Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”

1 Broad concept of Ethics:
Including “what is good”, “what is valuable”, “the meaning of life”, the area of aesthetics etc. (Note: this is not the common understanding of what ethics is.)
2 Distinction between the relative (trivial) and absolute (ethical) sense of a word:
Relative: “good”, “right” etc. for a certain purpose (good tennis player, right road)
Absolute: “good person” (e.g. “but you should behave better”)
a) Relative sense of a word is a description of a certain state of affairs, absolute sense of a word is something else: it is a normative judgment or a prescription. We try to say something that goes “beyond the world”: These propositions have therefore no meaning, according to Wittgenstein.
b) Another way of understanding: relative sense of the word is conditional (this is the right road if you want to go to Manila in the shortest time), absolute sense of the word is unconditional (you ought to behave better). The distinction can be compared to the Kant’s distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperative.
3 The “World-Book”:
Another way suggested by Wittgenstein to get aware of the difference (between “relative” and “absolute”) is his thought experience of a world book: Imagine an omniscient person who knows all the movement of all bodies, all state of minds, all facts. He would write everything in a book; “this book would contain the whole description of the world [but] nothing that we would call an ethical judgment.” (p. 3) Even the description of a murder, with all its details, but we would still not find an ethical proposition.
4 Even though that there can be no ethical statement, we make such experiences:
Three examples: a) “I wonder at the existence of the world”, b) “I feel absolutely safe”, c) the concept of “miracle”. In all three examples, it is a misuse of language: a) “wonder” is always about something that might not be the case (an unusually big dog, a house that was there and now has been demolished etc.), b) safe is always relative (e.g. in my room, I’m safe, because no truck can run over me) and c) the word “miracle” does not belong to (scientific) language.
5 Ethical and religious expression just similes?
The use of good, right, valuable etc. in the absolute sense, seem just to be meant as similes. But then, it should be possible to drop the similes, and describe the state of affair on the basis of facts – but there are no such facts. (p. 6)
6 Ethics as a need of human beings
“My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (...) But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), Austrian philosopher, student of Bertrand Russell, initiator of the philosophy of language. Underlying assumption of his philosophy: Philosophical problems arise through the misuse of language. Therefore, an account of the proper use of language is required in order to get rid of these problems.

2 Key ideas of his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”
The aim of the Tractatus is to find out what can be said and what cannot be said. To draw a line between sense and nonsense. In order to show that, Wittgenstein develops a theory of meaning, which explains how propositions (=what is meant by a sentence) get their meaning (namely by virtue of being representations).
2.1 Wittgenstein’s conviction about the “Tractatus”:
“On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.” (Preface)
2.2 The starting point of the Tractatus:
“1 The world is all that is the case”. Wittgenstein’s main task is then to explain, what he intends to say with this statement. He emphasizes that world consists out of facts, rather than objects: “2 What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.” A state of affair is a combination of objects.
2.3 Picture Theory of Propositions:
This theory tries to explain how language works. Sentences depict reality in the same way as an arrangement of toys might simulate reality (Paris court case): A proposition is a picture of reality. The picture theory can also explain, why sentences are either true or false: True, if the proposition is in correspondence with a state of affairs in reality; false, if there is no correspondence.
2.4 The limits of the world are the limits of language
The picture theory implies that we can only say something about empirical facts. There is a limit to what can be said: “The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather - not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).” (Preface) What is beyond the empirical world, cannot be articulated (“7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”)
2.5 Difference of “saying” and “showing”
With language, we can say something about the empirical world, about what is the case in the empirical world (“1 The world is everything that is the case”). What is beyond, cannot be said, it can only be shown (e.g. the area of religion, of ethics, of the meaning of life, of logic). We somehow are aware of the boundary of our world and our language and have a inkling that something is beyond. (Note: there is a difference between logic and ethics; whereas propositions of logic, which determines what is sense and nonsense, is “senseless” (4.0312 That the logic of the facts cannot be represented), propositions of ethics is “nonsense”, i.e. not depicting any fact.)
2.6 The limits of the Tractatus itself
Wittgenstein is aware of the fact that he tried to say something, which actually only can be shown:
”6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)”