Ludwig Wittgenstein - Lecture on Ethics

This edition first published 2014

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Cover image: First page of Wittgenstein MS 139a. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

This volume is possible because of an understanding reached with Trinity College, Cambridge. The reproductions of MS 139a, MS 139b, and TS 207 are included by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. We thank David McKitterick and Jonathan Smith of Trinity College, Cambridge, for granting the rights to reproduce facsimiles of the manuscripts. We are grateful also to the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, for permitting Valentina Di Lascio extended access to the collection of Wittgensteins manuscripts and for producing facsimiles of MS 139a and TS 207. We also thank the sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, for producing a digital replica of page 1 of MS 139b. We thank the Leverhulme Trust and the Mairie de Paris for having supported Valentina Di Lascios research, respectively, in the academic years 2009/10, 2010/11, 2011/12, and 2012/13. We must also thank Anat Biletzki, Francesco Borghesi, Walter Cavini, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Simonetta Nannini, and David Stern for their support for this project and for commenting on earlier drafts of . Notwithstanding the generous assistance rendered to us by the above, any errors or shortcomings remain solely our responsibility.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein delivered a lecture on ethics in Cambridge on November 17, 1929. Wittgenstein was forty years old and recently returned to Cambridge and academic philosophy after more than a decade away. The audience was a group called The Heretics who were not academic philosophers. The group was established to promote discussion of problems of religion and philosophy. Past speakers to The Heretics had included Virginia Woolf and past members included Wittgensteins dear friend David Pinsent who had died in the First World War. Wittgenstein was invited to speak by C.K. Ogden, a co-founder of The Heretics, who had been central in the publishing of Wittgensteins book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. The content of Wittgensteins lecture survives in the drafts he prepared for the lecture. (The drafts are found in of this volume.)
   The Lecture on Ethics, as it is now known, is a unique work in Wittgensteins philosophical output. It is the sole lecture he delivered to a general, non-philosophical audience. It is the sole work Wittgenstein prepared exclusively about ethics. It is the sole lecture for which several complete drafts have survived. The four drafts of the lecture posited in this volume suggest Wittgenstein spoke directly from his prepared text, against his usual practice. All of these qualities give the lecture a special importance.
2. Ethics, being the Lectures subject, is its most important aspect in the context of Wittgensteins philosophical work. The Lecture is a sustained, written treatment of ethics, prepared for an audience. In the rest of his work, Wittgenstein wrote very little about ethics and almost none of it for an audience. Scattered throughout his philosophy working papers are short remarks about ethics, but none is even a page long; none constitutes a sustained train of thought. Simply by the quantity of content, Wittgensteins Lecture is a major part of Wittgensteins writing on ethics.
   The singular philosophical importance of the Lecture derives from its being a considered train of thought that is a statement regarding ethics. It is not a personal note that records a moment of insight or a meditation. (Many of Wittgensteins diary entries concerning ethics were written in a code to prevent them from being easily read by anyone but Wittgenstein.) Rather, as Wittgenstein conceived the lecture, he intended to communicate to his audience as one human being speaking to other human beings. By this we can understand that he meant to make himself available personally to the audience without deference to his philosophical achievements or academic status. On the above basis, the Lecture has a good claim to being the most important work on ethics in Wittgensteins body of work.
3. If it is accepted that the lecture is important for documenting Wittgensteins view of ethics, one could nonetheless speculate that ethics was not of much importance to Wittgenstein since he wrote so little about it compared to other philosophical topics. This speculative conclusion is not at all credible. The conduct of Wittgensteins life, his correspondence, and the testimony of his friends and students all confirm that ethical concerns were of the utmost importance in Wittgensteins life. Wittgensteins diaries document his sometimes tortuous struggle to live up to his own high ethical standards. His friends recall his preoccupation with, above all else, being honest about the conduct of ones life. Neither was Wittgenstein reluctant to talk about ethical matters with his friends and fellows.
   In despite of the undeniable importance that ethics had for Wittgenstein, it is striking that his philosophical work contains so little about ethics. One suggestion for this apparent contrast is that for Wittgenstein, philosophy itself was a kind of ethical endeavor. Indeed Wittgenstein advertised the manuscript of the