be a body of true propositions, because its subject - absolute value - lies beyond the realm of facts and so beyond the reach of meaningful language.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Wittgenstein, early and late, the most important things - ethics, value, the meaning of life - cannot be captured in factual propositions or theory but show themselves in how one lives; that philosophy is an activity of clarification, not a body of doctrine; and that he lived his philosophy with r…
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