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Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, and Ethics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

A. Phillips Griffiths
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Extract

Wittgenstein always thought that he had not been understood, and indeed that it was very unlikely that many people ever would understand him. Russell not only failed to understand Wittgenstein's later work; according to Wittgenstein himself, Russell profoundly failed to understand even the Tractatus. Professor Anscombe says even she did not understand him, and that to attempt to give an account of what he says is only to express one's own ordinariness or mediocrity or lack of complexity. Certainly, most people acquainted with the Tractatus, when that work was Wittgenstein's only published book, gave it what now seems a quite crass positivistic interpretation. Wittgenstein's own preface to the Tractatus, despite its last sentence, does not help. He does tell us that the whole sense of the work is that what can be said can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence: but this does not make it clear that what we cannot talk about is all that is really important. Even when one has realised all this, however, one is aware mostly of one's failure to understand; and that if one did get any distance in understanding the last sixth of the Tractatus, the process would be extremely difficult, and the results quite astonishing.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 7: Understanding Wittgenstein , March 1973 , pp. 96 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1973

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Footnotes

1

References in parentheses in the text of the form I. 25 or II. 25 are to the first and second volumes of Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969) followed by the page number.

References

page 96 note 2 LLW, p. xiv.Google Scholar

page 96 note 3 But not, I think, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens.

page 96 note 4 ‘What lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense’ (TLP, p. 27).Google Scholar

page 97 note 1 LLW, p. 143.Google Scholar

page 98 note 1 Engelmann seems to suggest that this was deliberate (LLW, p. 106).Google Scholar

page 99 note 1 See also TLP, 5.64 and NB, 2.9.16.

page 101 note 1 See Anscombe, G. E. M., An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 4th ed. (Hutchinson Home University Library, 1971), p. 167n.Google Scholar; Black, Max, A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, p. 309Google Scholar; Hintikka, J., ‘On Wittgenstein's Solipsism’, Mind, LXVII (1958) p. 88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 106 note 1 Cf. Wittgenstein in a letter to Engelmann: ‘… I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact’ (LLW, p. 33).Google Scholar

page 108 note 1 See Rhees, R., ‘Some Developments in Wittgenstein's View of Ethics’ Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965) pp. 17–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 109 note 1 Schopenhauer, , Essays and Aphorisms, trans. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 52.Google Scholar

page 111 note 1 Bentham, Jeremy, Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. IIGoogle Scholar. Cf. also Calvin, 's essay ‘On Christian Liberty’ in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.Google Scholar

page 112 note 1 Pears, David, Wittgenstein (Fontana/Collins, 1971) p.91.Google Scholar

page 114 note 1 This and other very hard ethical issues are brilliantly and imaginatively dealt with by Naomi Mitchison in her Memoirs of a Spacewoman.