Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein (Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, 8) 3030980839, 9783030980832

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Nordic Wittgenstein Studies Series Editor: Niklas Forsberg

Salla Aldrin Salskov Ondřej Beran Nora Hämäläinen   Editors

Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein

Nordic Wittgenstein Studies Volume 8 Series Editor Niklas Forsberg, Centre for Ethics, Department of Philosophy,  University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic Editorial Board Members Sorin Bangu, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Martin Gustafsson, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Lars Hertzberg, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Kjell S. Johannessen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Oskari Kuusela, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Yrsa Neuman, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Bernt Österman, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Alois Pichler, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Simo Säätelä, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, University of South Denmark,  Odense, Denmark Thomas Wallgren, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Cato Wittusen, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway Advisory Editors Maija Aalto-Heinilä, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland Hanne Appelqvist, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Avner Baz, Tufts University, Medford, USA Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel Steen Brock, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway David Cockburn, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK James Conant, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA Cora Diamond, Professor Emeritus, Charlottesville, VA, USA Alberto Emiliani, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Juliet Floyd, Boston University, Boston, USA Gottfried Gabriel, Professor Emeritus, Jena, Germany Dinda L. Gorlée, The Hague, The Netherlands Herbert Hrachovec, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Allan Janik, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria James Klagge, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA Michael Kremer, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA Camilla Kronqvist, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland David Levy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Denis McManus, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Felix Mühlhölzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Jean Philippe Narboux, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France Joachim  Schulte, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK Stephen Mulhall, Oxford, UK Antonia Soulez, Paris, France David G. Stern, University of Iowa, Iowa, USA Nuno Venturinha, Lisbon, Portugal David E. Wellbery, Chicago, USA Edward Witherspoon, Colgate University, New York, USA

The series publishes high-quality studies of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work and philosophy. It is affiliated with The Nordic Wittgenstein Society, The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen and The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki. The series welcomes any first rank study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, biography or work, and contributions in the subject areas of philosophy and other human and social studies (including philology, linguistics, cognitive science and others) that draw upon Wittgenstein’s work. It also invites studies that demonstrate the philosophical relevance of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass as well as purely philological or literary studies of the Nachlass. Each submission to the series, if found eligible by the series editor, is peer reviewed by the editorial board and independent experts. The series accepts submissions in English of approximately 80 000  – 125 000 words. For further information (about how to submit a proposal, formatting etc.), please contact: [email protected] More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13863

Salla Aldrin Salskov • Ondřej Beran Nora Hämäläinen Editors

Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein

Editors Salla Aldrin Salskov Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland

Ondřej Beran University of Pardubice Pardubice, Czech Republic

Nora Hämäläinen University of Pardubice Pardubice, Czech Republic

ISSN 2520-1514     ISSN 2520-1522 (electronic) Nordic Wittgenstein Studies ISBN 978-3-030-98083-2    ISBN 978-3-030-98084-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The cover makes use of Wittgenstein Nachlass MS 115, page 118. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge and the University of Bergen have kindly permitted the use of this picture. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Ethical Inquiries After Wittgenstein: Introduction��������������������������������������    1 Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen Part I Grammatical Investigations “I Don’t Know”: Agency, Self-­Understanding and New Beginnings in Three Films by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 Martin Gustafsson  “Try to Be Loved & Not-Admired”: Lily Bart’s Moral Struggle����������������   49 Kamila Pacovská Mortal Longings����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Tony Milligan  the Difficulty of Speaking��������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 On Hugo Strandberg Animal Investigations��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 Anne Le Goff  Absolutely Personal: A Countercurrent in Moral Philosophy��������������������  105 Lars Hertzberg Part II Historical Investigations  Love in Teaching and Love of the World ������������������������������������������������������  125 Raimond Gaita  The On-the-Ground Radicality of Police and Prison Abolition: Acknowledgement, Seeing-as, and Ordinary Caring ����������������������������������  143 Naomi Scheman

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 Tea and Consent: Reflections on the Changing Grammar of a Moral Concept������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  157 Nora Hämäläinen  Debating Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Handling Moral Concerns More Gently��������������������������������������������������������  173 Pär Segerdahl “The Concept-Forming Words We Utter”: Extremism and the Formation of a Political “We” ��������������������������������������  189 Niklas Forsberg  What Is Changing and What Has Already Changed: Parenthood and Certainty in Moral Discourse ��������������������������������������������  205 Camilla Kronqvist  Chip Off the Old Block? Character, Transparency, A and the Ethics of Tattooing������������������������������������������������������������������������������  221 Michael Campbell  Want You to Act as If Our House Is on Fire. “I Because It Is”: Greta Thunberg, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Moral Change��������������������������������������������������������������  239 Ryan Manhire Conversational Machinations ������������������������������������������������������������������������  255 Ondřej Beran

Ethical Inquiries After Wittgenstein: Introduction Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen

This is a book collecting the contributions of authors attempting, each in their own way, to engage in an ethical inquiry in the wake of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. There are, however, many distinctive ways in which Wittgenstein has been inspiring and important for many people working in moral philosophy, and for some who aim at developing a moral theory. One such way is by trying to explore in some detail the ethical outlook of Wittgenstein’s works, with the same earnestness with which Kant’s or Aristotle’s ethics are still being studied and (re)interpreted. Admittedly, Wittgenstein does not offer much for his interpreters to chew on  – the literally occasional “Lecture on Ethics”, a few scattered passages from his war notebooks, some hints dropped towards the end of the Tractatus. His later works are even more elusive in this respect. An ethical dimension seems an integral part of the way in which he comments on the topics of religion, culture or history (in Culture and Value, Lectures and Conversations about Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief or the “philosophy of psychology” focus of some of his post-war work). Yet with the possible exception of the 1941 “A Lecture on Freedom of the Will”  – again, occasional  – he mostly avoids a direct engagement with ethical issues. That ethical issues were of great importance to him can be seen in the overview and recollection given by Rush Rhees in “Some Developments in Wittgenstein’s Views on Ethics” (Rhees 1965; cf. also Wittgenstein et  al. 2015). Yet in Wittgenstein’s notebooks, which form the basis of the posthumously edited publications of his work, he wrote down hardly anything of the observations recorded by Rhees. Some texts, such as S. Aldrin Salskov Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] O. Beran (*) · N. Hämäläinen University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_1

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those assembled in Crary and Read (2000), Gleeson (2002), Crary (2007) or AdamSegal and Dain (2017), aim at reconstructing Wittgenstein’s ethics, not simply out of historical curiosity but as a corrective that can be illuminating for current endeavours in moral theory. The focus, however, is chiefly retrospective/interpretive (on Wittgenstein). The light shed by Wittgenstein’s thinking can be fruitfully used for a dialogue on ethical questions with a disparate range of other thinkers; the contributions assembled in De Mesel and Thompson (De Mesel and Thompson 2015) thus engage, alongside Wittgenstein, philosophers including Aristotle, Bourdieu, Diamond, Hobbes, Hooker, Kant, Lévinas, Løgstrup, McDowell and Nietzsche. More often, though, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is characterised as analytical or language-oriented philosophy, and, in this capacity, he has sometimes been taken as its representative for entering into a dialogue – with (mostly) his continental counterparts – concerning philosophy, or philosophical method in general (for example, Gier 1984; Rentsch 2003; Thompson 2008). This kind of focus, stressing internal cohesion and taking language as the gateway, has parallels of different kinds in the attempts to frame Wittgenstein as an ethically relevant thinker, too. Thus, for instance, Iczkovits (2012) argues that Wittgenstein’s ethical view is integrated with his philosophy of language, or, perhaps, the lesson from his reading is that any attempt at tackling moral questions in a Wittgensteinian manner cannot but proceed within the confines of investigating questions of meaning. Somewhat analogously, Backström (2011) and Nykänen (2019) suggest that moral understanding lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and is a “submerged” theme throughout his writings, particularly in his later work. The present collection relies less on exegetical matters, a focus on Wittgenstein himself or the aim to settle the debate over whether Wittgenstein is relevant for ethics. Rather, it takes its point of departure in the midst of the rich tradition of writing about ethics in the wake of Wittgenstein from the 1960s onwards, engaging the pioneering work of Stanley Cavell, Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, D.  Z. Phillips, R.  F. Holland, Raimond Gaita, Cora Diamond and others. The Wittgensteinian inspiration in the writings of Rhees or Winch is indeed in line with their refusal to keep ethics in specific confines as a particular self-contained philosophical sub-­ discipline, and with a view of philosophy as unitary or integrated. However, these authors also refuse to find the key to this unity in narrowly construed “grammatical investigations” and in chasing after “linguistic confusions”. Rhees (1969) makes the notable point that the Wittgensteinian inspiration should not guide us towards reducing philosophy to searching in dictionaries, but towards considering more acutely what it means for humans to be beings whose lives are centrally organised around the fact that they speak. Our focus will be on the situated lives of speakers. In this ambition, our collection is not wholly without predecessors. See, for example Gustafsson et al. (2013), or, more recently, Kuusela and De Mesel (2018), who declare an analogous ambition and consider Wittgensteinian ethics to be an active, alive tradition that wants to tackle substantive ethical issues. We are, however, less interested in making comparisons with contemporary analytical ethics, and we place more emphasis on the investigation of particular, ethically laden cases. Like Amesbury and von Sass (2021, 2), we value the tradition for its capacity of “working in conversation with literature and film; engaging deeply with

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anthropology, critical theory, and political theory; and addressing contemporary problems and examples”. One central tenet shared by contributors to the present volume is that, despite some shared methodological views, the presented writings do not aim at demonstrating methodological principles, which would be then applied to particular cases selected with this ambition in view. Rather, we aim at a ground-up ethical reflection of cases as they present themselves for reflection with a sense of urgency. Instead of seeking theoretical closure in the form of a well-rounded normative philosophical “account” of ethics, or of philosophical methodology, we thus seek to illuminate ethical questions that might emerge in various areas of (social) practice that call for philosophical reflection. Philosophical reflection sometimes stops when it has made the point that we should pay attention to situated, contextualised practice. However, we aim at work that can, and should, be done after this point has been made, when we actually start paying attention. An additional benefit is in thereby getting a clearer idea of what it means to pay attention to the contextual (to practices, to situations, to particularity). The dominant approach embraced by this project is thus to try to spend considerably more time on examples and contexts than on methodological issues. It is with concrete ethical cases and issues in view that we can return to methodological questions in a fruitful and illuminating manner, as these are not separable. The range of examples discussed by the contributors to this volume is both wide and markedly contemporary, including sex education, pride and admiration, parenthood, the police and the Black Lives Matter movement, climate crisis, love, tattoos, the social life of primates or artificial intelligence. We believe that applying philosophical lessons learnt from Wittgenstein, as well as from those who helped establish the rich ethical conversation in his wake from the 1950s onward, means striving to make sense of topics of an independent contemporary interest (whether or not the core example of the discussion is in itself already “historical”). We also believe that this collection exhibits  – somewhat analogously to Wittgenstein’s (2009, §67) image of a thread – a certain unity of highlighting and relying on several motifs, such as the stress on particular examples or the heightened attention to the problematic status of the philosophical “we”. The following sections of this Introduction will examine a few of these motifs. We believe that they are important for understanding what it means to engage in ethical inquiries (after Wittgenstein) in a way that is alive to the world in which we live. Not all the authors highlight and rely on all these motifs, or do so to the same extent, but the strength of the picture presented consists exactly in “the overlapping of many fibres”.

1  Examples Ethical thinking inspired by Wittgenstein pays significant attention to particular cases and examples. Notably, it expresses a reluctance to move away from them towards a greater generality. Why this emphasis on examples? Can’t “actual topics”,

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“topical issues” or “contemporary questions” be discussed in generality and in abstract? They certainly can be. The reason for the reluctance is that a certain degree of generality can make our vision less than clear, perhaps cavalier. A generalising question would be, for instance: how can we or can we not act towards animals, or towards small children? One way of tackling such a question is to construct a normative argument based on a morally laden characteristic shared, universally, by all individuals falling under the description “animals” or “small children”. A Wittgensteinian approach questions the inclination to generalising perspectives as such, as “animals” and “children” here become figures of abstraction, and answering the question in general makes little sense with regards to moral questions that emerge in actual encounters with various animals or children. Instead, a case, or an example, of an encounter with an animal is explored, and its possible moral aspects investigated. This descriptive rather than normative exercise suggests that encounters with an animal  – such that we relate to an animal as to a fellow creature or companion  – may render certain ways of acting towards the animal unthinkable, incompatible with what the speaker understands as an “animal” or “living being”. (Such observations are offered by Cora Diamond’s classic paper “Eating Meat and Eating People” [Diamond 1978], in which she critically engages Peter Singer’s normative position, but not by way of offering an alternative normative account.) Talking about a particular example helps to see that certain ways of elaborating on it do not do justice to the example itself nor to what we take it to be about. There is a reason why, when writing about animals and animal ethics, Wittgensteinian thinkers often dwell on particular stories and narratives. In one of Rush Rhees’s most confusing and controversial (also posthumously published) texts, “The Death of a Dog” (Rhees 1999b), the author keeps revisiting, for years, the painful circumstances of the death of his dog, Danny, and his feelings of guilt, of having let Danny down. Personal recollections intermingle with philosophical reflections, both suggesting that the story is an example of the emotional complexity (entangledness) of the relationship with a companion animal. What this example, considered closely, seems to prevent, or make quite difficult, is the idea that grieving for an animal, as for a human being, is only intelligible as a confused, neurotic reaction. Dismissive general opinions about the possibility of a close relationship with an animal (perhaps because of its “objective” intellectual inequality) seem rendered misplaced by such examples. At the same time, it is a particular example, one that makes it natural to understand this particular case in terms such as “grief” while formulating no general opinion about what kinds of emotion are possible, present or commendable in any relationship with an animal. Examples, as Gustafsson (2005, 383) puts it, “are not proofs, but provocations”. An example urges one’s focus in a certain direction and discourages (or at least does not encourage) directing it elsewhere. Of course, Rhees’s diaries can be read as documenting the possibility of grieving over a dog only as a neurotic, twisted version of “normal” grief, yet such a reading would rather naturally invite criticisms (incommensurate with reading this as a story of grief), while a decontextualised suggestion “grieving over an animal can only be neurotic and derivative” might be

