The only text written and presentation form of L. Wittgenstein (1929)
Conference on Ethics
Before addressing the subject proper, let me make a few remarks. I feel like I'm having great difficulties to communicate to you what I think and I believe it is possible to mitigate some of these difficulties by exposing them to you immediately. First, I need hardly mention, is that English is not my mother tongue and therefore my speech often lacks the precision and finesse that would be required when treats a difficult subject. All I can do is ask you to make my job easier when trying to understand what I mean, despite the mistakes that I make myself constantly guilty against the English grammar. There is also this second challenge I want to mention: probably what many, of you expect from this conference, hear me coming, he is slightly inaccurate. To put you on the way in this matter, I'll say a few words why I had to choose my topic: When your previous secretary did me the honor to request a conference for your company, I thought at first that I would certainly be nice to do, and, secondly, that if I had the opportunity to speak before you, I should tell you something he keenly interested in giving you communication, and not to misuse this opportunity by offering, say, a conference of logic. I say "misuse" because, you expose a scientific question, I would not a one-hour lecture, but a complete series of conferences. Another possible solution would you do what's called a conference extension - that is to say, a conference designed to make you think you understand something that in fact you do not understand - and satisfy what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of our contemporaries, this curiosity surface covering the latest discoveries of science. Rejecting these options, I decided to talk about a subject that, in its generality, I think is important, hoping thereby to help you clarify your ideas on this subject (even if you had to be in total disagreement with what I'll say). My third and final difficulty is in fact the lot of most philosophical conferences of any length - is the fact that the auditor is unable to see the way the liver that he caught and the purpose for which it it leads. That is to say it or think: "I fully understand what the speaker says, but what the hell is he getting at? "Or:" I see where he is coming from, but how on earth will he do? "Again all I can do is ask you to be patient and hope in the end you will see both the path to which he leads.
start now. I treat, as you know, ethics and I will adopt the explanation that Professor Moore has given the term in his Principia Ethica. He said: "Ethics is the general investigation of what is right. "I now use this term in a somewhat broader sense, in fact in a way that includes what I believe is the core part of what is commonly called aesthetic. And to show you as clearly as possible what I think is the proper subject of ethics, I will submit a number of more or less synonymous expressions, such that we can replace all the above definition, by listing them, I try to produce the same type of effect which Galton when photographed on the same plate material a number of different faces in order to obtain an image of the typical traits they shared. And just showing you a photograph that group thus obtained, I could show you what is typical, say, a Chinese face, and I hope that by browsing the list of synonyms that I will you submit, you will be open see the features they have in common, features which are those of ethics. So instead of saying: "Ethics is investigating what is right," I could have said it is investigating what has value, or what really counts, or j ' would still have said that ethics is the investigation of the meaning of life, or what makes life worth living, or the correct way to live. I think that in considering all these sentences, you'll get a rough idea of what the ethics involved. Now the first thing that strikes us in all these expressions is that each is actually used in two very different meanings. I will call on the one hand the trivial or relative sense, and secondly the ethical or absolute sense. For example, if I say: this is a good chair this means that this chair is used to some predetermined end, and the good word that we use here has meaning only insofar as that purpose is already predetermined. In fact, the word good in the relative sense simply means that satisfies a certain predetermined pattern. So when we say someone is a good pianist we mean that he can play the music of C degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say he important for me not to catch cold, I mean a cold place in my life some faults it is possible to describe and if I say it ' this is the correct road, I mean that's the correct way to achieve a certain goal. Used in this way these expressions do not pose serious problems or difficulties. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Suppose, if I could play tennis one of you, seeing me play, tell me: "You play very badly" and I answer him: "I know I played poorly, but I do not want to play better, "everything that my partner might say would be: "Oh, in this case, all is well. But suppose I told one of you is a lie extravagant, let him come to me saying "you are behaving in cad" and I answer: "I know I behave badly, but Anyway, I do not want me driving any more, "could he then say:" Oh, in this case everything is fine "? Certainly not, he would say: "Well, you better drive you want. "Here you have a decree of absolute value, while that of the previous example was a decision on. In essence, the difference between these two types of judgments appears obviously consist in this: While value judgments on is a simple statement of facts and can therefore be formulated so that it loses all semblance of value judgments: Instead of saying, "This is the correct way to Granchester "I could just as well say:" That is the correct road you take if you want to reach Granchester in the shortest possible time "," This man is a good runner "simply means it traverses a number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.. What I want to argue now, although it can be shown that any value judgments on boils a simple statement of fact is that no set of facts may or may not involve an absolute value judgments. Let me explain it this way: suppose one of you is omniscient, and therefore he is aware of all movements of all bodies, dead or alive, of this world, he also knows all provisions of mind of all human beings to someone the time they lived, and he wrote everything he knows in a big book, this book contains the complete description of the world. And the point where I'm getting is that this book would contain nothing that we would call ethical judgments nor anything that logically imply such a trial. Naturally, it would contain all relative judgments of value, all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described