Wittgenstein & Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the Ethical (original) (raw)
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Wittgenstein and Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the Ethical
Philosophy and Literature, 2016
For Wittgenstein, ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics cannot be made manifest; indeed, he took the best manifestation of ethics to occur in aesthetics, and more specifically in literature. Wittgenstein takes us some way toward fleshing out literature's "perspicuous presentations," but not far enough. To do this, I appeal to F. R. Leavis's notion of enactment and his view of the autonomous, active role of language in literature. I conclude that for both, the meaning of literature's ethical enactments is determined not subjectively but intersubjectively. Literature imposes, and not merely proposes, ethical meaning. Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say.. .. But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.-Ludwig Wittgenstein 1
Reshaping Ethics after Wittgenstein
This article suggests a reading of the significance of Wittgenstein's Tractatus for ethics, in the light of Cora Diamond's resolute reading. The contrasts between sense and nonsense and between ethics and science are commented on and are connected to a further contrast between a specialized response to language and the world and an unspecialized response characteristic of the humanistic disciplines. The Tractatus is seen as a work which diagnoses the loss of such a fully human unspecialized sense of things and which wishes to recover this possibility for its reader. On the basis of such reading, the article also suggests how to connect the significance of the later Wittgenstein for ethics with the Tractatus. A connection can be established by following Iris Murdoch's notion of conceptual clarification.
Ethics and the Tractatus: A Resolute Failure
Philosophy, 2004
The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written.
TRACTATUS: LOGIC AND THE CHALLENGE OF ETHICS
The subject of this thesis is primarily the ethical point of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In the work, Wittgenstein investigates the connection between ethics and the world by examining the nature of the proposition. In the Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein reinvestigates this connection more directly by explaining the nature of the ethical expression. I argue that the ethical point of the book is to help one to understand the ephemeral characteristics of ethics insofar as they cannot be articulated by demonstrating what can be articulated. In the Lecture, Wittgenstein also points to a deep challenge encountering the Tractarian pictorial language. Logic reminds us that we are held captive by pictorial language and could never get outside it. Ethics, on the other hand, is a constant attempt to get outside of it by usage of simile. Although this attempt seems to be hopeless, it is unavoidable and significant. It characterizes the human condition.
Early Wittgenstein’s Views on Ethics: Some Reflections
Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2018
The paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of the early phase of Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings in Notebooks (NB), Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (TLP) and ''A Lecture on Ethics'' (LOE) in order to present an exposition of some of the central themes, and to extrapolate his views on ethics. To this end, the paper analyses Wittgenstein's understanding of the nature of philosophical inquiry, significance and centrality of ethics, the model of language, saying/showing distinction, notions of will, happiness, good and evil, use of relative and absolute values and several others. Early Wittgenstein's views on ethics are peculiar in so far as they are implied by his views on language with the study of which he was centrally concerned. He claims that language, thought and reality are isomorphic; therefore, language is the basis of all speculation about morality. In TLP, Ethics is transcendental and transgresses the limits of language. The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of ethics, as explicated in his early writings.
Sub Specie Aeternitatis. An Actualisation of Wittgenstein on Ethics and Aesthetics
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010
This article will present an interpretation of Wittgenstein's under standing of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. In extension, it will inform recent discussions regarding a special kind of nonsensicality, which forms a central part of ethical and aesthetical expressions. Instead of identity between ethics and aesthetics, we should understand the relationship in terms of interdependence. Both attitudes provide a view sub specie aeternitatis and thus permit a view of the world as a whole. Employing the vocabulary of Charles Taylor and Harry Frankfurt, it must be remembered that rather than a neutral view from nowhere, such wholeness arises out of strong evaluations that are made against the backdrop of a constitutive framework of intelligibility. At this point, the epistemic gain of actualizing Wittgenstein will reveal itself: it will put us in a position where it is possible to differentiate between ethi cal and aesthetical forms of identification that Taylor and Frankfurt neglect. However, in order to actualize Wittgenstein's ideas, it is necessary to argue that Tractatus should not be understood in a Kantian fashion as suggested by Tilghman for instance.
Nonsense and the Ineffable: Re-reading the Ethical Standpoint in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2012
The paper examines the ethical standpoint of the Tractatus as it has been reconstructed by Cora Diamond ("the austere view") and gives an account of some of the criticism this reconstruction has received in the work of P. M. S. Hacker and Meredith Williams ("the standard view"). The second half of the paper tries to argue that the austere and the standard views rather complement each other if we recognize "two I'-s" in the Tractatus and if it is supposed that there is a "3rd person" and "1st person" perspective which are voiced on its pages.
Reformation Bible College, 2021
This thesis reconsiders common understandings of Tractarian ethics by proposing to recontextualize it within the anthropological bent that runs through Wittgenstein’s philosophy and culminates in the Philosophical Investigations. More specifically, I claim that this recontextualizing of the Tractarian vision of value, ethical propositions as nonsense, and ethics as transcendental shows how these are actually instantiated within the anthropological frame of Wittgenstein’s vision of meaning as use, language-games, rule-following, and forms of life from Philosophical Grammar to Philosophical Investigations. The significance of the paper is that it offers a study of Wittgenstein’s moral thought positioned between traditionalist and resolute readings which offers the possibility of new avenues of dialogue with other moral philosophers.