Ethics After Wittgenstein
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Ethics a!er Wittgenstein Contemplation and Critique Edited by Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Richard Amesbury, Hartmut von Sass and Contributors 2021 Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Extreme-Photographer/iStock All rights reserved. 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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8714-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8715-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-8716-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents Preface vi Introduction: Doing Ethics a!er Wittgenstein Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass 1 Part One Ethics and Wittgenstein 1 Ethics as We Talk It Lars Hertzberg 13 2 Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Fieldwork in Philosophy Nora Hämäläinen 28 3 "e Texture of Importance: Ethics a!er Cavell and Diamond Sandra Laugier 50 Part Two Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Metaethics 4 "ree Wittgensteinian Interventions in Current Metaethical Debates Julia Hermann 75 5 Wittgensteinian Anti-Anti-Realism: One “Anti” Too Many? Hans-Johann Glock 99 6 Wittgenstein and Moral Realism: "e Debate Continues Sabina Lovibond 128 7 Does It Pay to Be Good? On D. Z. Phillips Having a "eory about Not Having a "eory in Ethics Hartmut von Sass 147 Part "ree A!er Wittgenstein 8 “A Certain Purity of Attention to the World”: "e Ethical Demands of Wittgensteinian Philosophizing Mikel Burley 173 9 Wittgenstein and Political "eology: Law, Decision, and the Self Richard Amesbury 194 10 Wittgenstein Does Critical "eory Alice Crary 214 Notes on Contributors 249 Index 251 3 !e Texture of Importance Ethics a"er Cavell and Diamond Sandra Laugier An essential essay by Cora Diamond is called “!e Importance of Being Human,” and this is also the title I chose for a small collection of her writings on moral philosophy in French.1 Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond have refocused moral re#ection or shi"ed it toward the question of importance, of what matters. !e subversive force of this approach to ethics has appeared to me over the years, while I was teaching—and translating into French— Diamond’s and Cavell’s works. It is of course in Wittgenstein (and Austin for Cavell) that these principles are rooted, but Diamond’s and Cavell’s readings of these texts, what they do a!er Wittgenstein, had a deeply liberating e$ect, toward a rede%nition of ethics, and moral life, as refocused on our ordinary lives. It has also helped me (and so many others) to explore and determine what matters to me (to them). Understanding what importance is, and that philosophy is about the recounting of importance, helps one understand what Wittgensteinian ethics is about. What does it mean to refocus moral re#ection toward the question of what matters? How does it matter? For me, speaking of “Ethics a"er Wittgenstein” means simply the new acknowledgment of importance that Cavell and Diamond achieved a"er Wittgenstein. My aim in this chapter is to present the transformative power of this perspective. 1 Ordinary Concepts Let’s start with Cavell. Stanley Cavell’s work is—among many other things—a rede%nition of ethics: it transforms our view of the way ethics and knowledge !e Texture of Importance 51 bear on our ordinary lives. Cavell’s teaching on %lm—in the way he draws our attention to gestures, particulars, details of our ordinary lives—is the basis of such a transformation of ethics and a di$erent approach to morals. !is is an ethics of perception and sensitivity, and an ethics of importance. I will de%ne this approach by the idea, expressed in the title of Chapter 3 of Pursuits of Happiness, “!e Importance of Importance.” !e expression comes from Austin: What, %nally, is the importance of all this about pretending? I will answer this shortly, although I am not sure importance is important: truth is.2 Austin is, as we all know, Cavell’s %rst master, and also a very strong and lasting in#uence as appears in recent texts like “Performative and Passionate Utterances.” My point here is that Austin’s presence (importance) in Cavell’s work is connected to this transformation of ethics and that such a transformation of ethics is a new understanding, or reinstatement, of importance. I haven’t been able to %nd in Cavell’s Chapter 3 of Pursuits of Happiness, “!e Importance of Importance,” an explicit reference, or treatment of, Austin’s idea of the importance (or nonimportance) of importance. !e chapter as a whole is about importance, and Cavell reads as a crucial moment of the 1940 movie Philadelphia Story the declaration of the infamous publicist Sidney Kidd about the event of the wedding as being of “national importance.” !e whole movie, and its narrative, may be seen as an acknowledgment of what the actual importance of this wedding is: what is happening at the end (what you see on Kidd’s picture, the remarriage) is what is “of national importance.” It could mean for example that they understand their marriage as exemplifying or symbolizing their society at large, quite as of they were its royalty, and their society as itself embarked on some adventure. George is confusedly thinking something more or less like this when he declares towards the end that his and Tracy’s marriage will be “of national importance.”3 It takes a whole movie, and sometimes many years, to get a clear idea of what is important, and to %nd the right application of the concept: and %nding the right application of the concept of importance would, then, be understanding what is important to you—what are the important turns, or moments, or movies, in your life, or what you care about. Finding the right application of the concept of importance would be understanding “the importance of importance.” “Importance” is an important word for Dexter and throughout the film.4 It is an important word for Cavell, as is shown by the strategic reappearance 52 Ethics a!er Wittgenstein of the motif of importance in Cities of Words. First about The Philadelphia Story: Importance is an important word for Tracy’s former (and future) husband C. K. Dexter Haven, who applies it, to Tracy’s chagrin, to the night she got drunk and danced naked on the roof of the house—it is her saying impatiently to him that he attached too much importance to that silly escapade that prompts him to say to her, “it was immensely important.”5 But we shouldn’t understand the chapter, and Cavell’s treatment of what importance is, as a rebuttal of Austin’s seemingly ironic sentence “I am not sure importance is important.” !e question is not: is importance or truth important? !e question is to understand—and it is one of Cavell’s greatest accomplishments to show—that truth and importance are one and the same, or that importance is just as important as truth, and just as demanding and precise a concept. Just as Austin says parenthetically in a passage of Truth, which is later quoted parenthetically by Cavell: To ask “Is the fact that S the true statement that S or that which it is true of?” may beget absurd answers. To take an analogy: although we may sensibly ask “do we ride the word ‘elephant’ or the animal?” and equally sensibly “Do we write the word and the animal?” it is nonsense to ask “Do we de"ne the word or the animal?” For de%ning an elephant (supposing we ever do this) is a compendious description of an operation involving both word and animal (do we focus the image or the battleship?) and so speaking about “the fact that” is a compendious way of speaking about a situation involving both words and world.6 Cavell comments on, or at least uses, this Austinian point in Pursuits of Happiness about the mutual expression of words and world: J. L. Austin was thinking about the internality of words and world to one another when he asked, parenthetically in his essay “Truth,” “do we focus the image or the battleship?”7 !e matter of importance is a matter of focusing, and %lm is a means to teach us how to focus, how to see %ne details, how to see what matters. Importance and truth are not separate things, but are both important: the two words de%ne the way my own experience matters (to myself and to the world), or counts.