ABSTRACT
While serving in World War I, Wittgenstein received the news that his brother Paul, a talented pianist and Austrian officer, had been wounded, and his arm amputated. Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook in October 1914:
Again and again I cannot but think of poor Paul who so suddenly lost his vocation! How terrible. Which philosophy would be needed to overcome this. If this can be done except by suicide. [ … ] Thy will be done.1
Which philosophy indeed? What, if anything, might philosophy offer to someone who has lost his vocation? Philosophy for Wittgenstein was therapeutic, even in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.2 However it was therapy for confusion and tangles created by language, not for the loss of an arm or one’s vocation. In the most dire form these confusions might take, the confusions appear solely as questions seeming to demand impossible answers.3
How could philosophy-conceived superficially as riddles-overcome a challenge that urges suicide? I shall argue first that Wittgenstein’s philosophy-specifically in his ideas
concerning ethics-can help resolve a challenge such as he imagined his brother Paul faced. My argument faces an immediate difficulty. Though Wittgenstein was famously deeply concerned with ethical or moral matters, he also maintained that the will was powerless to effect change in the world, because will and world were wholly independent. But if the will is powerless, then what is left for the expression of someone’s ethical engagement with the world? It is as if, by this claim, Wittgenstein erased ethics, contrary to what we know of his interests and contrary to what I am arguing. Therefore I shall argue second that we can honor Wittgenstein’s serious
interest in ethics by distilling and elaborating from his conception of the will as powerless an account of morality that is not dependent on the power to act, i.e., on agency, but which still gives a place for engaging one’s moral challenges. This account is, I suggest, a plausible reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s view of ethics as it is sparingly set out in his writings. The account I attribute to Wittgenstein is of additional philosophical
interest for its revisionary implications for contemporary moral theories. An
emphasis on instrumental action as the exemplar of moral response can distort moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, I shall claim, does not wait on theories of action or on what they presuppose, namely agency. To support this claim, I propose-following the reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s account of morality without agency-to suppose that we lack the power to act. Then we can see how little changes in the possibilities for moral understanding and response. If an intelligible account of morality can be recovered without action or agency, then there is a prima facie reason to doubt that action or agency is central to morality. I shall proceed in four sections. First, I shall set out Wittgenstein’s view of
ethics based on his three central themes. Second, I shall reconstruct his view in a way that makes it more plausible and reduces its dependence on peculiarities of his philosophy. Third, I shall use Wittgenstein’s reconstructed ethical views to engage contemporary views. Finally, I will return to the challenge that Wittgenstein’s brother faced.