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reacted to in several, often noncommittal, ways (see Beran 2021a, chap. 2.3 on “closures”). The engagement with examples as a core form of philosophising is led by the intuition that the space for confused aspirations (of normative arguments, or others) would thereby be reduced. Philosophy certainly can occasionally talk about “nothing in particular”, but to the extent that it is a quest for understanding, it is a quest for understanding something, taking into account the terms in which we meet the phenomenon in question and in which we reflect on the way we become familiar with it. Yet, clearly, one can miss – sometimes spectacularly – what an example is about. We are thus dealing here with a different kind of understanding than the capacity to get what is said in sentences such as “Rome is the capital of Italy”, or to follow the instructions in a travel guide about how to get from the Forum Romanum to the Colosseum. These capacities are relatively low-threshold examples of linguistic competence. The former capacity – to get what an example is about – suggests that one dimension of our competence as speakers concerns a never-completed, lifelong task of understanding. This involves self-understanding and moral reflection, as being a speaker of a language involves, as Cavell (1988) reminds us, a self-­ sabotaging, self-undermining capacity to stop feeling at home in one’s language. Inherent to speaking is the possibility of spectacularly missing what an example is about, because it is something that lies in plain sight yet is hidden to some. Particular stories are perhaps more graphic than abstract arguments about “the same thing”, but can be misunderstood, too. A Wittgensteinian way of phrasing this would be to point to the central meaning of these examples as the matter of “imponderable evidence”, one that “is there”, but only someone who has an “eye” for it will spot it. The deficiency of this “eye” does not resemble a low-threshold linguistic incompetence, a failure to follow a mathematical rule, but concerns another kind of understanding, involving judgement and experience (Wittgenstein 2009, II, §355ff). Cavell (cf. 2010, 97) might say that it is a more complex and more opaque kind of meaning-blindness, as it concerns existential and moral matters, than the simple incapacity to see a duck in the duck-rabbit head. Cavell’s counter to duck-rabbit cases – the failure to notice that there are similarities between how animals are used in the meat industry and what was happening in concentration camps – is to suggest that such forms of meaning-blindness are cases of moral callousness or moral blindness (cf. Winch 1987, 166; or Gaita 2006a, Afterword). There are, of course, many kinds of examples and unfortunate ways of understanding them, without “unfortunate” necessarily connoting anything of a clearly moral nature. Most often, though, the examples that start a philosophical reflection or inquiry throw one into the midst of a life. A misunderstanding of a life may be innocent, but still, it misunderstands a life. An unremarkable story about one’s own parents’ passion for gardening can serve as an example of a social phenomenon characteristic of a class and generation in a country. Many of these people have lived their whole lives clinging to the short weekends spent in unremarkable country cottages growing unremarkable, sometimes unpalatable vegetables. A distinctive kind

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of social critique might picture this as an illustration of a certain narrow-­mindedness. There is, however, an important difference between inserting an insufficiently substantiated evaluative point into a sociological study and missing what the life of someone’s parents was like (even without really hurting anyone’s feelings). Both are errors in their own right, but trying to analyse what the latter kind of error is about in terms of what the former kind of error is about adds yet another kind of error. Starting a philosophical reflection from a particular example and, if possible, never losing sight of it motivates the philosopher also not to lose sight of the moral stakes involved by handling the question in a too cavalier manner. Wittgensteinian arguments against universalising a particular too eagerly (cf. Winch 1972a, b) are not motivated by the aim to propose an anti-Kantian epistemology but rather by the awareness of these moral stakes. This awareness also relates to approaching morality and moral questions as irreducibly personal (more about this in section 5). But there is also a more prosaic reason for giving priority to examples. More abstract genres of philosophical writing may strike us as unnecessarily, certainly unhelpfully and sometimes intolerably humourless, dry (in the sense of Iris Murdoch’s plea “Against Dryness” [Murdoch 1997a], though Murdoch, a novelist gifted with a strongly malicious sense of humour, does not mention humour in this philosophical essay). Life is sometimes tragic, and a philosophical lack of focus on the particular can fail to do justice to the tragedy, yet the tragic in life is not all that life is. Sometimes life is comical, unjust, difficult, enjoyable, and so on, and the philosophical lack of focus on the particular can miss that, too.

2  The “We” One of the recurring features of ethics after Wittgenstein, and also present in many of the essays in this book, is the use of a philosophical “we”, drawing the reader as if into a potentially involuntary community of observation and opinion. Prevalent in the work of Wittgenstein, and common also in (especially older) analytic philosophy for purposes of broaching (supposedly) shared intuitions, this practice tends to draw critical attention from readers in the humanities and social sciences, especially gender studies, postcolonial studies and other areas particularly sensitised to questions of exclusion and inclusion. For the social scientist, the philosophical “we” is contentiously unspecific, reeking of empirical sloppiness and an imperialism of privileged perspective. For instance, in the context of feminist criticism, Robyn Wiegman references the “we” as “that towering inferno of universalism” and “the master stroke of white-woman-speech” (2012, 13). However, the fact that some feminist uses of “we” have contributed to a politics of exclusion does not mean that the use of “we” in feminist thought must always entail exclusion. Speaking of what we do can just as well be genuinely open-ended. It might point to quite trivial points about our being language users; it might also propose more or less political visions

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of phantasmic collectives, the former not excluding anybody, the latter open to everybody. Who is the intended “we” of a given text? What are the assumptions of similarity between writer and reader on which it is premised? How does the “we” of a given text situate us as readers, and whom does it exclude? Can some version of the (philosophical) “we” be used as a tool, or a resource, for analysing and  avoiding its exclusionary uses? Such questions prompt us not only to explain the nature and purpose of this philosophical “we” but also to look at it critically. The solution for researchers in the social sciences, even when talking about communities of which they are a part, is to exchange any “we” for a more concrete specification of the social group intended, and to back up claims about a given practice with empirical evidence. Thus, the potential imperialism of the unspecified “we” is assuaged by empirical means. But the philosopher’s “we” is not empirical in this sense, as an attempt to research the habits of a distinctive social group. Neither is it meant to be normative. Its use, as we find it in the tradition of ethics after Wittgenstein, is not intended to involve assumptions about the reader or to postulate a community or collective. Stanley Cavell explicates this idea of the philosophical “we” in his early paper “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” (in Cavell 1976). The idea is that the “we” works as an open-ended invitation to look in a certain direction, to broach an area of potentially shared practice, often in order to get away from misleading theoretical preconceptions: The philosopher … turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against himself. He is saying: Look and find out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say. Of course he often seems to answer or beg his own question by posing it in the plural form: ‘We say …; We want to say …; We can imagine …; We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena, repair a spider’s web; We are under the illusion …; We are dazzled ...; The idea now absorbs us ...; We are dissatisfied.’ (Cavell 1976, 95–96, emphasis added)

But, Cavell emphasises, “this plural is still first person: it does not, to use Kant’s word ‘postulate’ that ‘we’, you and I and he, say and want and imagine and feel and suffer together. If we do not, then the philosopher’s remarks are irrelevant to us” (Cavell 1976, 96). It is thus a part of the game of this “we” that the power to deny the description of what we do is in the hands of the interlocutor, not as a denial of shared identity but as a denial of vision. The “we” is provisionally put together from the “you and I and he and she” who think about an issue together. There is thus (ideally) no place for philosophical imperialism here, although the philosopher may be insistent: Of course [the philosopher] doesn’t think [his remarks] are irrelevant, but the implication is that philosophy, like art, is, and should be, powerless to prove its relevance; and that says something about the kind of relevance it wishes to have. All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own. (Cavell 1976, 96)

The philosopher seeks to meet his interlocutor in a shared way of looking at the world: accounts of what “we do” are up for grabs, to be contested. The interlocutor

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is in turn free to be the philosopher, and to offer a differing description, to say what she sees as the salient thing going on in an area of shared life or a given case or example of it. The attention is to “ordinary language” and practice and the aim is to gain clarity, specificity or an overview, one that is open to discussion, negotiation and understanding between the partners in the conversation, rather than to produce one or the other kind of abstract theoretical account. However, this explanation of the practice suggests we should be cautious with uses of the “we” along the lines suggested by critics. Even when intended as an invitation, the philosophical “we” does not always work that way. A description of what “we” do may be discriminatory in ways invisible to the author; it may include built-in assumptions about gender, affluence, access, cultural background and bodily capacity that turn the invitation against its purpose. Instead of opening up a shared space, a tear in the social fabric is made visible and may widen if it is not properly acknowledged by the party who issues the invitation. In this respect, philosophical invitations to share an understanding are similar to our everyday invitations of this kind. If the premises of the invitation are experienced as biased and imperial by the interlocutor, the philosopher cannot hide behind the intention merely to project an invitation. Thus, Cavell’s account of the philosophical “we” should be seen as an explication of intentions pertaining to a given practice, but not as a potential recourse when that practice misfires. There are different ways of going on after the invitation, and some of them may involve stepping out of the philosophical comfort zone of largely armchair-ish conceptual elucidations.

3  Historical/Empirical Inquiries vs the “Grammatical” These reflections on the philosophical “we” take us a good step towards discussing the question of “grammatical” in contrast to empirical or historical investigations. The philosophical “we” as an invitation is at home in Wittgensteinian grammatical investigations, which are investigations into our “life in language” (Wittgenstein 1982, § 121), or “lives in language” as the phrase has also been turned by researchers in the field (e.g. Moi 2017, 44; Hämäläinen 2021, 42; Medina 2002, 185). Wittgenstein’s own investigations have sometimes been read as dealing primarily with language use, but “lives” should be given equal importance here. The question is how we live lives as the kinds of creatures we are, linguistic beings for whom language is a part of our nature, part of what structures and mediates our existence and togetherness. Thus, grammatical investigations into Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the work inspired by him are not only or even primarily investigations into language use, but into understanding in a wider sense. Here the notion of grammar is often used to illuminate structural features of human situations (as a kind of “phenomenology”, in a broad and informal sense, which is in line with some of Wittgenstein’s remarks equating grammar with phenomenology). In this sense, there is a grammar to shopping, to asking for and receiving directions, to asking for and granting forgiveness,

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to caring for an infant, to opening a meeting, to courting and being in a relationship, etc. Language has various roles in such dimensions of our lives, and thus attention to language plays an important role in investigating them. Wittgenstein thinks that philosophers, when engaging in theoretical endeavours, are prone to misunderstand quite ordinary practices and thus to produce oversimplified or outright wrongheaded accounts of them. But this tendency does not belong exclusively to the activities of philosophers: there are plenty of opportunities in everyday life, too, for theoretical misunderstandings of this kind. Concepts coming from theoretical/specialist contexts – “nation”, “climate”, “herd immunity” – enter everyday language all the time. The twists and turns in their everyday use provide an excellent opportunity for tracing misunderstandings, confusions or obfuscations of their true relation to their “home” life form, just as the metaphysical “craving for generality” in philosophy does. Grammatical investigations purport to “go back” and seek to describe practices so that our misunderstandings appear as what they are and we get a more nuanced picture of what goes on in the area (of language and life) we are inquiring into. “We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (Wittgenstein 2009, §107). In ethics, this means addressing moral philosophical puzzlements by exploring and describing moral meaning and understanding, often by using examples, and also often with the parallel polemical aim of showing how some theoretical rendering of moral life misses out on essential complexities in moral life. Anne-Marie Christensen compares two ways of understanding the Wittgensteinian notion of grammar and how it impinges on moral philosophy. The first way is found in the work of Peter Hacker, who sees the task of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as the revelation of a depth grammar [that] consists of logical grammar, the actual and use-dependent rules for constructing well-formed sentences (…) By describing the complicated networks of grammatical connections that establish the grammar of our language, grammatical investigations reveal a world of nuances and detail normally hidden behind ordinary grammatical categories. (Christensen 2020, 58).

