1
Ladies & Gentlemen. Before I begin to speak about my subject proper let me make a few introductory remarks. I feel I still have great difficulties in communicating my thoughts to you & I think some of them may be diminished by mentioning them to you beforehand. The first one, which almost I needn't mention, is, that English is not my native tongue & my expression therefore often lacks that precision & subtlety 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 etc. The second difficulty which 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 & my second 2 thought was that if I should ||
was to have an || the opportunity to speak
to you I should speak about
something which I am keen on communicating to you & that I should
not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say,
logic.
I say I call this a misuse for to explain a scientific matter to you it
would want || need a course of
lectures & 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, & to gratify what I
believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people,
namely the superficial curiosity about the latest
discovery || discoveries
in || of science.
I rejected these alternatives & decided to talk to you about
a subject which seems to me to be of general importance, hoping that
this || it may help to clear up your thoughts
about this subject (even if you should entirely disagree with
what I will say about it).
My third & last difficulty is one which, in fact, adheres
to most lengthy philosophical lectures & it is this, that the
hearer is incapable of seeing both the
way || road he is lead & the
3 goal which it leads
to.
That's 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 & to
hope that in the end you may see both the road ||
way & where it leads to. –
I will now begin.
My subject, as you know, is Ethics & 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'm 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 terms || expressions each of
which could be substituted for Prof.
Moore's || the
above definition, & by enumerating them I want to produce
the same sort of effect which
Galton
produced when he took a number
of photos of different
4 faces on the same photographic plate
in order to get the picture of the typical features they all
had in common.
And as by shewing 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
place || put before you, you will, I
hope, be able to see the characteristic
features they all have in common &
these are the characteristic features of
Ethics.
Now instead of saying Ethics is the enquiry into what is
good I could have said it is ||
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 what is the right
life || 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
& the ethical or absolute sense on the other.
If for instance
5 I say that this is a good chair
this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose
& 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.
So || Thus when we say that this man is
a good pianist we mean that he can play
pieces of a certain degree of difficulty
in a certain degreeable || with a certain degree of
dexterity.
And similarly if I say that it's important for me
not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold
produces certain describable disturbances in my life & 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 & one of you saw me playing
& said „well you play pretty badly ” &
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 || is || would be „Ah then
that's all right”.
But suppose I had told one of you
6 a preposterous lie & he came up to me
& said „You're behaving like a beast”
& then I were to say „I know I behave badly, but
then I don't want to behave any better”.
Would then the man || 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 judgement of value, whereas the first instance
was one of a relative judgment.
The essence of this difference seems to me to be obviously
this:
Every judgment of relative value
is a mere statement of facts & 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 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, & so forth.
Now what I wish to contend is, that although all judgments of relative
value can be shewn to be mere statements of facts, no
statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute
value.
Let me explain this: 7
Suppose one of you were an omniscient person
& therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world
dead or alive & 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 &
all true scientific propositions & in fact all true propositions
that can be made.
But all the facts described in this world would, as it were,
stand on the same level & 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 & 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 8 & 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 & psychological
the mere description of these facts will contain nothing
which we could call an ethical judgment ||
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, & 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, & above all other
subject matters. 9
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 & sense, natural meaning & sense.
Ethics, if it is anything, is
super natural & our words will only
express facts; as a teacup will hold only || only hold a teacup
full of water & if I were to pour out a gallon over it. –
I said that so far as facts & propositions are concerned
there is only relative value & 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 & 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 ||
of not going.
And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of
affairs would be one which everybody,
10 independent of his
tastes and inclinations, would,
necessarily, bring about or be ashamed || 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 do || have all of us who, like myself,
are still tempted to use such expressions as „absolute
good”, „absolute value”
etc., what have we
then in mind & 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 & 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 about
pleasure would become concrete &, as it
were,
controllable.
One man would perhaps choose as his stock example the sensation
when walking || 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
11 experience presents itself to me which
therefore is, in a sense, my experience par
excellence & this is the reason why, in talking to
you now, I will use this experience as my first & foremost
example.
(As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter
& others would find other examples more
striking.)
I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you
recall to your the same or similar
experiences, so that we may have a common ground for
our investigation.
The || I
believe the best way of describing it || this
experience || 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 an other experience straight away which I
also know & 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, because || 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
12 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 & 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
ordinary || 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 & 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 & hasn't visited it for a long time & 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 up into the blue
sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when
it's clouded.
But
13 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 can't be run
over by an omnibus.
I am safe if I have had whooping cough &
can't therefore get it again.
To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain
things should happen to me, & 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 through all ethical & 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 if || when
14 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 analogy ||
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
connection || analogy.
Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes, or
allegorically.
For when we speak of God & that he
sees everything & when we kneel &
pray to him all our terms & actions seem to be parts of a great
& elaborate allegory which represents him as a human
being of great power whose grace we try to win etc.
etc.
But this simile || allegory also
extends to || over the description
of || describes the experiences 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; & 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 &
again this was described by the phrase that
God disapproves of our
conduct.
Thus in ethical & religious language we seem
15 constantly to be using similes.
But a simile must be the simile for
something.
And if I can express || describe a fact by means
of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile & to
express || describe the facts without it.
Now in this || our case as soon as we try to
drop the simile & simply to state the
facts behind it || 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 some more || 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 & there, lasted a certain definite
time & 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.
And I will make my point still more acute by saying „it is the
paradox that an experience, a fact, 16
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 & 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 have never
yet seen.
Now suppose such an event happened.
Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a
lion's head & began roaring || to roar.
Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I
can imagine.
Now whenever we would || should have
recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to
fetch a doctor & have the case
scientifically investigated & 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 would
have || 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 shews that it is absurd to say then „science has
proved that 17 there are no
miracles”.
No, || 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 again we have been using the word
„miracle” in a relative & 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 to be aware of this
miracle at some times & 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 & 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 & importance, this simply 18 shews 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 & 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 & 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 or explanation 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
& that is to say beyond significant language.
My whole tendency & 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
19 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
& I would not for my life ridicule it.
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