Wittgenstein – Lecture on Ethics
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Ludwig Wittgenstein - Lecture on Ethics
Delivered in November 1929 to the Heretics Society, Cambridge University
My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor
Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is
good." Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which
includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics.
And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put
before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted
for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which
Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic
plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by showing
to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical—say—Chinese face; so if
you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see
the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of
Ethics.
Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is the
enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the
enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of
living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics
is concerned with.
Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used
in absolute sense on the other. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair
serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this
purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means
coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist
we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity.
And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold
produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean
that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.
Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how
Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said
"Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't
want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But
suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving
like a beast" and thenI were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any
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better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought
to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance
was one of relative judgment.
The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a
mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a
judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well
have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest
time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a
certain number of minutes, etc.
Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be
mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.
Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the
movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind
of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then
this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this
book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would
logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all
true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts
described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on
the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or
trivial.
Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What
Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are
attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a
fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.
If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical
and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an
ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance
the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of description might cause us pain or rage or any other
emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they
have heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.
And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a
science, this result seems tome quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever
think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of
which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my
feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on
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Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words
used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and
sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only
express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon
over it.
I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative
good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right
road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that
there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us
see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be
the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for
not going.
And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which
everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty
for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs
has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.
Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as 'absolute
good,' 'absolute value,' etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to express? Now whenever I
try to make this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would certainly use
these expressions and I am then in the situation in which you would be if, for instance, I were to
give you a lecture on the psychology of pleasure. What you would do then would be to try and
recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. For, bearing this situation in mind,
all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. One man would
perhaps choose as stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer's day. Now in
this situation I am, if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value.
And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to
me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in
talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. (As I have said
before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.) I
will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar
experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation.
I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the
world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist'
or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.'
I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might
be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the
state of mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'
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Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to
get clear about. And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give
to these experiences is nonsense!
If I say 'I wonder at the existence of the world' I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has
a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all
understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I
have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In
every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I
wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary
size, at which I should not wonder. To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only
sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.
In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it
for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense
to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.
I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience
while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when
it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might
be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not
blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
Now the same applies to the other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute
safety. We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot
be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it
again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should
happen to me and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again this is a
misuse of the word 'safe' as the other example was of a misuse of the word 'existence' or
'wondering.'
Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all
ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. Thus
it seems that when we are using the word right in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not
right in its trivial sense, it's something similar, and when we say 'This is a good fellow,' although
the word good here doesn't mean what it means in the sentence 'This is a good football player'
there seems to be some similarity. And when we say 'This man's life was valuable' we don't mean
it in the same sense in which we would speak of some valuable jewellery but there seems to be
some sort of analogy.
Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or allegorically. For when we
speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and
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actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being
of great power whose grace we try to win etc.
But this allegory also describes the experience which I have just referred to. For the first of them
is, I believe, exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world;
and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of
God. Third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the
phrase that God disapproves of our conduct.
Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must
be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to
drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the
simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And
so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.
Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to
those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute
value. But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and
there, lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable. And so from what I have said
some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute value. And I will make
my point still more acute by saying 'It is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to
have supernatural value.'
Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this paradox. Let me first consider, again,
our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly
different way; we all know the like of which we have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event
happened. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar. Certainly
that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered
from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically
investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the
miracle have got to?
For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless
what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again
means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows
that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.'
The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For
imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For
we see now that we have been using describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the
world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.
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Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of
the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what
then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have
said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the
expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we
want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.
Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain
experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical
value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all
what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that
all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we
mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see
clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to
describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that
anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance.
That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not
yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I
wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant
language. 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. Ethics so far as it
springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the
absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. 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.
Text prepared by Robert Charleston 10th
October 2002