are somehow the same level, and even all the proposals would be the same. There is no proposal that, in some absolute sense, is sublime, important or trivial. No doubt some of you will agree, remembering what Hamlet says: "Nothing is good, nothing bad is the thought that creates the good or bad. But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. Hamlet's words seem to imply that the good and the bad, though not qualities of the outside world, are attributes of our states of mind. Instead, what I want to say is that a state of mind (insofar as we understand by this expression is a fact that we can describe it) is neither good nor bad in an ethical sense. For example, if we read in our book of the world describing a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing that we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be exactly the same as any other event, such as a falling stone. Certainly, reading this description might cause us pain, anger or other emotion, or we could read what was pain or anger that the murder has aroused in people who were aware, but there will here only the facts, facts - facts but not ethics. So I need to say that if I stop to consider what ethics should be really, assuming that such science exists, the result seems quite obvious. It seems clear that nothing we could ever think or say could be the thing, ethics, we can not write a book that would address a scientific topic intrinsically sublime and a higher level than all other subjects. I can not describe my feeling about it as a metaphor: If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on ethics, this book, like an explosion, destroy all other books of this world . Our words, as we use in science, are vessels which are only able to contain and convey meaning and sense - meaning and natural meaning. Ethics, if it exists, is supernatural, so that our words do express only facts as a teacup that never contain water as the value of a cup, even though I would pour a liter of water. I said that insofar as these are facts and proposals, there are only a relative value, accuracy, although related. Before proceeding, let me illustrate with an example rather speaking. The correct way is what leads to a goal that has been predetermined arbitrarily and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense to speak of a proper road outside of such a predetermined goal. Let's see what we could hear the phrase: "The road is absolutely correct." I think that would be the road that everyone should take, driven by a logical necessity, since he would see her, or he should be ashamed. Similarly, the absolute good, but if this is a situation likely to description, each state would necessarily pursue the achievement, regardless of their tastes and inclinations, which we would feel guilty not to pursue the achievement. And I want to say that this state of affairs is a chimera. No state of things has in itself, what I would call the coercive power of an absolute judge. For all of us - including myself - who are still tempted to use phrases such as " absolute good, "" absolute value ", what have we in mind and we trying to express? Every time I try to get my account to some clarity on this point, it is natural that I recall the circumstances in which I certainly used those words, which puts me in the situation where you would be if my lecture was to consider, for example, on the psychology of pleasure. Your reaction would be to seek to evoke typical situations where you feel constantly fun. Because you have to Devers this in mind, all I would say you would become practical and somewhat controllable. One of you would choose Perhaps as its typical example the sensation he felt while walking on a beautiful summer day. It is in this situation I am if I want to stop to see what I mean in spirit by ethical value or absolute value. And what always happens in my case, is the idea of a special experience that comes to my idea as such, is in a sense my experience par excellence is the reason why in addressing you, I will make this experience my prime example. (As I just said, this is a purely personal and someone else could find different and more striking examples! ) I will describe this experience in order to get you to talk, if possible, experience the same or similar and thus give us a common basis for our investigation. I think the best way to describe it is to say that when I make this experience, I am surprised by the existence of the world. And then I am inclined to use phrases like "as it is extraordinary that anything exists," or "as it is extraordinary that the world exists! "Without dwelling on it, I will continue this another experience that I know well and which will no doubt familiar to many of you: that we might call the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean by this that frame of mind where we are inclined to say "my conscience is clear, nothing can touch me, no matter what. "Let me now dwell on these experiences, because I think they have precisely these characteristics that we seek to elucidate. The first thing I have to say is that the verbal expression that we give them is a nonsense! If I say: "I am surprised by the existence of the world," I make a bad use of language. Explain it: it has a perfectly clear and correct to say that I'm surprised something happens, we all understand what it means to say that I am astonished at the size of a dog when he is bigger than anyone I've ever seen, or that I am surprised at all that is extraordinary - in the usual sense that word has. In all these cases, I am surprised that something happened which I could conceive that it would not happen. I am surprised at the size of this dog because I could conceive, for a dog, a different size - normal size - which I'd not be surprised. Saying "I am surprised that this or that happens" only makes sense if one can imagine its non-production. In this sense, it is surprising, say, the existence of a house, when you see without having been there a long time, whereas we had thought it had been demolished in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say I am surprised by the existence of the world, because I can not imagine it does not exist. Of course I could be surprised that my world is as it is. For example, if I did this experience by seeing the blue sky, I could be surprised that the sky is blue, as opposed to when it is cloudy. But that's not what I mean in spirit. I am surprised that there is sky, whatever it either. One might be tempted to say that what I wonder is a tautology, that is to say that the sky is blue or it is not blue. But it is simply nonsense to say that it is surprising to a tautology. And this applies to the other experience I have mentioned, that of absolute safety. We all know what that means, in ordinary life, but be safe. I'm safe in my room when I can not be crushed by a bus. I'm safe if I already had whooping cough and therefore