Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Paul Smeyers
Can an ethical problem also be characterized as a philosophical problem, thus as a
problem that is of the nature "I don't know my way about"? Does it signify here "knowing
how to act", i.e. is one's commitment at stake? Is "seeing connections" in this context
"seeming what I ought to do", again thus about one's engagement? In an analogous way
one may think of justification-but then again, can being brought up in a particular
environment, say Soweto, Brixton, the Bronx or the jet set, serve as an alibi for whatever
one does? And this presses one again in the direction of the subject, how she is involved
in all of this. Can one accept on this level the analogon of Wittgenstein's saying that we
talk and utter words and only later get a picture of their use, along the lines of "Here is
what we do and by this I reach bedrock"? Surely, this is too simple: my attitude towards
him (says Wittgenstein, is the attitude towards a soul), will perhaps also evoke a
Strawsonian kind of responsiveness. What I do intimates furthermore what I am
prepared to live with. The fact is that in all these kind of considerations the empirical
occupies an important place. The emphasis on who we are (with the naturalistic
embeddedness that goes with it) is certainly one of Wittgenstein's tenets in his quest
against metaphysics. This is the seminal idea of rule following and all of its aspects that
go with it. But again a danger is looming, philosophy seems to suggest an unacceptable
acquiescence, a kind of resignation, an undesirable passivity. It seems to paralyse us, in
the realization of how little we can do, how powerless we are in the end. We can only
change ourselves. Can this answer satisfy us, or does it abandon all hope before the
battle has even begun? Why can no more be said?
3. Wittgenstein on philosophy and expressing oneself
The beginning of an answer may be found in looking more closely at how the subject is
embedded at the intersubjective level. The Philosophical Investigations share a
commitment to the value of freedom or autonomy, but less as the exercise of arbitrary
choice, than as the achievement of a way of being, in which resonances to nature and
artistic achievements and moral possibilities are taken seriously, even felt to be
unavoidable. Wittgenstein mocks the protagonist who is tempted by the promise of being
able to control one's performances in engaging with culture, thus making our concepts
and thoughts of the world as it is and thereby making the cultural performances that
seem to flow from them necessarily in order. On the contrary Wittgenstein holds that
each account is partial or one-sided: no formula or doctrine of the nature of
consciousness succeeds in controlling our performances in cultural practice and in
freeing us from anxiety. He focuses on the fitful, shifting presence of voluntariness, of
Willkür always only partially informed by Wille and never quite transparent, in what we
do. This description will acknowledge itself as a conceptual performance that enacts and
expresses these very wishes, anxieties, and efforts at expressiveness and self-
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