Before I begin to
speak about my subject proper let me make a few introductory
remarks.
I feel I shall have great difficulties in communicating my
thoughts to you and I think some of them may be diminished by mentioning
them to you beforehand.
The first one, which almost I need not mention, is, that English is not
my native tongue and my expression therefore often lacks that precision
and subtilty which would be desirable if one talks
about a difficult subject.
All I can do is to ask you to make my task easier by trying to get at
my meaning in spite of the faults which I will
constantly be committing against the English grammar.
The second difficulty I will mention is this, that probably many of you
come up to this lecture of mine with slightly wrong expectations.
And to set you right in this point I will say a few words about the
reason for choosing the subject I have chosen: When your
former secretary honoured me by asking me to read a paper to your
society, my first thought was that I would certainly do it and my second
thought was that if I was to have the opportunity to speak to you I
should speak about something which I am keen on communicating to you and
that I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about,
say, logic.
I call this a misuse for to explain a scientific matter to you it
would need a course of lectures and not an hour's paper.
An other alternative would have been to give you what's called a
popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you
believe that you understand a thing which actually you don't
understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires
of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest
discoveries of science.
I rejected these alternatives and decided to talk to you about a
subject which seems to me to be of general importance, hoping that it may
help to clear up your thoughts about this subject (even if you
should
2) entirely disagree with what I will say
about it).
My third and last difficulty is one which, in fact, adheres to most
lengthy philosophical lectures and it is this, that the hearer is
incapable of seeing both the road he is led and the goal which it leads
to.
That is to say: he either thinks: “I understand
all he says, but what on earth is he driving at” or else he
thinks “I see what he's driving at, but how on earth is
he going to get there”.
All I can do is again to ask you to be patient and to hope that in the
end you may see both the way and where it leads to. ‒ ‒ ‒
|
I will now begin.
My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the
explanation of that term which Prof. 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
3) 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 two very different senses.
I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand
and the ethical or 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 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 then I were to say “I know I behave
badly, but then I don't want to behave any 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 a relative judgment.
The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this:
Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of
4) 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, and so forth.
Now what I wish to contend is, that although all judgments of relative
value can be shown to be mere statements 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 of 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
5) 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 this 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 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 to me 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 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 put || 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,
6) 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 and 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 his 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”.
Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the
very characteristics we try to get clear about.
And there
7) 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 anyone 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's nonsense
to say that I am safe whatever happens.
Again this is a misuse of the word “safe” as
the other example was a misuse of the word
“existence” or
“wondering”.
Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of
our language runs
8) 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 jewelry 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
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. 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.
A 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 a 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
9) 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 here I have arrived at the main point of this paper: it is the paradox that an experience, a fact should seem to have absolute value.1
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 what in ordinary life would be
called a miracle.
It obviously is simply an event the like of which we yet never have || 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 the word
“miracle” in a relative and an absolute
sense.
And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of
the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a
miracle.
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
10) 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 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. |
1) Added from Ms-139b,15. The sentence seems to have been omitted when producing the typescript.
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