The other notion of “depth grammar” is found in the work of Gordon Baker, who thinks that “‘depth grammar’ cannot be given a fixed, ‘once and for all’ description, because it concerns conditions of the construction of sentences that are liable to change with context” (ibid. 59). According to this latter view, there is no general depth grammar to be given, because any rendering of depth grammar “concerns a particular instance of the expressions described” (ibid.). Thus, the lack of “perspicuity” in philosophy, on this interpretation, is not a lack of comprehensive grammar but of sufficient attention to the various grammars of human situations. We do not share this preoccupation with grammar in the sense of “conditions of the construction of sentences”, but certain aspects of the difference between Hacker’s and Baker’s positions (as described here) are relevant for us, too. In elucidating her Wittgensteinian account of the study of ethics, Christensen opts for a variation on the latter approach, highlighting the mobility and contextuality of grammars, and the irreducible importance of attending to particulars. Yet the

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notion of grammar introduces a distinctive level and type of generality. Christensen indeed sees the elucidation of moral grammars as potentially a form of moral theory, answering to a certain degree to the theoretical values of “generality, abstractness, explicitness, a certain degree of simplicity and internal consistency” (2020, 65). Rhetorically, this can be considered a radical move within the tradition of ethics after Wittgenstein, but content-wise it is well in line with the work of moral philosophers in the tradition focalised by this book. Attention to cases (examples) works not only to dispel undue philosophical generalisations but also to draw our attention to structural features of our lives together: certainties, uncertainties, challenges, possibilities, limitations, opportunities for learning and for transcendence of the given. Thorough attention to particular cases resonates in our attention to other cases and our manner of approaching moral issues. The prominent descriptive element in philosophical work of this tradition has been the source of some controversy over method. Wittgenstein himself is adamant that his philosophical work is not empirical, and not hypothetical, but a description of practices that are our own and already open to view (2009, §109, §123–129). The things that interest him are, like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight, difficult to see because of their everydayness. Thus, we need to change our habits of philosophical attention in order to see them. In an early effort to counter misunderstandings on this account, Cavell stresses that the Wittgensteinian method of attending to how we speak is not a species of armchair linguistics, to be countered by empirical evidence to the effect that some people in fact do speak differently (and think and act differently) in relevantly similar situations (Cavell 1976, 4f). Analogously, philosophical explorations in ethics after Wittgenstein have traditionally followed this model of excluding empirical evidence concerning “our” practices, to the benefit of explorations that rely purely on “what is already before us”, accessible to us as speakers of a language and creatures sharing a form of moral life. Thus, the description of philosophical grammar is separated from and seen in contrast to, say, sociological, anthropological or historiographical inquiries into the ways we live, speak and act. (See, for example, Boncompagni 2015; Gaita 2005; Kuusela 2019.) For researchers influenced by Wittgenstein beyond the philosophical conversation, this idea of a sharp separation between the empirical and the conceptual has never had much relevance. Clifford Geertz’s anthropological emphasis on what he (drawing on Gilbert Ryle) calls “thick description” is informed by Wittgenstein’s attention to the complexities of meaning, while using tools of ethnography and historiography to understand what is going on in people’s lives (Geertz 1973, 12–13). A more contemporary example of Wittgensteinian influence in anthropology is found in the work of Veena Das (2020), whose work, despite being strongly influenced by Cavell, does not feature a sharp boundary between the grammatical/philosophical and the empirical, but instead is characterised by an intricate blending of ethnography and grammatical investigation. Attending to the “grammars” of ethical responsibilities and encounters in low-income neighbourhoods of Delhi, she probes philosophically resonant areas and registers of lived morality. For these thinkers,

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ethnography is a path, not just towards anthropological knowledge but also to philosophical insight into human possibilities. Of course, for both the result is recognisable as anthropology rather than philosophy, but such philosophically ambitious empirical work challenges the idea of philosophy as the prerogative of non-­empirical thinkers. For philosophers, the wedge between the empirical and the conceptual has been a way of claiming a distinctively philosophical niche, both against empirical research and against other traditions of philosophical work. Without doubt there are also features that differentiate the Wittgensteinian philosophers’ various “grammatical” investigations from more empirical and “third-person” attempts at elucidating the grammars of human societies and situations, and the insistence on this distinction has been a way of seeking to mark such differences. But there are a growing number of Wittgensteinian philosophers who (explicitly or implicitly) question the exclusion of empirical input in moral philosophy (Hämäläinen 2016, 2021; Beran 2021b). Especially in areas where moral sensibilities are undergoing changes, such as gender issues and our relation to animals, the environment and disruptive technologies, the “method” of getting a perspicuous presentation of what is already open to view seems highly limited at best. The ongoing emergence of new empirical knowledge – on biology, ecology, social conditions and social experience, among other things – is an integral part of “ordinary” moral lives, and thus the formula of grammatical not empirical becomes increasingly hard to apply without falling into a parochialism that is not representative of our evolving moral reflection. Such areas of life call for a world-open approach, in which conceptual elucidation, empirical and historical input, and self-reflection all have their place. The return to “the rough ground” is here as much a matter of acknowledgement of new knowledge and differences, and of the negotiation of new communalities, as it is of presenting things already there and “open to view”. More than half of the essays in this book open up in the direction of change and renegotiation, and in many of these the contrast between grammatical and empirical breaks down, and historical and social-­ scientific input is used as a source of philosophical understanding and self-understanding.

4  Relativism Wittgensteinian ethics traditionally eschews universalist attempts at providing philosophical grounding for supposed normative truths. It also emphasises human singularity, the particularity of situations and the first-person perspective (Winch 1972a, b; Phillips 1992, 1999; Gaita 2006a), and its reliance on the study of contingent “grammars” may seem to undermine the possibility of universal moral truths. For these reasons, Wittgensteinian moral philosophers have sometimes been accused of being relativist or insufficiently interested in the rational elucidation of morality in exchanges with philosophers such as Onora O’Neill (1980, 1986) and

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Martha Nussbaum.1 As Christopher Cordner and Andrew Gleeson (2016, 70n12) concisely put it: “O’Neill’s central concern is that ‘Wittgensteinian’ moral philosophers, because they forgo moral theorizing, lack any way of rationally resolving fundamental moral disagreements and are consequently implicated in relativism and conservatism.”2 A typical feature of ethics after Wittgenstein is what could be called a context-­ sensitive universalism, and a disavowal of relativism. We see an instance of this disavowal in Lars Hertzberg’s text in this book, in which he discusses John W. Cook’s well-known Wittgenstein-inspired argument against relativism, which, as Hertzberg notes, bears certain similarities to Diamond’s thinking. A potential weakness of Cook’s argument, not discussed by Hertzberg, lies in his description of relativism in terms of the doctrine that moral claims are true relative to the norms of a given culture. While this is a common, popular way of glossing the nature of moral relativism, it is hardly representative of the varieties and nature of relativist thought among contemporary anthropologists, philosophers and other scholars. Thus, it may suggest that this criticism of relativism does not address the challenges posed by more complex and sophisticated varieties of relativistic thought. Cook’s account does, however, work well to indicate the approximate place where many Wittgensteinian moral philosophers find themselves in relation to issues of universalism/objectivism and relativism. In his view, relativists and objectivists both give a central role to the question of the source of moral principles (1999, 126), the one locating them in “culture” and the other seeing them as universal to all humans. Cook’s path is to criticise what he takes to be their joint focus on moral principles, and thus to deflect the question of source. Instead, he wants to give priority, in the realm of ethics, to how people see things and think about them, to the kinds of issues that are captured in terms of “callousness and sensitivity, insightfulness and obtuseness, reasonableness and perversity, fair-mindedness and prejudice, self-deception and self-criticism, wisdom and fanaticism” (1999, 127). Such terms point to the personal struggles involved in our moral lives, and the sense of degrees of insight involved in such struggles, no matter their cultural locations. Insofar as such struggles are a feature of a universally human predicament, morality is not compartmentalised into authoritative “cultures”, but is a common realm of evaluative responsiveness to each other and to a world around us, and of criticism and self-criticism along the familiar lines indicated by the thick moral concepts of the above quotation. Relativism, in this analysis, rests on a misdescription of the grammar of moral life. Thus, Cook bypasses what he takes to be the original opposition but ends up with something that is in certain respects reminiscent of universalism, though somewhat reformulated.3 This kind of 1  Nussbaum (2001) groups Cora Diamond with other late-twentieth-century “anti-Kantian” thinkers, who, in her view, are involved in an attack on rational (universalist) exploration in ethics. 2  For critical responses to O’Neill, see Diamond (1991, 26–29 and 291–308). 3  Both Cook’s criticism of relativism and his characterisation of moral life have much in common with Michele Moody-Adams’s account (Moody-Adams 1997), with the distinction that the latter finds her main points of sympathetic reference in the pragmatist tradition. For a characterisation

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recalibrated universalism  – context-sensitive and mindful of the implications of human singularity, but hostile to anything that smacks of relativism – is throughgoing in much of the literature in ethics after Wittgenstein cited in this introduction thus far. Many Wittgensteinian philosophers, among them Winch and Phillips, are critical of varieties of the idea that philosophy could offer action guidance (in universal or other terms). Phillips, especially, is also intent on critiquing nearly all kinds of generalisation in ethics, highlighting instead the variety of moral situations and predicaments. Nevertheless, they pursue their investigations of cases in the spirit described by Cook, in which issues of difference between cultures are set aside or at most seen as obstacles to ethical discernment. Indication of a different view may, however, be found in Winch’s (1997) discussion of the heterogeneity and opaqueness of even one’s own culture. For our purposes, the crucial point of his argument is his short commentary on the assassination of the Colombian football player Andrés Escobar (p. 202), suggesting that there are cases of value-standpoint differences where it is perfectly legitimate not to understand the other (in fact, as Murdoch [1997b, 90] puts it, “even moments when understanding ought to be withheld”). Winch is not speaking as a universalist here, nor is he opting for any old-school relativism. He acknowledges that differences in moral outlooks exist, some appear irreconcilable,4 and the reasons for preferring one’s own standpoint may have to do less with its superiority than with the fact that openness towards some alternatives as different versions of, still, morality would seriously compromise the cohesion and tenability of one’s own position. At any rate, thoroughgoing anti-relativism and modified universalism should not be considered the last word in this tradition. The picture of relativism presented by Cook is hardly the form in which relativism appears, for example in contemporary anthropology. As anthropologist Michael F. Brown (2008: 364) exclaims: I find it tiresome to be held accountable for versions of relativism to which neither I nor most anthropologists of my acquaintance subscribe. Not only has anthropological theory evolved significantly since the articulation of the mid-twentieth-century version of cultural relativism but the social world itself has been transformed in ways that necessitate a recalibration of relativistic thinking away from the broad scope of earlier formulations.

The complex appreciation of criss-crossing cultural differences and overlaps in a changing and interconnected world, such as we find in present-day anthropology, offers very different material with which to think about moral issues than the chunky, supposedly neutrally descriptive relativism of the early twentieth century – not because “relativism” has been left behind, but because largely relativist insights, as well as their terms of application, have evolved through criticism within the field. Thinking in terms of relativity to context does not imply deriving norms from some and critique of some implications of this context-sensitive universalism in the Wittgensteinian tradition, see Hämäläinen 2020. 4  Cf. an analogous case made by Burley (2020) in favour of a “radically pluralist” (Wittgensteinian) philosophy of religion that does not downplay the differences between religious standpoints but instead “dramatises” them as fully and faithfully as possible.

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supposedly fixed, culturally specific framework, but attending to the interplay of contextual affordances and constraints, and thinking closely about how they come to play in people’s ethical meaning-making, in given cultural locations, between locations and over time. Attention to such relativity goes well with the contextual focus of Wittgensteinian philosophers in this tradition, but can be stalled by a disciplinary self-understanding that is systematically antithetical to “relativism”. Particularly, the attention to (historical, collective) change and renegotiation of moral practices, meaning and language, which we see in the chapters in the second half of this volume, also pose a range of potential challenges to the universalist tendencies in the tradition (see also Eriksen 2020; Hämäläinen 2020).

5  The Personal Dimension of Morality As seen before, the moral singularity of people and the first-person perspective in moral thought and action are prominent features of this tradition of moral philosophy that need to be fleshed out a bit more. One classical example of this is Peter Winch’s discussion of Melville’s Billy Budd in his paper “The Universalizability of Moral Judgements” (Winch 1972b). Billy Budd, a foretopman on a Royal Navy ship in the last years of the eighteeth century, is tormented and falsely accused of incitement to mutiny by a superior officer, master-at-arms Claggart. When asked to defend himself, he is unable to speak and strikes Claggart, who falls down and dies. The commander of the ship, Captain Vere, is forced to convene a court martial. Military law is unequivocal: the penalty for striking a superior is death. Mitigating moral features of the situation speak for a different decision, however. Vere is not insensitive to these mitigating reasons but ultimately comes to see a moral verdict in line with the military code as the only one (ethically) possible for him, a view that leads to the execution of Billy Budd: If he were asked to give an account of what the possibility or impossibility consisted in, he could only again rehearse the moral arguments which led him to his decision. But somebody else in such a situation, considering those very same arguments, might conclude that the moral possibilities were different for him without necessarily making any further judgment about what the corresponding possibilities were for Vere or for anybody else and without being committed to any such further judgment. (Winch 1972b, 168–169)

The point, as Winch makes clear, is not only that the individual experiences and situations of different people might differ so much as to thwart attempts at universalisation. Their individuality is not merely an addition to the list of potentially significant particularities of their situations. In the end, the difference between Vere and the senior officer of marines, who is prepared to acquit Billy Budd, is that each gives weight to different moral considerations. Yet, rather than pointing away from morality or towards irrationality in moral reasoning, this points to the way moral

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actions are someone’s actions, owned by someone. This first-person perspective on action is seen as more decisive in characterising an action as moral, than an instantiation of a universalisable principle would be. Another example along these lines is found in the work of Lars Hertzberg (2002, 263). Countering Judith Jarvis Thomson’s construal of abortion as a matter of a foetus’s right (or absence of right) to life, he engages the perspective of a woman contemplating abortion, and how she might talk about the child’s right to life, not as an abstracted universal notion but as part of the reflective process through which abortion is, or ceases to be, an option for her. As Christensen elaborates: In the example, the woman’s answer will have to take into account her specific moral commitments and her particular situation, and her decision should be shaped by the way she relates to this type of moral question as well as her commitments and values. This also means that even if the woman finds that she has reached the right decision about what to do, we will find it understandable if she is still reluctant to claim that her reasons are valid or authoritative for other women facing a similar choice. (Christensen 2020, 39; cf. also p. 107)

Winch’s discussion is aimed at the demand for universalisability in ethics, while Hertzberg’s revolves around a critique of the idea of moral expertise. The positive contribution in both is a conception of ethics in which a first-person perspective, a personal relationship to what one does, is an irreducible part of moral agency, action and moral understanding. It is important to note how this differs from a particularism of situation, with which it is easily conflated: the person, with individual traits, is not just another “variable” of a situation. It is crucial that the choice, decision, action and perspective are her own, and are owned by her, in order to be a moral decision (etc.) in the first place. It is crucial also to see that her struggle, perhaps being indecisive of what to do, can speak to the moral difficulty of her situation. These ideas are emphasised in this tradition, in contrast to mainstream analytic moral philosophy, which has to a large extent been impartialist as regards people’s individuality, considering the first-person perspective and its implications as largely irrelevant for morality. This impartialism has gone well with the emphases on generality and universality in the tradition of analytic moral theory, but the severing of moral agency from the first-person perspective has also engendered intense discussions on moral motivation. That is, how are people compelled by moral principles that are construed as the product of disengaged reason and theoretically separated from the personal wellsprings of practical motivation? On the Wittgensteinian account, the problem of moral motivation looks quite different: of course, there may be issues in which people are split between what they take to be moral concerns and more prudential or self-interested concerns. But there is no general theoretical question of how to connect motivation with moral norms, values and goals, because these are already an integral part of our motivational makeup. We approach choices and challenges as beings with a first-person perspective, of which moral concerns and motivations are a part. Moral conversations, also of the philosophical kind, thus pass between people who already orient themselves by ethical terms, though not necessarily exactly by the same ethical terms, identically applied.

