Sunday, 8 June 2025
Friday, 6 June 2025
Approaching Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics
As the centenary of Wittgenstein’s 1929 “Lecture on Ethics” approaches, this conference seeks to offer a re-evaluation of this singular text and of its enduring influence. There are two main objectives to the conference: (I) to assess the place of the Lecture within Wittgenstein’s oeuvre; and (II), to measure the impact and continuing importance of the Lecture to the development of post-Wittgensteinian approaches to Ethics.
I The Lecture on Ethics in Context
The participants assembled by the conference will seek to articulate (1) the unconventional conception of ethics manifested in the Lecture; (2) Wittgenstein’s unique moral sensibility and the way the Lecture gives voice to it; (3) the ways in which Wittgenstein’s biography and lived experience are reflected in this philosophical work; and (4) the continuities and discontinuities between the Lecture and Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophical work.
The Lecture on Ethics is a singular event in Wittgenstein’s life and a singular text in Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Contrary to his habitual mode of teaching, Wittgenstein prepared the text of the Lecture in advance, he wrote it in English and delivered it, uncharacteristically, in front of a philosophically untrained audience, on November 17th, 1929. In its content, the Lecture might initially seem to be an extension and clarification of the views expressed in the last paragraphs of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein famously rejects the possibility of ethical propositions and classifies them as nonsensical. But the way the Lecture articulates Wittgenstein’s meta-ethical viewpoint involves several new and unique elements, such as the distinction between the relative and the absolute sense of ethical and religious terms, the distinction between what is expressed by means of language and what is expressed by the existence of language, and the idea that what is expressed by our use of ethical terms in their absolute sense has (or seems to have) “supernatural value.” Moreover, at the heart of the Lecture there appear three novel examples for the ethical, and absolute, use of language, which constitute a rare locus of explicit ethical content in Wittgenstein’s corpus. Wittgenstein there proposes to trace the origin of central ethical and religious expressions, such as creation, providence, and sin, back to the experiences of absolute wonder, of absolute safety and of absolute guilt.
The Lecture can be approached not only as a text, but also as a philosophical occasion. For it is its form and style that make the Lecture truly unique, and render it significantly different from Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics in his earlier and his later work. The Lecture consists in a series of moments that together amount to an attempt by Wittgenstein to put on display his own unique ethical sensitivity. As the opening remarks of the Lecture suggest, he conceives of the occasion in terms of a pedagogical intervention, rather than as a textual presentation of an argument or a view—the Lecture opens with an apology for the topic selected, and an expression of doubt whether it shall not turn out to be a misuse of the opportunity. Wittgenstein then proceeds to select examples for the absolute use of language in a way that indicates that he is guided by ideals of sincerity and authenticity. Throughout the Lecture, Wittgenstein repeatedly addresses the temptation, with which he himself struggles, to put into words that which in fact cannot be expressed. And the Lecture ends in a highly personal tone, as Wittgenstein confesses his deep respect for the human tendency, hopeless though it may be, to attempt to give expression to ethics.
II The Lecture on Ethics and contemporary Moral Philosophy
The Lecture continues to play a significant role in contemporary debates in ethics and serves as one of the main sources of inspiration for the development of a unique, new approach to ethics — often called post-Wittgensteinian ethics — which seeks to offer an alternative to the traditional choice between deontological and teleological ethical approaches.
Breaking with the mainstream traditions of ethics, post-Wittgensteinian moral philosophers aim to resist what Wittgenstein called the “craving for generality”, that is, the tendency of philosophers to play down and ignore the importance of examples, and to neglect the details of ordinary human lives. Instead of propounding general theories, post-Wittgensteinian moral philosophers focus on descriptive work; through the foregrounding of examples and through attention to the details of the particular cases, they seek to reveal dimensions of the ethical that would otherwise remain hidden, such as the formation of ethical attitudes and affective modes of response. Failure to act ethically is traced, in this tradition, to the blocking of the individual’s ethical vision; ethical progress and moral transformation are achieved when the individual realizes and acknowledges those features of reality that they have so far been blind to. Work in post-Wittgensteinian ethics is thus not narrowly confined to argumentation and appeal to principles; instead, in order to help individuals develop a sense for the moral significance of concrete situations, a much more diverse range of methods is deployed, including those methods which have traditionally been thought to belong to the extra-philosophical realm of literature and the arts.
The Lecture on Ethics inspires philosophers working in this tradition not only in terms of the ethical view Wittgenstein discusses in it, but also in terms of the kind of ethical intervention that the performance of the Lecture consisted in. The Lecture does not simply reject the idea that ethics can be approached in terms of generalizable criteria of utility and duty; it inquires into the deep-seated patterns of thinking which lead us in these directions and contends that they only serve to distort our vision and to alienate us from the reality of ethical experience. Instead, the Lecture proposes to approach ethics as a deeply personal matter, an attitude which, once achieved, colors the entirety of the person’s interactions with the world and with others. Moreover, in the Lecture, Wittgenstein places himself and his own personal experience as an example, calling attention to the ethical significance of emotions and affects.
Existing research on the Lecture is yet to exhaust the significance of this philosophical event and the rich interconnections between it and Wittgenstein’s earlier and later work in ethics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of education. We look forward to an event in which all of these themes will be touched on.
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