Ethics as Grammar

Changing the Postmodern Subject

Brad J. Kallenberg

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Jahr: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780268159696
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias—linguistic puzzles—as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein's method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas's thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Kallenberg argues that Wittgenstein's pedagogical strategy cultivates certain skills of judgment in his readers by making them struggle to move past the aporias and acquire the fluency of language's deeper grammar. Theologians, says Kallenberg, are well suited to this task of "going on" because the gift of Christianity supplies them with the requisite resources for reading Wittgenstein. Kallenberg uses Hauerwas to make this case—showing that Wittgenstein's aporetic philosophy has engaged Hauerwas in a lifelong conversation that has cured him of many philosophical confusions. Yet, because Hauerwas comes to the conversation as a Christian believer, he is able to surmount Wittgenstein's aporias with the assistance of theological convictions that he possesses through grace.

Ethics as Grammar reveals that Wittgenstein's intention to cultivate concrete skill in real people was akin to Aristotle's emphasis on the close relationship of practical reason and ethics. In this thought-provoking book, Kallenberg demonstrates that Wittgenstein does more than simply offer a vantage point for reassessing Aristotle, he paves the way for ethics to become a distinctively Christian discipline, as exemplified by Stanley Hauerwas.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Personal correspondence, 25 March 1998.

2. See Nancey Murphy and Brad J. Kallenberg, “Anglo-American Postmodern Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

3. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

4. Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

5. PI, p. 227e.

6. “Yes, I have reached a real resting place. And I know that my method is right.” M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 125.

7. See, for example, the works of D. Z. Phillips such as Interventions in Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992) or Wittgenstein and Religion (London, UK: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

8. See CV [1931], 11e, [1950], 86e.

9. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 165-16.

10. Words of Wittgenstein’s former student, G. E. M. Anscombe, cited in Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 32.

11. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1967), 97.

12. For robust theology in this vein, see Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986).

13. CV [1931], 18e.

14. Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversatios Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 118.

15. RFM §116, pp. 80-81.

16. Z §455.

17. PR, p. 319.

18. OC §475.

19. OC §478.

20. Cf. PI §96.

21. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), xxi.

22. “Situation Ethics, Moral Notions, and Moral Theology,” in Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers, 1974; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 29.

23. WL, 21.

24. This term is Wallace Matson’s. See A New History of Philosophy, 2 Vols. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 2:275f.

CHAPTER ONE WORKING ON ONESELF

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).

2. Wittgenstein’s life and thinking is typically divided into two periods. The early period culminates in the publication of the Tractatus in the early 1920s. His later period begins with his return to philosophy nearly a decade later, in 1929, and ends with his death in 1951.

3. Lars Hertzberg, “Primitive Reactions-Logic or Anthropology?” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 17 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 24.

4. Bernard Williams, “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” in Understanding Wittgenstein, ed. Godfrey Vesey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 76-95; Norman Malcolm, “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” in Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays 1978–1989, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 87–108.

5. James C. Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Tampa, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1982); Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein.

6. Perhaps only those who undergo a similar conceptual transformation as Wittgenstein can thereby overcome that which makes his realism-without-empiricism seem so elusive at the outset of the journey.

7. See NB 2.9.16, p. 82.

8. D. Z. Phillips, “The World and ‘I’,” Philosophical Investigations 18, no. 3 (1995): 237.

9. PR, §§57–58. For a helpful exegesis of this passage see David G. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79-87.

10. TLP 5.47, 3.315.

11. The one notable exception to this pattern is 5.6; but there Wittgenstein uses “my” in a specially restricted sense; in no way does it refer to L. W., but rather, to the generic metaphysical subject.

12. Cited in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 271.

13. TLP 5.6, 4.12.

14. TLP, preface, p. 27.

15. TLP 6.45.

16. See TLP, 6.53, 6.54. Gottlob Frege was the first to differentiate between sense and reference. However, Frege all but ignored the significance of this distinction when he anchored meaning primarily to reference. Similarly, the early Wittgenstein played down the distinction and regarded reference as the ultimate ground of meaning. Wittgenstein’s logical atomism was the view that the sense of every significant proposition must terminate in some combination of simple objects lest propositions have no determinate meaning at all. This was not so much proved by his logical atomism as it was the presupposition of it. See Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, 53–60.

17. TLP 3.31, 4.023, also N, 14.10.20, p. 16.

18. It is important to note that Wittgenstein did not consider mere lack of reference to be that which makes a sentence senseless, as the logical positivists (e.g., Ayer) did. Rather, both “p” and “~p” derive their opposing senses from the same source. What gives a proposition its sense is its correspondence to logical space, which is the range of all possible arrangements of simple objects (TLP 4.0621). Thus, some particular complex named by p may be logically possible but, in fact, nonexistent. In this case p is not nonsensical but simply false (TLP 3.24). A senseless proposition, on this view, is a proposition that attempts to describe a nonexistent simple or something lying outside logical space.

19. TLP 6.54 reads “dann sieht er die Welt rightig.” Here “sehen” can only be taken to refer to the attitude of the transcendental will toward the world sub specie aeternitatis.

20. Phaedrus, lines 277–278. Citations from Phaedrus and The Seventh and Eighth Letters, translated with introductions by Walter Hamilton (New York: Viking Penguin, 1973), 101.

21. Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 38.

22. Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” 38.

23. Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” 38–39.

24. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, 1975).

25. Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” 40.

26. Emphasis added.

27. LW-BR, 19.8.19, in Brian McGuinness and Georg Henrik von Wright, eds., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 124.

28. Michael Dummett, “Frege, Gottlob,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing and The Free Press, and London, UK: Collier Macmillan Publishing, 1968), 225–237.

29. Cited in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 175.

30. [D]ann sieht er die Welt richtig; TLP 6.54.

31. Z §457.

32. Lawrence M. Hinman, “Philosophy and Style,” Monist 63 (1980): 523.

33. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 174–180.

34. The only footnote Wittgenstein made in the Tractatus appears at the bottom of the first page of text and contains these sober words: “The decimal figures as numbers of the separate propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the emphasis laid upon them in my exposition.”

35. “The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it.” Letter to Ficker, cited in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 177.

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