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6  Seriousness In line with the importance of the personal is another sense in which several Wittgensteinian ethicists have been distancing themselves from what they took as more mainstream approaches: their emphasis on the seriousness of the ethicist’s reflection, but also on the serious nature of issues discussed in ethics. An aspect of this motivation is captured in Gaita’s (2006a, chap. 17) discussion and criticism of “fearless thinking”. “Fearless thinkers” are not afraid of saying or thinking literally anything, and consider this a virtue. Gaita draws a connection to the Wittgensteinian considerations of propositions that cannot really be questioned (only “cranks could seriously entertain” this possibility) if the discourse is to hold together. However, he adds one example of a noticeably different nature: that of thinking that “the Holocaust is a fiction invented and sustained by a Zionist conspiracy”. For Wittgenstein in On Certainty (1969), only “cranks” could seriously entertain the possibility that the Earth has existed only for minutes; it would be literally impossible to have even a trivial, everyday conversation with such people. The person who denies the existence of the Holocaust is a different case: in many ways, this person navigates comparably in much the same contexts as people who take it as a fact that the Holocaust took place. What is eroded between them is a shared understanding of more markedly moral topics. “Fearless thinking” of this kind represents a loss of a shared sense for “ruling some things out of consideration”, in Gaita’s (2002, 161) words. Other examples may include the controversial 1970s discussion of infanticide. That infanticide became, based on theoretical considerations, a topic for discussion on a par with the discussion of early-term abortion (instead of “the conclusion that infanticide is permissible [being] a reductio of any argument that led to it”) marks a shift in moral thinking. For Gaita, this shift consists in the loss of the capacity to understand some issues with due seriousness. As said above, the idea of seriousness involved in genuine moral thinking runs through the whole tradition of Wittgenstein-inspired ethics, beginning already with Rush Rhees. There is, however, an inherent tension to it; as the parallel with the abortion debate in the above example shows, the “seriousness” aspect brings the Wittgensteinian tradition closer to openly conservative thinking and its moralist judgementalism.5 To mitigate this, Gaita and others often stress that the seriousness of moral thinking and endeavour is a matter of not losing touch with reality. A morally serious thinker strives always to see that what she is talking about (if in very theoretical terms) is a piece of reality. One way of acknowledging this is by being aware that some ways of discussing the realities in question, and even naming them,

5  The troublemaking nature of the demand of “seriousness” is exemplified in Rhees’ writings on euthanasia, abortion etc. (Rhees 1999a, essays 11–14). He fully recognises the weight of considerations (such as the “sanctity of life”) motivating the conservative standpoint towards these issues, yet is very clearly, even abrasively unwilling to embrace this standpoint - which has an almost paralysing effect on him.

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may slide towards a “philosophical parody” (cf. Gaita 2006a, chap. 3). Seriousness manifests itself not just in the language that we use but also, and principally, elsewhere: it is present in the whole network of the sensitivity, imagination and practical attitudes that comprise our moral lives. It is against this background that some ways of talking about certain cases prove inadequate. The central example used by Gaita (2006a, chap. 4) to discuss the significance of recognising reality with seriousness is that of remorse. In remorse, one realises lucidly what one has done, what it means to the victim and what it means to oneself. It is not a self-centred neurotic feeling of guilt; the sense of what one has done (the sense of the harm) is expressed in how one relates to the other. It is not simply a concern for reparation; it is rather the impossibility, or unthinkability, of not being concerned for reparation (whether or not it is possible) and for what the victim has suffered, recognising it as one’s own responsibility. Gaita’s example is one of the seriousness of the awareness that one has become a “murderer”.6 But an analogous observation would hold for the realisation that one has done something (that one has been) egotistical, self-centred, or callous. It also holds for cases of, say, unintentional killing, as seen in the classic debates on the problem of moral luck. Seriousness here takes the form of fearing, or regretting, what one recognises as evil, or not saying and doing things that could not be taken seriously, in view of this concern for good and evil. In this sense, “seriousness” is a way of describing the way we see matters of moral import; that some things strike us as morally “necessary”, “impossible” or “difficult” is not “a fact of no importance”. A version of not caring about the moral importance of some necessities or impossibilities is the above-mentioned readiness to engage in fearless thinking. Seriousness is thus not very different from paying attention primarily to the particular cases one is discussing and to what they involve. Speaking of “seriousness” highlights that what is at stake is not simply understanding or misunderstanding, or rather that understanding may be a matter of not harming, or rather not doing wrong (of a special kind). One way of being aware that understanding “it” right is this kind of a challenge is in making due room for taking the situated, contextual layers of the case into account. For instance, knowing that no reference to “we” can proceed in a blind and complacent ignorance to the difference that gender, class or race make. The same goes for acknowledging that moral difficulties cannot be understood properly if not as personal difficulties. A great challenge for seriousness seems to consist, though, in talking about “seriousness”. We have mentioned that opposition to the reforming suggestions of theorising “fearless thinkers” brings Wittgensteinian ethicists close to conservatism. That, in itself, is legitimate, but the temptation to provide a critical explanation – in a way, theoretical too – of “fearless thinking” exposes an inherent risk. Anscombe 6  The example of murder has a particular importance for Wittgensteinian ethicists, due to its special character - committing a single murder makes one a murderer (as observed by Winch (1972c, 147)) in a way incomparable to how telling a single lie would make one a liar (it doesn’t really). Taking one’s actions and character traits and their impact seriously, however, doesn’t concern only extreme cases such as murder.

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(1958, 17), a remote predecessor of this critique, suggests that what Gaita will later call fearless thinking is a sign of a “corrupt mind”. (Which, according to her, and just as Gaita claims, rules out any discussion.) To an extent, Gaita (2006a, 311ff) takes over Anscombe’s image of “corruption” as an explanation of the inverted counterpart of seriousness. There, we believe, lurks the most profound risk of the claim of seriousness: it may make one’s thinking judgemental and moralising. “Fearless thinking” – thinking through a theoretical principle – may be both fantasising about the moral righteousness of torturing suspected terrorists7 and advocating for the LGBTQIA+ agenda, relying on an extensively unpacked universal (theoretical) conception of human rights. An inverse risk is in diagnosing, as “lacking seriousness”, attempts at communicating morally laden ideas by way of memes or half in jest. Once seriousness in morality is understood as moral posturing with a serious face, it makes it natural to scoff at everything that does not conform to this standard. This is not to say that no forms of criticising “fearless thinkers” are honest or needed. We believe that, in the case of the Wittgensteinian reluctance to buy into the implications and applications of moral theories, they mostly are honest and needed. Other forms of criticising others for their lack of “seriousness” may not be such, though. This is thus a challenge for Wittgensteinian thinking: to preserve the claim of seriousness without becoming a “moraliser”, in Taylor’s (2012) sense. Moralism, as Taylor investigates it, consists in the disposition to pass judgements that may not be, in themselves, untrue, but where one is misplaced in claiming the position of the person who can and should be passing them.

7  The Structure of the Book The chapters in this book are organised into two parts. The first part consists of essays exploring questions around what could be called the “grammar” of our moral forms of life, and thus representing a more traditional approach in ethics after Wittgenstein. The second part represents a recent turn in the tradition towards investigating moral conceptions, perspectives and concepts that are undergoing change, either because the world itself is changing (with new technology, environmental change, migration, changing economies, new research, etc.) or because human agency, for example in social movements, has led us to reconsider previously unquestioned ideas and structures. This latter turn draws importantly on Wittgenstein’s attention to language and practices, but poses important challenges to the synchronic and ahistorical way in which forms of life and the grammars of our everyday interactions have usually been construed for the purpose of philosophical analysis. By featuring both synchronic and diachronic texts side by side, 7  Cf. Gaita’s (2006b) discussion of torture; his position in this case shows clearly that Wittgensteinian criticisms of “fearless thinking” reach deeper than, and are not exhausted by, aspects and topics about which there would be an easy agreement with religious conservatives.

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the volume explores the potentials of the tradition and offers new perspectives on how to make use of it in an ethically complex and mutable world. The “grammatical investigations” are opened by Martin Gustafsson’s reading of three films by the Dardenne brothers that explore the sense of the moral “must” present in situations of difficult attitudes, decisions or actions, and its relationship to the presence or absence of moral reasons and principles. Gustafsson is interested in the cases of agents’ “miraculously” transcending their personal imperfections and limitations and perceived difficulties. Against Robert Pippin’s reading, he argues that the incapacity of the characters to explain why they act in the way (they perceive) they must does not testify to any kind of moral deficiency on their part. On the other hand, the absence of an explicit moral deliberation or reasoning preceding the action is not necessarily a mark of moral “authenticity” either, as Gustafsson stresses, against some arguments by Joel Backström. While openness to another’s need roots deeper than explicit moral reasoning, the impossibility of explaining oneself is not without risks either, which shows that reasons and reasoning play a valuable role in our indispensable endeavour of understanding our lives. The next two chapters discuss a systematic topic, that of love. Kamila Pacovská follows the tradition of Wittgensteinian discussions of moral psychology. She takes the example of Lily Bart, the central character in Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, to explore the important differences between love and admiration. The example of King Lear shows the ingrained human tendency towards confusing love and admiration: Lear fears he is losing the love of his daughters, thus also losing what used to make him admired – the power and greatness of a king. The tragedy of Lily Bart, in Pacovská’s reading, is that she cannot bear to be without the trappings of admiration (wealth, a position in society, recognition by her peers), yet at the same time she cannot make herself act in the ruthless manner needed to maintain such a position and appearance, recognising also the importance of the values of authenticity, intimacy and confidence, which are associated with love rather than admiration. Pacovská’s discussion aims to show that love and admiration, though similar, differ in important respects, and also turn out to be incompatible. Their respective demands may place a person in a moral dilemma. Tony Milligan discusses the heterogeneity and “family” character of the concept of love, warning against particular kinds of essentialism in thinking about love. He admits, however, that love seems to share many features across various contexts, focusing on its inherent transcendence in the sense of leaving, partly and temporarily, one’s ego behind (following suggestions also by Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch). Milligan suggests a particular Platonic notion of love, one that admits the imperfection, flaws and vulnerability of human love but, as care for a particular other, is inextricably intertwined with care for other persons, beings or things (the recognition of what is good, not confined to only one relationship). Eventually, he strives to reclaim love in the sense of a (physical and mortal) experience of togetherness in this world, against the primacy of the immortal and non-transitory. He points out the role that ideas of dimensions of eternity and immortality play in human love and without which human love would not be what it is; such as the sense that death

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represents a loss of something that is intelligible to desire to continue without a set limit. Hugo Strandberg’s chapter looks at the detail of our use of words, along with the moral dimension and complexities of their use. Strandberg argues that attention, which helps us see how difficult it may be to speak words expressive of what our situation means, and to understand such words, needs to be paid to particular examples and not to be diverted from them towards theoretical concerns. He uses the example of two scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Martha, in which the title character shows the difficulty of uttering particular words in reference to her own situation. Words can either seem insufficiently expressive of the situation, or, even if they are apt, the speaker may not feel inclined to agree with another person’s using the same words or elaborating on their utterance in an independent manner. In order for a philosophical reflection to avoid being unfaithful to its discussed example, it must not conceal the opaqueness and unclarity of language use for language users themselves. This unclarity, as Strandberg points out, may also have to do with reasons of social convention or cynicism. A topical and typical occasion for exploring the moral dimension and plasticity of the grammar of our language is the context of animals. Anne Le Goff reviews classical Wittgensteinian arguments about language as a uniquely human capacity, that is, based on a kind of form of life that is uniquely human, and asks about the similarities and dissimilarities between human and animal (chimpanzee) forms of life. Le Goff argues that thinking about language in terms of a capacity requiring specific neurological (and other) underpinnings is unnecessary and metaphysical. Instead, attention to the detail of our language suggests that the concept itself of “language” is one of intricate relational activity. Le Goff’s review of the work of Frans de Waal and others shows that the social practices of chimpanzees betray a kind of complexity that is strongly analogous to the human form of life. The key aspect of this analogy is the capacity for rule-following, especially playing games with signs that are rule-governed. Le Goff also raises a polemic against Rush Rhees and his contention that Wittgenstein’s focus on rules is insufficient to capture the workings of language, and she argues that forms of communication between primates represent a full-fledged language game (if rudimentary). Lars Hertzberg’s chapter offers a discussion of the position of Wittgensteinian ethicists against various forms of what can be called “mainstream analytic ethics”. Wittgensteinian ethicists point out the inherent confusion of both morally realistic and anti-realistic (non-cognitivistic) positions in ethics. Instead, Hertzberg argues, moral reality is in a profound sense constituted by our use of our words, and is expressive of the place these words have in human interactions. Expressions of value are not disconnected from descriptive expressions. Morality, however, does not simply amount to norms prevalent in a society; rather, it is the matter of the sense one finds in one’s actions and situations (in the demand that these put upon the individual). As the situations of particular people differ from each other, one’s reluctance to pass judgement on the actions of another, especially if the latter apparently speaks and acts from within a different culture, thus may resemble moral relativism,