can no longer catch him. Be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things happen to me, and therefore it makes no sense to say that I am safe, whatever happens. Again here there is misuse of the word "security" as in the other example, there was misuse of the word "existence" or "surprise". That said, I want you to understand that there are certain characteristic type of misuse of language that runs through all our religious and ethical terms. All these expressions, prima facie, seem to be just dummies. Thus it seems that when we use the word "correct" in an ethical sense, although what we mean By this in mind may not be correct in the ordinary sense of the term, there is something similar, and when we say that man is good, "although the word good does not mean here what it means in the sentence" it's a good football player, "it seems there is some similarity. When we say "this man's life was worth," we do not hear it in the sense that we would of valuable jewelry, but it seems there is some kind of analogy. In this sense, all religious terms seem to be used as mock and allegorically. For when we speak of God and say he sees everything, when we kneel to pray, all terms we use, all we seem to be part of a larger allegory which represents very fine as a human being with a wide discretion, which we strive to capture the grace, etc.. But this allegory also describes the experience that I just mentioned. For the first of these experiments is exactly, I think, that to which we alluded to when we say that God created the world and they described the experience of absolute safety when told that one feels safe in the hands of God. Third similar experiment, that of guilt has been found also described with the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct. Thus we use paraissons constantly mock the language of ethics as in that of religion. But a sham to be the semblance of something. And if I can describe a fact through a sham, I must also be able to leave is the simulacrum and describe the facts without resorting to it. But when we try to leave the sham side in our case and we stick to stating the facts that remain behind, we find that there is no such facts. So what appeared at first as a simulacrum seems i1 now be pure nonsense. And However, for those who made them for me for example, three experiences which I have mentioned (I could, give others a complement) appear in some sense have an absolute value, intrinsic. But the moment I say they are experiences, they are certainly facts they occurred in a given place and time, they lasted a while well defined, and therefore are likely to be described. Thus, given what I said a few minutes ago, I do admit that it is nonsense to say that they have an absolute value. And I'll give this remark a point even stronger, saying: " That is the paradox that experience, fact, seems to have supernatural value. Now there is a path I'd be tempted to take to address this paradox. Let me go back to our first experiment, which was to surprise the world's existence, and describe a slightly different way and we all know that in the ordinary course of life, would be called a miracle. Obviously, it's just an event as we have never seen anything like it again. Now suppose that such an event occurs. Imagine if suddenly a lion's head would push on the shoulders of one of you, who would begin to roar. Certainly this would be something as extraordinary as any I can imagine. What I suggest then, once you would have recovered from your surprise would be to get a doctor to conduct a scientific review of the case of this man, and if they were suffering this would entail I'd make a vivisection. And what would have led the miracle? It is indeed clear that if we see things in this eye, all that is miraculous disappears, unless what we mean by this term is simply this: a fact which has not yet been explained by science This in turn means that we have not yet managed to consolidate this with others within a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say "science has proven that there are no miracles." In truth, the scientific approach of a fact not approach this as a miracle. Indeed you can well imagine any fact, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For now we see that we have used the word "miracle" in a relative sense and also in an absolute sense. I will now describe the experiment of wonder at the existence of the world, saying it the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. I'm so tempted to say that the correct way to express in language the miracle of the existence of the world, although this is not a proposal of language is the existence of language itself. But then what does the fact that we perceive this miracle at some times and not others? For everything I said in passing the miraculous expression of an expression by means of language to express the existence of language, all I did was to say that again we can not express what we want to express and that everything we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. To all this, many will think of you probably find an answer that seems clear. You say: Well, if certain experiences constantly challenge us to assign a quality we call absolute value or importance or ethics, it simply shows that what we call in mind when we use these words is not nonsense this shows that what we mean in spirit, saying that experience has an absolute value, is after all a fact among others, and that everything boils down to this: we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean in spirit by our ethical and religious expressions. When I subjected to this objection, I immediately see very clearly, as in a flash of light, not only that no description I would not conceive the matter to describe what I mean by absolute value in mind, but that I would dismiss ab initio any meaningful description that I may have suggested because of the fact that it is meaningful. Which is to say that I see now that if these terms had no meaning, it is not because the expressions that I found was not correct, but because their essence quo was n have no meaning. Indeed everything that I wanted to come up with it was to go beyond the world, that is to say beyond significant language. Everything that I held out - and I think what tends all the men who once tried to write or talk about ethics or religion - it was to confront the limits of language. It is perfectly, absolutely hopeless and to give the front against the walls of our cage. Insofar as ethics is born of desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, of absolute good, what has an absolute value, ethics can not be science. What she says does not add anything to our knowledge, in any sense. But we documented a trend that exists in the mind of man, a trend that I can only deeply respect for myself, and I do not know about my life ridicule.
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
