Philosophy as a Way out of Life: Wittgenstein’s Mystical Ethics

One might hope that one can answer Kant’s questions “What should I do?” and “What can I hope for?” by reading a great deal of philosophy books. In this paper I will consider the opposite approach, beginning with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s suggestion 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” (“Lecture on Ethics” 40) A final word written about the good would destroy our life as we know it. For Wittgenstein, we see the ultimate things through a glass darkly, and the more we try to speak technically and specifically about what we see, the less we say and the less we can really do.  

Wittgenstein is unequivocal about the relationship between knowledge and the moral life. He writes, “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” (“Lecture on Ethics” 44). Living a good life is not a matter of having the right knowledge. And insofar as hope has anything to do with ultimate meaning or the absolute good, philosophical ethics (or any other body of knowledge) cannot render us hope. Indeed, Wittgenstein writes “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” ("Lecture on Ethics" 44). Of course, what he means here is that truly writing ethics is a task unaccomplishable, but I think we should read him more literally: that in all the books of ethics ever written, there is not a jot of hope. Hope is not that sort of thing. 

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein probes the grammar of hope. He asks: “Is hope a feeling?” (PI 545.) He doesn’t directly answer the question, but he does tell us that “believing is not thinking. (A grammatical remark.) The concepts of believing, expecting, hoping are less different in kind from one another than they are from the concept of thinking” (PI 574). Expecting, believing, and hoping are not species of thinking, neither are they species of knowing. (Maybe this seems over-obvious: hope is something we do in the absence of knowledge. I don’t hope for an outcome that I know is certain.) Of course, it is not as if they have nothing to do with knowing either. A little further in the book, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine him sitting and hoping that a certain man (“N. N.”) will bring him money. “Suppose one minute of this state could be isolated, cut out of its context; would what happened in it then not be hoping? –Think, for example, of the words which you may utter in this time. They are no longer part of this language. And in different surroundings the institution of money doesn’t exist either” (PI 584). The lesson is simple: hope is nothing unto itself; there is no hope absent an object of hope, absent the entire context that that hope inhabits. So, for Wittgenstein to hope for N. N. to come, he must know that N. N. exists, he must know what money is, he must be able to recognize N. N., etc.

This analysis of hope suggests that the Kantian question “What can I hope for?” is empty. There is no general hope, there are only the innumerable contexts in which we hope. Wittgenstein would suggest that the philosophical search for hope can only be paralyzing, can only keep us from action.  As the philosopher Stanley Cavell interprets Wittgenstein, “The point is not that you sometimes cannot say (or think) what is the case, but that to say (or think) something is the case you must say or think it, and “saying that” (or “thinking that”) has its conditions. The philosopher feels that he must say and think beyond these conditions; he wants to speak without the commitments speech exacts” (Claim of Reason 215). The philosopher wants to discover hope and its conditions in general, that is to say: they want to speak about hope's conditions as if that speaking itself lacked conditions. 

All of this might seem like despair. If Wittgenstein is right, we can’t reason our way to right or hopeful action. But this failure of reason, of knowledge, should itself give us hope. At the end of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer… The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not say wherein this sense consisted?)” (6.521-6.522). The problems of life (that is, the sort of problems that prompt us to hope or despair) are not problems that we can touch with knowledge. Learning that knowledge cannot help us here is the best answer we have. Abandoning our hope for hopeful knowledge frees us for authentic hope. 

This paper will mine Wittgenstein’s critiques of philosophy and especially philosophical ethics for a path to a life in which hope is a genuine possibility. Famously, Wittgenstein asserts that the aim of his writing is “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI 309) I will suggest that one of the most important ways in which he does that is to free us from the hope that philosophy (or any knowledge, for that fact) will save us.