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but, in Hertzberg’s view, it has more to do with the irreducibly personal nature of morality. The section of “historical investigations” is opened by Raimond Gaita’s chapter on teaching and tradition (of a culture). Gaita opens his autobiographically coloured discussion with a reflection on the standing of teaching and education, and on the threat posed by specialisation and views on teaching and learning as service for customers. He stresses the importance of the teacher’s caring for and loving that which she tries to open to her pupils, with the focus on the “treasures” of our cultural tradition. This suggestion is then given a historical contextualisation. First, Gaita argues that the Holocaust, and atrocities by Europeans and European settlers against indigenous nations, indeed shows that “civilisation” is no obstacle to terrible deeds. This calls for rethinking what “civilisation” or “tradition” can mean to those who “come after” the Holocaust, how we can retain respect and love for German culture (for example) and how art can help us love and appreciate the world despite its affliction. He then discusses the need to rethink the standing of the philosophical “we”, in view of its traditional exclusion of most non-white and non-European people. Decolonising our notion of knowledge and our university curricula does not, in Gaita’s argument, call for casting off European culture but for finding a new place for it, in the project of inspiring a love of the world, while not denying inequality, injustice and threats to humanity (such as climate change). Naomi Scheman’s chapter makes use of Wittgensteinian aspect shift and the Cavellian theme of acknowledgement to elucidate contemporary American activist demands for police and prison abolition. She sees in these movements a call “back to the rough ground”, to shared attention to how lives are shaped by coercive power structures, which, rather than solving social problems, become a means to their perpetuation. Connecting threads from Wittgensteinian work and care ethics, she frames this radical politics not as a site for disconnected utopianism but as an opening to what Veena Das calls “the birthing of the eventual everyday from the actual everyday” (Das 2020, 58), that is, the everyday renegotiation of our togetherness for a better, less damaging, more humane tomorrow. Nora Hämäläinen’s starting point is the “Tea as consent” video featured as part of a sex education campaign launched by the Thames Valley Police, teaching aspects of sexual consent through the analogy of offering and accepting a cup of tea. Drawing on resources from Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking and Michel Foucault, the chapter investigates the video as a mock conceptual investigation with a normative aim, expressive of recent modulations of the concept of sexual consent in broadly Western liberal settings. It also places this concept in a broader frame of changing conceptions of sexual relationships, sexual self-formation and power relations, and concludes with some reflections on the potential costs of theorising such changes in terms of moral progress even when we have reason to think of them as for the better. Pär Segerdahl’s chapter takes a fresh view of the polarisation of ethical debate in relation to stem cell research. He suggests that the conflict between different parties in this area is exacerbated by a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of ethical views. Led by the conviction that such conflicts concern different epistemic

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positions on what embryos are, ethicists seek to address issues by elaborating and clarifying the different positions concerned. What they fail to notice is that they simultaneously transform conflicting views into incompatible systematic doctrines, thus making conflicts irresolvable. Leaning on Wittgenstein, he develops a different way of conceptualising conflicting positions in this area as expressive of differing but not necessarily incompatible “human sensitivities towards existence”, which can be used as a more fruitful starting point for negotiating agreement. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch, Niklas Forsberg explores the ways in which changes in the use of words give rise to alterations in the underlying concepts, with far-reaching implications for how we conceptualise the world. His central example is the “metapolitical” work of the Swedish alt-right movement to change the conditions for using words in such a way that previously stigmatised ideas, for example varieties of racism, become possible to express in mainstream contexts. A key part of their strategy is to anonymously spread discriminatory language, crude jokes about minorities and abuse of political opponents, in order to make more moderate expressions of the same views look normal in comparison. Such cases highlight our shared responsibility for “the concept-forming words we utter” (Murdoch 2003: 260). In Camilla Kronqvist’s chapter, philosophical attention is turned to the moment in our history when such claims as “everyone has a father and a mother” no longer have the appearance of obvious, even analytic, truth, but are rather increasingly construed as expressions of a limiting, potentially oppressive social norm. Making use of Wittgenstein, as well as feminist scholarship and personal experience, she explores the grammar of recent and ongoing renegotiations in this area, highlighting the open-ended character of language that makes it adjustable and responsive to new experiences and realities, and a carrier of new insights into what is important. Michael Campbell delves into the changing grammar of tattooing, as an artform and a bodily practice that within a generation has developed from the potentially stigmatising identity marker of sailors and prison inmates to a booming context of artistic expression, bodily curatorship and aesthetic, political and existential self-­ expression. In this context, he asks two questions prompted by the rise of tattooing: (1) why has tattooing increased in popularity? and (2) what is the ethical significance of this practice? He argues that the ways these questions are raised and addressed in the literature disclose specific, differing evaluative standpoints on what is in need of explanation. Taking his cue from Nora Hämäläinen’s recent Wittgenstein-inspired work on moral change, Ryan Manhire explores the philosophical grammar of Greta Thunberg’s rhetoric in two of her well-known addresses to world leaders. Thunberg’s strategy, he observes, is not one of presenting novel facts or arguments, but of inviting interlocutors – by means of persuading, shaking and showing things to them – to share a way of looking that should make sense, in a new way, of the knowledge and values that she and her audience (supposedly) already share, and result in a change in practice. This change may involve a personal change, hand in hand with a change in our notion of morality, which is shown to be a natural event, consistent with the nature of morality being what it is.

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The final chapter, by Ondřej Beran, invites us into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and conversational robots, questioning the terms by which issues of intelligence in AI are commonly addressed. Rather than thinking of the matter as revolving around an empirical question of whether a robot (in fact) has a predetermined attribute that we would call intelligence, he argues, in Wittgensteinian vein, that we need to address this question in terms of the emergence of a form of life that we are learning to live with, and relate to, and of a variety of entities using AI and exhibiting features that we may successively come to call intelligence. The case study of Sophia the Robot shows that such a shift in our conceptual sensitivities can be encouraged through targeted interventions by AI designers, who focus as much on curating conversational situations as on designing AI itself.8

References Adam-Segal, Reshef, and Edmund Dain, eds. 2017. Wittgenstein’s moral thought. London: Routledge. Amesbury, Richard, and Hartmut von Sass, eds. 2021. Ethics after Wittgenstein: Contemplation and critique. New York: Bloomsbury. Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958. Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33: 1–19. Backström, Joel. 2011. Wittgenstein and the moral dimension of philosophical problems. In The Oxford handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn, 729–752. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beran, Ondřej. 2021a. Examples and their role in our thinking. New York: Routledge. ———. 2021b. To each incel according to his needs? SATS 22: 191–213. Boncompagni, Anna. 2015. Elucidating forms of life. The evolution of a philosophical tool. Nordic Wittgenstein Review special issue 2015: 155–175. Brown, Michael F. 2008. Cultural relativism 2.0. Current Anthropology 49: 363–383. Burley, Mikel. 2020. A radical pluralist philosophy of religion. London: Bloomsbury. Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must we mean what we say? A book of essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. The uncanniness of the ordinary. In In quest of the ordinary, 153–178. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. The touch of words. In Seeing Wittgenstein anew, ed. William Day and Victor J. Krebs, 81–98. New York: Cambridge University Press. Christensen, Anne-Marie Søndergaard. 2020. Moral philosophy and moral life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, John. 1999. Morality and cultural differences. New York: Oxford University Press. Cordner, Christopher, and Andrew Gleeson. 2016. Cora Diamond and the moral imagination. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (1): 55–77. Crary, Alice, ed. 2007. Wittgenstein and the moral life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crary, Alice, and Rupert Read, eds. 2000. The new Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge. Das, Veena. 2020. Textures of the ordinary: Doing anthropology after Wittgenstein. New  York: Fordham University Press. 8  Ondřej Beran and Nora Hämäläinen’s work on this text was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic).

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De Mesel, Benjamin, and James Thompson, eds. 2015. A Wittgensteinian approach to moral and political issues. Special issue of Ethical Perspectives. Diamond, Cora. 1978. Eating meat and eating people. Philosophy 53: 465–479. ———. 1991. The realistic spirit. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2019. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, going on to ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2020. Moral change: Dynamics, structure, and normativity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaita, Raimond. 2002. A common humanity. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. The philosopher’s dog. New York: Random House. ———. 2006a. Good and evil: An absolute conception. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. ———. 2006b. Torture: The lesser evil? Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 68: 251–278. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gier, Nicholas F. 1984. Wittgenstein and phenomenology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gleeson, Andrew, ed. 2002. Ethics in the light of Wittgenstein. Special issue of Philosophical Papers. Gustafsson, Martin. 2005. Perfect pitch and Austinian examples. Inquiry 48: 356–389. Gustafsson, Ylva, Camilla Kronqvist, and Hannes Nykänen, eds. 2013. Ethics and the philosophy of culture: Wittgensteinian approaches. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2016. Descriptive ethics: What does moral philosophy know about morality? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. A case for moral history: Universality and change in ethics after Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations 43: 363–381. ———. 2021. Wittgenstein, ethics and fieldwork in philosophy. In Ethics after Wittgenstein: Contemplation and critique, ed. Richard Amesbury and Hartmut von Sass, 28–49. New York: Bloomsbury. Hertzberg, Lars. 2002. Moral escapism and applied ethics. Philosophical Papers 31: 251–270. Iczkovits, Yaniv. 2012. Wittgenstein’s ethical thought. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuusela, Oskari. 2019. Wittgenstein on logic as the method of philosophy: Re-examining the roots and development of analytic philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuusela, Oskari, and Benjamin De Mesel, eds. 2018. Ethics in the wake of Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge. Medina, José. 2002. The unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: Necessity, intelligibility and normativity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Moi, Toril. 2017. Revolution of the ordinary: Literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997. Fieldwork in familiar places: Morality, culture & philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1997a. Against dryness. In Existentialists and mystics, 287–295. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1997b. Vision and choice in morality. In Existentialists and mystics, 76–98. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 2003. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. London: Vintage Classics. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Why practice needs ethical theory: Particularism, principle, and bad behavior. In Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little, 227–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nykänen, Hannes. 2019. Wittgenstein’s radical ethics. European Journal of Psychoanalysis 11. https://www.journal-­psychoanalysis.eu/wittgensteins-­radical-­ethics/. O’Neill, Onora. 1980. Review of Stephen Clark, The moral status of animals. The Journal of Philosophy 77: 440–446. ———. 1986. The power of example. Philosophy 61: 5–29. Phillips, D.Z. 1992. Interventions in ethics. London: Macmillan. ———. 1999. Philosophy’s cool place. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Rentsch, Thomas. 2003. Heidegger und Wittgenstein. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Rhees, Rush. 1965. Some developments in Wittgenstein’s view of ethics. The Philosophical Review 74: 17–26. ———. 1969. Art and philosophy. In Without answers, 133–154. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1999a. Moral questions. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1999b. The death of a dog. In Moral questions, 197–227. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Taylor, Craig. 2012. Moralism: A study of a vice. Durham: Acumen. Thompson, James. 2008. Wittgenstein on phenomenology and experience. Bergen: The Wittgenstein Archives. Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Winch, Peter. 1972a. Moral integrity. In Ethics and action, 171–192. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1972b. The universalizability of moral judgements. In Ethics and action, 151–170. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1972c. Trying. In Ethics and action, 130–150. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1987. Who is my neighbour? In Trying to make sense, 154–166. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1997. Can we understand ourselves? Philosophical Investigations 20: 193–204. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On certainty. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1982. Last writings on the philosophy of psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophical investigations, revised 4th ed. Chichester: Wiley. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Rush Rhees, and Gabriel Citron, eds. 2015. Wittgenstein’s philosophical conversations with Rush Rhees (1939–50): From the notes of Rush Rhees. Mind 124: 1–71. Salla Aldrin Salskov is a researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include queer feminist theory, and Wittgensteinian moral and language philosophy. Her work has been published in Sexualities, NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, and Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics.  

Ondřej Beran is a Deputy Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (University of Pardubice). He writes about various topics. His recent publications include the book Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021).  

Nora Hämäläinen is senior researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her research interests include ethics, moral personhood, moral change, moral anthropology, philosophy and literature, and philosophical method. She is the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury 2015), Descriptive Ethics: What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Är Trump Postmodern: En essä om sanning och populism (Förlaget M 2019), and and co-editor of Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2012) and Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).  

Part I

Grammatical Investigations

“I Don’t Know”: Agency, Self-­Understanding and New Beginnings in Three Films by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Martin Gustafsson

Igor, the 15-year-old lead character in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film La Promesse (The Promise, 1996), is torn between his father and the truth.1 His father, Roger, is a human trafficker who exploits illegal immigrants for construction work. The truth is this: when, due to an unexpected inspection at a construction site, the immigrant workers ran away in panic, one of them, Hamidou, fell from the scaffold. Igor found Hamidou barely conscious, bleeding badly. The boy used his belt to try to stop the bleeding and urged his father to take Hamidou to the hospital. But Roger, afraid that his trafficking business would be exposed, instead loosened the belt in front of Igor’s eyes, hid the by now unconscious Hamidou under a tarpaulin, and let him bleed to death. Later in the evening, he forced Igor to help him put Hamidou’s corpse in a wooden box and then filled the box with cement. A few days before this happened, Hamidou’s young wife, Assita, arrived from their homeland of Burkina Faso to join her husband in Belgium, bringing with her the couple’s baby. When Igor finds Hamidou after his fall, the wounded man begs him to take care of his wife and child. Igor answers, “I promise.” Thus the key conflict of the film is established: Igor cannot both stay loyal to his father and keep his promise to Hamidou. Assita insists on finding out what has happened to her husband and will not be gullibly content with Roger’s attempts to convince her to go back home. Desperate to get rid of her, Roger arranges a faked telegram, ostensibly sent by Hamidou from Cologne, asking Assita to join him in Germany. Roger offers to drive her to Cologne

1  This is how the Dardenne brothers themselves characterise the subject of the film, as cited in Campion 1996; see also Cooper 2007.

