ABSTRACT
The Ludwig Wittgenstein-style community is not defined over and against anything, not even non-human animals. It is a truly open field, not a barbed wire-ringed fence. Ethics makes a fundamentally spectatorial posture into a problem. Ethics require a fundamentally first-person-plural or else a second-person stance. Radically, to reconceive as Wittgenstein does the so-called “inner object” is to allow space for a more real, realistically apprehended and expressed inner life—and it is that life that is alive in our interpersonal pain-talk. The fantasy of the “inner object,” necessarily hidden from others, blunts the possibility—the necessity—the beauty—of genuine empathy, of being alive to the human field, as we might put it, borrowing a metaphor perhaps from modern physics.
