Scholarship at UWindsor

Developing a Wittgensteinian Ethic

Wittgenstein is notorious for his lack of discussion on ethics. An entire crowd of people eager to hear the great Wittgenstein speak were famously disappointed when his special talk on ethics lasted less than ten minutes. As it is, we generally think of Wittgenstein as an incredible philosopher of language and logic, beginning with his first work, Tractatus, and changing the way we think about language with the publication of Philosophical Investigations, bringing with it the invention of the language-game theory of language. In these two works, Wittgenstein does not talk much about ethics directly, except to say that we should not be talking about it; however, if we piece together comments from his entire body of work (much of which was published posthumously) with the details of his life, we can start to get a picture of the ethic by which Wittgenstein lived his life. In this paper, I will argue that Wittgenstein’s ethic was one centered around living life with as much authenticity and integrity to the self as possible. I will also argue that the method of communication most suited to discussing ethics is art, using more comments from Wittgenstein with outside references to aesthetics, phenomenology, and existentialism. Many problems and questions will arise from our investigation. How do we reconcile an ethic of authenticity coming from someone who’s manner of “being himself” led to him boxing children’s ears as a school teacher? How can we talk about ethics at all? Should we take a philosopher’s life into consideration when reading their work? At the conclusion of the presentation, we will ask ourselves whether we should implement such an ethical view into our own lives.