M. Gustafsson (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_2

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the next morning, allegedly to meet up with her husband. But Igor knows about his father’s real plan: on arrival, he will sell Assita into prostitution. The next morning, Igor suddenly takes an opportunity to escape with Assita in Roger’s van, telling her about his father’s scheme. Seemingly surprised at his own bold initiative, he even agrees to drive Assita to the police station to report the disappearance of her husband – to no avail, however, since Hamidou’s entrance into the country wasn’t registered by the authorities. Igor still hasn’t told Assita about what really happened to Hamidou, and while they are on the run from Roger he continues lying to her, telling her that he doesn’t know where Hamidou is. Assita eventually decides to go to Italy to stay with relatives there. After an extraordinary confrontation scene in which Igor breaks irrevocably with his father, he follows Assita and the baby to the station from where their train is leaving. On the stairs leading up to the platform, as he is walking behind her, he suddenly tells her the truth. She stops, takes off her headscarf, turns around, and walks down the stairs towards and past him. Then she stops, turns around again and looks at him. He looks at her, and their gazes meet for several seconds. She continues walking. He runs after her, and the film ends as they walk away together in the train station public subway. The Dardenne brothers started off as documentary filmmakers in the late 1970s. Their first two feature films, Falsch (1987) and Je pense à vous (1992),2 did not meet with much acclaim, and the brothers themselves soon came to regard them as flawed. La Promesse, however, was a major international success, and since then the brothers have written, directed and produced eight more feature films: Rosetta (Rosetta, 1999), Le Fils (The Son, 2002), L’Enfant (The Child, 2005), Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence, 2008), Le Gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike, 2011), Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night, 2014), La Fille inconnue (The Unknown Girl, 2016) and Le Jeune Ahmed (The Young Ahmed, 2019). From La Promesse onward, their oeuvre forms a remarkable unity, in several interrelated ways. To begin with, all the films are set in or in the vicinity of the town of Seraing in Belgian Wallonia, once proud of its steel production but now hit hard by deindustrialisation.3 Second, many of the actors appear in several films. Thus, Olivier Gourmet, who plays Roger in La Promesse, appears in most of the later productions  – as the lead character in Le Fils, but also in Rosetta, L’Enfant, Le Silence de Lorna, Le Gamin au vélo, Deux jours, une nuit and La Fille inconnue. Jérémie Renier, who plays Igor, has the lead in L’Enfant, and plays central characters in Le Silence de Lorna and Le Gamin au vélo, appearing also in La Fille inconnue. And so on. Third, several of the actors, even in some leading roles, are amateurs – and their performances are often stunning, such as Assita Ouedraogo as Assita in La Promesse, and Émilie Dequenne as Rosetta in Rosetta.4 Fourth, the 2  There is also a short film from 1988, Il court… il court le monde. For an extensive account of the brothers’ productions before La Promesse, see Mosley 2013. 3  Seraing is also the town in which the two brothers were born and grew up. 4  Dequenne went on to become a professional actress. For an interesting discussion of the reactions to her being sensationally awarded best female actor for her Rosetta performance at the Cannes festival in 1999, see Austin 2004.

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cinematic style and techniques are strikingly unconventional and disorienting. For example, the characters are often filmed from behind at very close range by means of a handheld camera; scenes begin and end in surprising and unsettling ways; the camera often moves in a stressful fashion, swinging around “like a panicked animal” (Russell 2014). These films are and are meant to be disturbing and uncomfortable to watch.5 This is directly connected to a fifth common feature: the realities that are depicted are disturbing and uncomfortable – the realities of contemporary capitalism as they affect people in society’s lowest stratum. Most characters in the films are either unemployed or have low incomes and often insecure jobs.6 Their world is one in which families and neighbourhood communities are shattered, where former working-class solidarity has been replaced by individualist competition in which you can win only by making someone else lose, and where there are no real opportunities for organised political resistance (O’Shaughnessy 2008). All these elements make watching the films a matter of entering a quite specific world: the geographical and historical location is the same, faces are eerily recognisable from one film to another, the stories are all set under similar social and economic conditions, and they deal with the struggles of people who are hit hardest by this social and economic order. On the other hand, the significance of these struggles is not depicted as just local and specific. Even if Igor’s being torn between his father and the truth takes a very particular shape due to the conditions under which he lives, it is recognisable as a more universal human quandary – as are the related themes of promising, loyalty, murder and homelessness around which the film revolves. In all the films, the plot is driven by such archaic themes, as they figure in critical moral difficulties that the characters are facing. The films can be said to explore what it means to face and handle such difficulties in contemporary circumstances that are so dire and taxing that the very possibility of care and compassion seems lost. However, it is deeply characteristic of the films that, despite these circumstances, some of the characters are nonetheless, seemingly inexplicably, capable of such compassion. Igor keeps his promise, even if his doing so seems like a miracle. In a sense, his taking care of Assita and her baby and telling her the truth make him lose everything: he can no longer go back to his father, and Assita can hardly help him with the material means he needs to build a new life. And yet, this loss seems like nothing in comparison to what he has gained: his confession has made it possible for him to live again, with the confidence to meet the gaze of another human being. In his diary notes, Luc Dardenne describes this ending is “an initiation, a birth, a new beginning”, and quotes Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition: “The life span of a man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men,

5  The unconventional filming techniques are taken to their extreme in Rosetta and Le Fils. They are used in later films as well, but not as incessantly as in these two relatively early pieces. 6  There are a few exceptions, such as Jenny, the lead in La fille inconnue, who is a young doctor.

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though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin… The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted” (Dardenne 2019, 487; cf. Arendt 2018, 246–247). In an earlier entry, written while he and his brother were still pondering how to end the story, he writes: I’d like to find an “optimistic” ending for the screenplay. Not to reconcile the irreconcilable but to battle against the loss of trust in humanity, against this falsely lucid thought in which all man’s actions are in vain. Without action, without drama, man would disappear. In drama, “man infinitely surpasses man.” That’s the significance of Jacob’s battle with the angel. (Dardenne 2019, 29)

Even if not all films have such endings,8 they all involve acts by which “man infinitely surpasses man” – what Robert Pippin describes as “stirring moments of resistance, even transcendence” (Pippin 2015, 762). As Pippin goes on to notice, appreciating and understanding the significance of these moments in the films is perhaps the most central and difficult challenge for the viewer. Each of these moments, he says, can seem at first gratuitous and inexplicable, but, remarkably, not in a way that is unsatisfying or frustrating – the way hardened criminals in movies sometimes suddenly recant and become saintly. We are somehow prepared for such reversals; understanding that “somehow” and comprehending the status of such moments seem to be the key questions for each and every film. (Pippin 2015, 762–763)

In this essay, I shall pursue the second of the questions raised by Pippin in this passage. My aim is to better understand the status of these stirring moments of resistance and the sense in which they can be appropriately described as instances of “transcendence”. In doing so, I will take issue with certain things Pippin says in his essay – or, perhaps better, with his not saying certain things that I think need to be said about these moments in order to understand their status. In short, it seems to me that as his discussion moves on, Pippin gradually loses sight of the special character of these moments of transcendence by assimilating them to cases of action in which the agents’ self-understanding is deficient due to the extremely distressing social circumstances under which they are living. I will argue that the transcendent character of these moments is not well understood if conceived in terms of such deficiency. Rather, the lack of self-understanding is essential to the sense of revival involved. In order to further clarify my own conception, I will contrast it with another view as well – a view that constitutes a sort of antithesis to Pippin’s notion of deficiency. This is a view that can be found in some Wittgenstein-inspired moral philosophers. As my stalking horse I will use a particularly forthright presentation of this conception in an essay by Joel Backström (2019). For Backström, not giving reasons in morality is (not a deficiency but) a sign of authenticity. I will argue that this sort of view is bound to underestimate the depth of the difficulties at the centre  In fact, this entry is as much about the ending of Rosetta as it is about the ending of La Promesse.  Most films do have such “optimistic” or “uncertain but cautiously hopeful” endings (Mosley 2013, 129), but there are exceptions – most notably the fate of Lorna in Le Silence de Lorna. 7 8

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of the films I will be discussing, and that Backström is therefore no more able to do justice to the sort of “transcendence” involved than is Pippin. *** In a diary entry from 27 December 1993, Luc Dardenne notes: Igor, the boy in the screenplay we’ve finished, doesn’t know why he does what he does and he’ll discover what he doesn’t know. (Dardenne 2019, 26)

This note identifies a central aspect of the stirring sort of resistance or transcendence that characterises the films: the agents involved do not know themselves why they act as they do. In some films, there are key scenes in which this is made explicit. Two examples are Le Fils and Le Gamin au vélo. In Le Fils, the lead character, Olivier, is a carpenter whose young son was killed a few years earlier by another young boy. After this, Olivier started working as an instructor at a detention centre, taking on troubled youths as apprentices. One day, the name of his son’s murderer, Francis Thirion, shows up on the enrolment list for his class. Olivier is anxious and upset, and tells the school administrator that he cannot handle another apprentice since he already has four. However, he does not reveal that Francis is his son’s murderer, nor does he ask to have him transferred to another school. (Francis himself doesn’t know that Olivier is the father of the boy he has killed.) And soon, Olivier finds himself not only accepting Francis in his class but giving him extra lessons, driving him home in the afternoon, and so on. It turns out that Francis, who is only sixteen, has no family to go home to. There is no father present, and his mother’s boyfriend doesn’t allow him to visit. Olivier’s relation to Francis starts looking more and more parental-like: the viewer eventually realises that the title of the film refers not only to the boy that Olivier has lost but also to Francis. The marriage between Olivier and his former wife, Magali, was shattered by the tragedy of their son’s death. Magali has moved on, and is now remarried and pregnant.9 One day Olivier tells her that Francis has been released and that his name was on the enrolment list for his class. She gets very upset, and Olivier’s reaction is to mitigate by lying, telling her that he saw to it that Francis was transferred to another detention centre. However, Magali starts to suspect that Olivier has indeed accepted Francis (in fact, he told her that he had entertained the thought). One day she spots the two together in Olivier’s car, and Olivier confirms her suspicion. She passes out, and Olivier carries her back to her car and brings his thermos of coffee to give her something to drink. She wakes up and asks him, “Who do you think you are?” Olivier, trying to make her calm down, tells her to drink the coffee he has just poured. She continues, “Nobody would do this.” He answers, “I know”. She asks him, “So why you?” He pauses and answers, “I don’t know.” Cyril, the 11-year-old lead character in Le Gamin au vélo, has been placed in a children’s home by his broke father, Guy (we never find out what has happened to the mother). Guy has told him that he will have to stay there only for a month but in fact has no plans of taking him back. Instead, Guy is trying to start a new life with  In fact, Olivier’s accepting Francis in his class happens right after Magali has told him about her pregnancy. The theme of rebirth is thereby established very early on in the film. 9

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his girlfriend in another part of town, working at her restaurant. Cyril hates being at the children’s home and makes repeated attempts to escape and go back to Guy. On one such occasion he literally runs into Samantha, whom he has never met before. While being chased by his caretakers, he suddenly grabs hold of her so tightly that she falls off the chair where she is sitting waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Cyril keeps clinging to her while they are both lying on the floor and one of the caretakers is trying to separate them. Samantha, however, does not reject him; what she says is, “You can hold me, but not so tight.” Cyril is taken back to the home, but Samantha visits him soon thereafter, bringing him his beloved bike that his father had sold but that she has managed to buy back from the owner. Cyril asks Samantha if she would be willing to have him over the weekends, and she accepts. Samantha helps Cyril locate his father, and it soon comes to a point where Guy tells Cyril, face to face, that he does not want him back. Cyril is devastated, and Samantha starts taking more and more responsibility for him. He is a restless and unruly kid, and his behaviour and Samantha’s caring for him leads to tensions with Samantha’s boyfriend Gilles. Things get worse when Cyril starts hanging out with Wes, a local drug dealer who tries to lure Cyril into his gang. One night when Cyril doesn’t come home, a distressed Samantha makes Gilles drive her around for hours looking for him. When they eventually find him together with Wes (who has just helped him fix a puncture), they force him to come with them. In the car, Cyril insults Gilles, calling him a liar. Gilles loses his patience and tells him that he is not welcome back if he doesn’t apologise. Samantha reproaches Gilles, and he answers by an ultimatum: “It’s him or me.” Samantha pauses, and then finds herself answering, as if nothing else is possible: “It’s him.” Gilles leaves the car. Samantha drives Cyril back to her small flat next to her salon, where she works as a hairdresser. Preparing a late dinner, she asks him why he didn’t call her when he had a puncture and needed help. Also, didn’t he understand that she would be worried? Cyril answers, “I don’t know. I didn’t think.” They sit down to eat, and Cyril in his turn asks Samantha, “Why did you want me to come here?” She answers, “You’re the one who asked.” He persists: “But why did you agree?” She pauses, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “I don’t know.”10 What are we to make of these “I don’t know”s? This is a main topic of Pippin’s essay, in which he focuses in particular on Le Fils. According to Pippin, it would be a misunderstanding to conceive of the “I don’t know”s as referring to some merely epistemic shortcoming, as if there were an already determinate fact of the matter as to why the characters act as they do, a fact that the characters themselves for some  Samantha goes on to tell Cyril to promise not to see Wes again, and he makes the promise. He is thus torn between being loyal to a father figure (Wes) who will lead him to ruin and destruction, and keeping the promise to Samantha, who will allow him to begin anew. This is one of several connections between Le Gamin au vélo and La Promesse. Another related one is that Jérémie Renier, who plays Igor in La Promesse, plays Guy, Cyril’s father, in Le Gamin au vélo. Roger and Guy are fathers who fail and betray by being cowards – a phenomenon that the Dardenne brothers seem to see as emblematic of our time. A very different portrayal of a father (and a husband) – indeed, one of the warmest and most moving portraits of fatherly and marital love that I have seen on film – is given by Fabrizio Rongione as Manu, Sandra’s husband in Deux jours, une nuit. 10

