Reza Mosmer
Abstract
In the Notebooks and final pages of the Tractatus Wittgenstein identifies “good” with “happy”, and the latter with “being in harmony with the world”. He makes a distinction between two notions of self: Empirical and Transcendental. While the former stands in causal ...
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In the Notebooks and final pages of the Tractatus Wittgenstein identifies “good” with “happy”, and the latter with “being in harmony with the world”. He makes a distinction between two notions of self: Empirical and Transcendental. While the former stands in causal connection with the World, the latter is causally independent of the world. The subject matter of ethics, Wittgenstein claims, is not actions of the self, but its attitudes (of approval or disapproval) towards the world. Moreover, he argues that it is merely the attitude of the transcendental self and its state of “Willing” that can be judged from an ethical point of view. In this paper, I will argue that this account of ethics faces a formidable difficulty: to be a legitimate subject matter of ethics, the self ought to be transcendental and at the same time have some attitude (acceptance or disapproval) towards the world. I argue that the transcendental subject cannot meet both requirements. Finally, I use Backström (2018) and McGuinness (2002), as examples, to explain how this difficulty has led to misreadings of Wittgenstein’s account of ethics in the Tractatus.
