ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the “Lecture on Ethics” marked a significant breakthrough in Wittgenstein’s thinking, not only about ethics. Tensions in the Tractatus became even worse in “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” but were removed when Wittgenstein realized, as he says in Philosophical Investigations 107, that the “crystalline purity of logic” was something he had imposed as a requirement on himself. This realization and liberation from self-imposed requirements seems to have happened at the time he wrote the “Lecture on Ethics.” It freed him to see how language actually works without imposing any preconceptions on himself. The nonsense we speak when we speak ethics, Wittgenstein says in the lecture, is voluntary. It is not the nature of reality or of logic that somehow forbids us to say anything about ethics. Rather, what we want to do when we talk ethics or religion is to go beyond ordinary, significant language. In order to try to express the supernatural we reach for the super-linguistic. Careful investigation of MS 107 helps reveal this development.