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reason do not have access to but which would be, in principle, available to someone in a better epistemic position. Such a conception might invite (or be invited by) a Cartesian picture according to which “we need to see inside [the characters] to know them, know their secrets as if they were contents locked in a box” (Pippin 2015, 770, n. 29). This conception also lends itself to conventional forms of psychologising, according to which the task of the viewer is to figure out the hidden intentions or mental mechanisms that make the characters behave as they do. Pippin’s essay analyses brilliantly and in detail how the cinematic techniques of the films function to undermine such Cartesian and psychologising conceptions of the agency of the characters. Regarding Olivier’s “I don’t know”, Pippin says, [t]he genuineness of Olivier’s answer in the scene is at the heart of what the film is attempting to work out. […] We want immediately to say to ourselves, he means “I don’t know yet,” that he has a reason, an end, that he just cannot now formulate. […] There is no sense that this “I don’t know” is simply the best Olivier can do, as if someone more articulate or reflective could do better. So while it is true that Olivier might retrospectively be able to make some sort of sense of what happened between him and Francis, it is not by way of discovery. […] [G]iven that answer to his wife, Olivier could […] be said to be trying to find out why he is doing what he is doing […] simply by doing it. (Pippin 2015, 780)

In another passage, Pippin speaks of how, in the films, the putative isolation of the psychological as an ex ante determinate inner world (which can be expressed or not, which we see into by looking at the face) is being challenged by an attempt to locate such a putative interiority instead in the world. We see any such inner world taking shape and changing in the activities and expressions of the characters, and, in some cases, we see that there is very little determinate or fixed or resolved or even linear going on in such a putative world beforehand. (Pippin 2015, 775)

These passages might seem to go against how Luc Dardenne describes the situation of Igor in the passage quoted at the beginning of this section, where he says that Igor will “discover” what he does not know. However, I don’t think Dardenne’s use of the word “discover” needs to be understood in the epistemic sense that Pippin worries about. In fact, there are many passages in Dardenne’s diaries and in interviews with him and his brother that strongly indicate that they would agree with Pippin – passages in which they make it very clear that they strive to undermine precisely the sort of isolation or interiorisation of the psychological that Pippin is discussing.11 And in a suggestive entry written during the shooting of Le Fils, Luc Dardenne directly comments on Olivier’s response to Magali in a way that seems to reject the very idea of an epistemologically ideal position from which his reasons for action would be discernible: “There is something impossible in what Olivier does. Magali clearly has reason to say: ‘Why do you do that, then?’ and he clearly has reason to reply: ‘I don’t know.’ We don’t know either” (Dardenne 2019, 90). Now, according to Pippin, once we have recognised how the films “locate […] a putative interiority instead in the world”, we can see how these “I don’t know”s,  Not that I mean to suggest that Pippin’s analysis stands or falls with the Dardennes’ agreeing with it; as Luc Dardenne himself notes, “what we’re making might not be what we believe we’re making” (Dardenne 2019, 56).

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rather than expressing an epistemic-Cartesian predicament, connect with and reflect the societal circumstances under which the characters are living. Pippin says, the Dardennes are in their own way quite sensitive to the implications of this way, a socially mediated way, of thinking about what is involved in trying to understand what people do. The conditions under which such agency exists – or let us say, in general, the possibility of leading a life in a way that can be understood by themselves and others – are, for some, profoundly threatened. […] Something fundamental in even their relations to themselves – their ability to understand and evaluate themselves as conventional candidates for standard intentional explanation – is put in question. The possibility of self- and other-understanding is shown to be, in such a world, a kind of luxury, one made possible by the leisure and security these characters do not have, cannot ever expect to have. The consequences of not having it are on view in these films. (Pippin 2015, 782–783)

This passage identifies two essential themes of the films: (i) the ways in which the possibility of self- and other-understanding is undermined by the circumstances under which the characters are living, and (ii) that this undermining process cannot itself be adequately understood unless one breaks with a conventional Cartesian or psychologising conception of what such self- and other-understanding amounts to. However, with regard to the specific, extraordinary instances of action that Pippin mentions in his essay, and on which I have been focusing in this paper – stirring moments of resistance or even transcendence  – I nonetheless find the account offered by Pippin in this passage one-sided at best. Let me begin to explain why, by making some observations that are absent in his analysis. First, it should be noticed that even if Igor, Olivier and Samantha had lived under quite different circumstances – say, an upper-middle-class life with plenty of leisure and security – similar actions would still be quite extraordinary and would perfectly well be conceivable as stirring moments of transcendence for which the agents themselves are unable to give reasons. Indeed, as I have already noted (see note 6), Jenny, the lead in La Fille inconnue, is a young doctor whose living circumstances are quite comfortable, and yet her actions are no less “transcendent” than those of Igor, Olivier and Samantha.12 And suppose, for example, that Olivier had been a university professor, and that the name of his son’s murderer had shown up on the enrolment list for one of his chemistry classes. Suppose, further, that he had not only accepted him in his class but had given him extra support, had made him his assistance in the lab, had spent time with him during weekends, and so on – so that, gradually, a sort of father-son relation developed between them. Asked by his upset ex-wife why he is doing this, the answer “I don’t know” could well be just as genuine as when it comes from Olivier in the film, and it might be just as pertinent to say that he is trying to find out why he is doing what he is doing simply by doing it. What this points to is the following. In the passage just quoted, Pippin strongly suggests that the cases in which agents in the films cannot give reasons for why they are doing what they are doing are deficient cases – cases in which something is lacking that should be there, a self-understanding of which the agents have been deprived due to the social and economic pressures under which they are living. Importantly, 12

 To be fair, I should note that La Fille inconnue had not been released when Pippin wrote his essay.

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I don’t want to deny that some actions depicted in the films are deficient cases in this sense – indeed, the films are full of such cases, where people are so distressed by their living conditions that they just cannot afford to reflect on why people, including themselves, act as they do. However, I want to insist that the stirring moments of resistance or transcendence on which I have been focusing, and which Pippin himself acknowledges are so central to the films, should not be assimilated to such cases. On the contrary, it is essential to their “transcendent” character – to their being describable in terms of “an initiation, a birth, a new beginning” – that the agents themselves do not understand why they are doing what they are doing. Such lack of understanding is part of what makes them new beginnings, in the radical sense required to capture their significance. If Igor, Olivier and Samantha had been able to give well-thought-through reasons for their actions, there would be nothing like a new beginning happening. All we would see would be three very dutiful or virtuous persons acting in accordance with principles they already hold or their properly educated moral character. The films would deteriorate into flat and boring moralistic tales – no transcendence, no drama in which “man infinitely surpasses man”. So, rather than a deficiency, a lack of self-­ understanding characterises the very special sort of agency on display in these moments. Igor’s, Olivier’s and Samantha’s actions are not just privative occurrences of what would in more comfortable surroundings be understandable in terms of standard intentional explanations, but rather actions of which it is crucial that they elude such explanations.13 This is connected with another important feature of Igor’s, Olivier’s and Samantha’s actions. They all involve a very strong sense of being fated. Igor is torn between his father and the truth, but he does not really choose between them. Rather, his quandary is this: he cannot tell the truth to Assita, but he must do so. The conflict is resolved at the end of the film, by his telling her what really happened – and the sense is that this is not only inevitable but also a miracle. Samantha does not really choose to adopt Cyril. Rather, he runs into her, clings to her, and after that moment she is bound to him. When her boyfriend Gilles gives her his ultimatum, “It’s him  Let me make clear, though, that I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that the Dardennes’ depiction of this sort of “transcendent” agency mostly involves persons who do not live socially and economically comfortable lives. For even if the “transcendent” sort of agency I am focusing on needs to be distinguished from cases in which the agent is just under such external pressure that she cannot afford to reflect on or provide reasons for her actions, there is nonetheless an intriguing dialectic between these two different sorts of cases. For one thing, the needs to which the transcendent actions constitute responses are often more immediately on display under circumstances of social and economic despair. Thus, Samantha lives in a neighbourhood where she often encounters children who have no secure family situation, or who are neglected by their parents, and this presumably makes her more open to Cyril’s call for help. Perhaps it is even arguable that people who are used to experiencing the sort of deficiency involved when social and economic pressures do not allow them to reflect on what they are doing are more open to, or tolerant towards, the possibility of non-deficient transcendence, since their expectation that people (including themselves) should always be able to explain and justify their actions might be less strong than for someone who lives a socially and economically comfortable life. Thanks to Stina Bäckström for pressing me on this issue.

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or me!”, she doesn’t really weigh the alternatives. Gilles has completely misunderstood the situation: he does not realise that, for her, rejecting Cyril is not an option. And so she realises that she simply has to break up their relationship. Olivier’s case is interestingly different from the cases of Igor and Samantha. Igor’s keeping his promise and Samantha’s adopting Cyril are unequivocally good. As viewers, we hope for these things to happen, and are unhesitatingly satisfied when, against all odds, they do. By contrast, when it comes to Olivier, things are less straightforward. His ex-wife’s angry reaction is very understandable, and as a viewer one worries that some virtually insane hubris might be involved. Luc Dardenne expresses this worry: In his prideful arrogance, [Olivier] believes himself able to forgive, to reconcile with his son’s murderer. He believes he’s above humans. He thinks he’s God. Olivier’s arrogance but also the desperate man’s mad hope. He doesn’t know where or why he’s going, much less what for, but he goes there. It never becomes clear. (Dardenne 2019, 88)

The viewer of the film is held in suspense as to whether Olivier is in fact creating an opportunity to take violent revenge for his son’s death. But again, as one gradually realises, the issue is not a matter of grasping Olivier’s plans; as Pippin notes, “[i]t takes us a while to appreciate the irrelevance of the notion of planning” (Pippin 2015, 767). Things are brought to a head at the end, when Olivier takes Francis with him to his brother’s timber yard in the countryside to get some wood. When they are there, Olivier tells Francis who he is, and Francis flees, convinced that Olivier intends to kill him. Olivier shouts after him that he need not be afraid but then runs after him and ends up wrestling him to the ground, putting his hands around his throat so as to strangle him. But he cannot do it; instead, he lets Francis loose. However, Francis doesn’t run away. The film ends as Francis joins Olivier, helping him load boards on his trailer.14 However, even if the sort of unequivocal goodness that is present in La Promesse and Le Gamin au vélo is not there in Le Fils, I don’t want to exaggerate the difference between the films. In all three, the characters are torn, not by having to “choose” between two or more “alternatives” (as moral dilemmas are standardly conceived in much philosophical literature) but by having to do what is impossible without  My interpretation of the film might differ from Hugo Strandberg’s at this point (Strandberg 2021). Strandberg’s discussion of the film is one of the most sensitive I know, but he does not give the ambivalence induced by the hubris and arrogance of Olivier’s actions the same central place as I do. In my view, this strong sense of ambivalence is an important reason why Le Fils is an even more deeply intriguing film than La Promesse and Le Gamin au vélo. The latter has been described as a “fairy tale” (see, for example, the long interview with Cécile de France, who plays Samantha, in the DVD extra material), and part of the point of that characterisation is that there is a clearly identifiable good person (Samantha), a “fairy”, who saves Cyril. By contrast, even if Le Fils also has a strongly mythical aspect to it, Olivier is certainly not a fairy. The myth is of a different sort – a myth beyond any such straightforward morality, one wants to say. (The myth to which Luc Dardenne returns again and again in his diary notes on the film is the one of Abraham and Isaac; this connection is also made by several commentators.)

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understanding why. That is the paradoxical depth of the difficulties involved, and it is only against this background that it becomes understandable why characterisations such as “transcendence” and “rebirth” seem apt to capture what is going on. Even if the ending of Le Fils leaves many things open, there is just as strong a sense of a new beginning as in La Promesse and Le Gamin au vélo (where, to be sure, many things are left open too). As in those other films, there is this intriguing combination of fated necessity and unpredictable revival. What I am arguing is that it is these two elements that are manifest in the “I don’t know”s of the agents. The absence of reasons is in this way essential to what they do, and thus their actions are not merely deficient versions of what might in more comfortable social surroundings be possible to understand and justify. *** Still, one might find this puzzling: how can the “must” involved in these transcendent moments be compatible with such unpredictability and absence of self-­ understanding? What kind of necessity is this, if there are no principles or rules by reference to which the agents can give reasons for their actions? Shouldn’t such a lack of reasons instead mean that the actions are haphazard and arbitrary? Igor does not justify his actions by reference to any general principle, such as “Promises must be kept.” And yet, he is bound by his promise – he must keep it. Wherein lies that “must”? Here is another diary entry by Luc Dardenne: In all the scenes where Igor/Assita are looking at each other, Igor is always the one to look away first. Igor can’t look at Assita’s gaze because there lies the pressure of the moral commandment he cannot follow. Except in the final scene. (Dardenne 2019, 42)

This is an absolutely central theme of the film: the force of the “moral commandment” that Igor must but cannot follow does not reside in any rule that he can or will recite, but is perceived by him in the gaze of Assita, the voice of the bleeding Hamidou – concrete, bodily particulars that carry such significance. Similarly, as I have already suggested, the necessity of Samantha’s actions is tied to her first encounter with Cyril: her fate takes the shape of a boy literally running into her, clinging to her desperately in his attempt to get away from his caretakers. In another diary entry, written three months before the one just quoted, Luc Dardenne notes that Emmanuel Levinas died during their shoot, and acknowledges that La Promesse “owes much to our reading of his books. His interpretation of face-to-­ faces, of faces as the first conversations. Without these readings, would we have imagined the scenes with Roger and Igor in the repair shop, with Assita and Igor in the shop office and on the train station steps? The whole film can be seen as an attempt to finally come face-to-face” (Dardenne 2019, 42). Levinas’s significance for the Dardenne brothers has been discussed extensively elsewhere (for example, in Cooper 2007), and I will not dwell on it any further here. However, the way in which moral necessity is depicted as residing in the gazes, voices, faces and bodies of other human beings resonates not only with Levinas’s thinking but also with central themes in much Wittgenstein-influenced moral philosophy. For example, in his famous discussion of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of St Luke, Peter Winch argues that the Samaritan’s compassion is not mediated by rules or principles but is

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a matter of immediate perception: “nothing intervenes between the Samaritan’s taking in the situation and his compassionate reaction” (Winch 1987, 156). “The Samaritan,” says Winch, responds to what he sees as a necessity generated by the presence of the injured man. What I mean by introducing this word can be brought out by considering what someone in the Samaritan’s position, and responding as he did, might say if urged by a companion to hurry on so as not to miss his important appointment. “But I can’t just leave him here to die.” The word “can’t”, as used in such a context, expresses the kind of necessity – in this case an impossibility – I have in mind. (Winch 1987, 157)

In a similar vein, Joel Backström describes what he sees as a fundamental insight of Wittgenstein’s: [P]erceiving a situation as morally charged means feeling claimed in response by the perception of what the person(s) in the situation does and suffers. One’s response isn’t, basically, a product of reasoning, inference or decision, but is given in one’s very perception, one’s sense of the interpersonal significance of the situation, and whatever reasoning or decisions that may follow respond and are answerable to this immediate understanding. (Backström 2019, 248)

In what remains of this essay, my aim is to further clarify the status of those stirring moments of transcendence in the films that I have been discussing, by relating them to the sort of conception articulated in the above passages from Winch and Backström. However, I will not simply apply such a Wittgenstein-inspired sort of conception to these moments in the films. Rather, even if I think that both Winch and Backström express important insights, I will clarify my own understanding of those stirring moments by explaining how it differs from such a Wittgenstein-­ inspired conception, as it is further developed by Backström.15 My overall point can be gestured at by saying that at least Backström seems to be articulating what in effect amounts to an anti-thesis to what I found unsatisfactory in Pippin’s discussion of the “I don’t know”s. In Pippin’s case, what I worried about was his tendency to slip into a conception according to which these “I don’t know”s manifest a deficiency of moral agency, the suggestion being that under better, more secure living conditions, Igor, Samantha and Olivier would have been able to provide reasons for what they do. As we shall see, Backström seems to propose what in effect amounts to the reverse idea. Even if he does not discuss the Dardennes’ films in particular, the way he addresses the place of reason in moral life is directly relevant to the cases found in those films. For Backström sees a deficiency in a place exactly opposite to where Pippin sees it. He argues that the goodness of love and compassion is a matter of spontaneously affirming a responsive openness to another human being  – an openness that is prior to and more basic than acting from reasons. According to him, such openness “has nothing to do with the reasonable or representational, with the  I don’t want to deny that there are important differences between Winch and Backström. It is not entirely clear to me to what extent these differences matter to the criticism I will make. Winch’s view is tricky to get into clear view, and I am not sure I have understood all aspects of it; hence I focus on Backström in what follows. However, for a more detailed discussion and criticism of Winch’s conception, see Gustafsson 2019.

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public and performative, that is, with the whole discourse of cultural, collective moralities – other than in the sense that that whole discourse is a response, largely destructive and repressively self-deceptive, to the openness. […] Between ‘you’ and ‘I’ there are no norms, no standards, and no public discourse” (Backström 2019, 269). In general, the problem about anti-theses is that they share too much with the theses they are disputing in order to be able to fully uproot them. The “I don’t know”s in the Dardennes’ films can help us see the blind spots shared by the two opposite conceptions that I have just sketched. For neither Pippin nor Backström provide us with the resources needed to do justice to the exceptional, transcendent character of what happens in these films. We have already seen how Pippin’s tendency to think of these moments in terms of deficiency makes it impossible to understand how they can have such significance. However, Backström’s opposite inclination, to think of reasoning in terms of deficiency and of unreasoned openness as characteristic of all genuine moral action, makes it equally impossible to get the relevant sense of transcendence into proper view. To see why, let us look closer at what is involved in the sort of openness that Backström sees as constitutive of love and compassion. One difficulty here is that Backström frequently tries to characterise such openness by saying what it does not involve, and in doing so he uses many different terms to describe this opposite pole. Here are some of the things openness is contrasted with: reasoning, inference, rationality, representation, norms, standards, rules, public discourse, performativity, cultural collective moralities, cultural sanctions and social approval. It is not clear why and how these different phenomena are supposed to form a unity against which the openness of love and compassion can be homogeneously and illuminatingly contrasted. Sometimes, Backström emphasises the social-conventional aspect, understood in a thin, legalistic sense. Thus, he says that “Standard accounts of both language and ethics ignore … the basic moral question, which concerns precisely what is going on between us, what our real attitudes are, not how one can, with some plausibility, represent our behavior, or what it conventionally counts as or commits us to. Those are lawyer’s questions” (Backström 2019, 266). Here, the suggestion is that representation is a matter of conventionality, and that conventionality is to be understood as a matter of “lawyer’s questions”. The same tendency is present in the following passage, where again the notion of openness, here tied to the notion of the spirit with which something is done, is explained by contrasting it with conformism to superficial societal norms: [S]omeone may always “do right”, yet their whole life may be wrong. That is, their actions may be irreproachable in the superficial, legalistic sense of conforming to various “moral rules” (helping others, not lying, etc.), yet the spirit they manifest, the motives driving them – e.g. conformism or a pharisaic wish to justify oneself – may render them morally corrupt and destructive. (Backström 2019, 248)

A third example is the following passage, in which Backström argues that the “untaught moral understanding” characteristic of “the responsive openness to others we share with the child we once were” is opposed to egocentricity or selfishness

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(Backström 2019, 257–258). According to Backström, such egocentricity or selfishness is located at the same level as social approval: An attitude’s being socially approved of course means that it isn’t generally seen as egocentric, but in fact egocentricity (selfishness) isn’t a contrast to identifying with collective norms and valuations, but presupposes such identification. Thus, thieves steal things that everyone is after, and the selfishness and destructiveness of the “legitimate” businessman’s attitude to other people may be as great as that of the criminal, even if he uses money rather than guns to get his way. (Backström 2019, 260)

Laying aside the worry one might have about the idea that children unvarnished by “cultural-moral formation” (Backström 2019, 256) are somehow conceptually incapable of egocentricity or selfishness, what I want to draw attention to here is again how thin the notion of normativity is that Backström is working with in this passage: apparently it reaches no deeper than the public “legitimacy” of a sinister businessman. However, as we have already seen, there are plenty of other passages in which Backström invokes thicker notions to make the contrast with openness – notions such as “reason”, “rationality” and “representation”. What are we to make of this slide? One possibility is that he sees no slide here, but conceives of these thicker notions in equally thin, legalistic terms – as if being rational, representing the world and one’s actions, and justifying what one is doing were in principle similar to a businessman’s striving for legitimacy in the eyes of the public. One thing that might point in this direction is Backström’s way of drawing the distinction between moral difficulties and problems that involve reasoning, and his calling the latter “merely intellectual problems” (Backström 2019, 248). His use of the word “merely” here suggests a pretty thin conception of reason and justification. Now if this is Backström’s conception, his notion of openness has little to do with the sort of transcendence I have been trying to capture in my discussion of the Dardennes’ films. As a general point, it seems to me essential to the notions of rationality, representation and justification that they are not reducible to social approval in such a thin sense. However, I will not rehearse the arguments against such a conventionalist conception, since it would take me too far away from the main theme of the present paper. Let me instead clarify why my notion of transcendence involves no such thin conventionalism but is in fact diametrically opposed to it. I have repeatedly described the situations faced by the characters in the films in terms of a paradox: these characters cannot do what they have to do, and yet they do it (since they have to). In order to make sense of the transcendent character of these episodes, we have to give due weight to this “cannot”. This means acknowledging that the difficulty involved is not just the difficulty of breaking free from some thinly conventional morality. Mere conventions do not circumscribe what is possible in the relevant sense, and there is nothing overly intellectualised about Igor’s mode of life before he meets Hamidou and Assita, or with Samantha’s before she meets Cyril, or with Olivier’s before he meets Francis. What is true is this: these meetings put these human beings in situations where they have to change their lives radically without being able to give reasons for it. However, to describe this in terms of a liberation from some oppressive discourse of collective morality is to underestimate the depth, difficulty and danger involved in the process. After all, Pippin is

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right about this: in one’s everyday life, knowing why one is doing what one is doing – being able to give reasons for one’s actions – is not in general a matter of over-intellectualisation or moral superficiality, but is crucial to one’s self-­ understanding. By answering the question “Why are you doing this?”, in thousands and thousands of everyday instances of human action, we do not just satisfy some external demands for a conventional representation of what we are doing. Rather, we make sense of what we are doing and of who we are.16 It is only by acknowledging how crucial such humdrum reason-giving is in everyday life that we can understand the sense in which the main characters in these films are doing “something impossible” (cf. the already-quoted entry from Dardenne 2019, 90)  – something with regard to which the notion of transcendence is genuinely appropriate. For we need to see how the crisis they are going through involves their loss of self-­ understanding – an understanding that is constitutive of their sense of agency. What is remarkable is how this loss of self-understanding is needed in order for them to regain their lives. Consider again the case of Olivier. As we saw, Luc Dardenne notes Olivier’s arrogance or hubris: “He believes he’s above humans. He thinks he’s God.” He also observes that Magali’s reactions – “Who do you think you are?”, “Nobody would do this” – are very understandable. Her worries are not “lawyer’s questions”. Indeed, they are as far away as possible from being such questions. Magali is not just giving voice to some conventional, superficial morality. She is worried that Olivier is going mad. That is the depth of what is at stake here – and the depth of her worry reflects the depth of the significance of reason in our moral lives. Certainly, sometimes our ways of reasoning about moral difficulties are conventional, and they can also be numbing, destructive and repressively self-deceptive. But this must not make us forget that reasoning is still an essential part of our human and moral life. It is only if we remember this that we can fully understand the legitimacy of Magali’s reaction: what scares her so much about Olivier’s “I don’t know” is that it threatens his very sanity and the sanity of her world. And even if the film ends in a sort of reconciliation between Olivier and Francis, the possibility is still left open that what Olivier has done might lead to a disaster of the sort Magali fears. Olivier doesn’t know, Magali doesn’t know, and we don’t know. But perhaps it is uncharitable to ascribe to Backström the sort of thin conventionalist conception that I have been distancing myself from. Maybe he does not mean to reduce notions such as rationality, reason and representation to matters of social approval. After all, he puts great emphasis on the difficulty involved in being open to other human beings. It is, he says, “a difficulty of the will”, and it “demands that one change, giving up one’s cynicism or sentimentality, or whatever other  This is a fundamental insight characteristic of Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of human action. Notice that it does not commit one to what Pippin calls a “Cartesian” conception of agency and subjectivity. In fact, opposing such a Cartesian conception is central to many contemporary neo-Aristotelians, such as Elizabeth Anscombe (1963) and Michael Thompson (2008). There are passages in Pippin’s 2015 essay where the Aristotelian and the Cartesian conceptions are not distinguished clearly enough – see, in particular, p. 780.

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self-­centered and destructive spirit one has allowed oneself to indulge and serve” (Backström 2019, 264). “[T]his wholehearted opening of oneself to the other”, he adds, “is the most fearful thing there is” (Backström 2019, 269). Doesn’t this indicate that he conceives such openness as something deeper than a mere break with social conventions? It is difficult to tell. Let me point out, though, that to the extent Backström acknowledges that rationality, reason and representation are not just matters of social convention, he runs into trouble with regard to another crucial part of his discussion. This crucial part is a view he finds in Wittgenstein, namely, that these notions depend, in a one-directed sort of way, on a more primitive kind of inter-­ human relation that characterises the sort of openness he wants us to recognise. According to Backström, it is an upshot of Wittgenstein’s later remarks on ethics and language that representation presupposes relationship; the relation subject-word-world, which so obsesses philosophers, rests on that between speakers. Standard accounts of both language and ethics ignore, or at least downplay this, however; that is a feature of the representational view of language Wittgenstein questions. Thus they ignore the basic moral question, which concerns precisely what is actually going on between us, what our real attitudes to each other are, not how one can, with some plausibility, represent our behavior, or what it conventionally counts as or commits us to. (Backström 2019, 266; italics in original)

In this passage, it does seem as if Backström still identifies the level of “representation” (which, for him, includes reason and rationality) with the level of social convention. In fact, I have already quoted the second half of this passage in support of ascribing such conventionalism to Backström, and the attentive reader may remember that right after that second half comes the sentence: “Those are lawyer’s questions.” However, let us nonetheless consider the possibility that Backström does not propose such a conventionalist thinning down of representation, reason and rationality. What is still unequivocally his view is that these notions presuppose what he calls “relationship”, by which he means the sort of pre-rational or a-rational relation to another human being that characterises the openness he is trying to remind us of. And this is supposed to be a one-directed dependence. Representation presupposes relation, but not the other way around: “openness […] has nothing to do with the reasonable and representational” (Backström 2019, 269). Here we have a variety of what has been called an “additive” or “layer cake” conception of rationality (Boyle 2016; Conant 2016). Reason is conceived as a faculty or capacity that is added to a more fundamental and primitive layer of our human existence. And this addition is not supposed to transform the fundamental layer in any essential fashion – the situation is conceived as analogous to when a layer of passion fruit mousse is added on top of a layer of chocolate without changing the chocolate. Certainly, the passion fruit mousse may leak into the chocolate and thereby distort its purity, and it may even be quite difficult to separate the two. But no essential transformation occurs: the chocolate is not in any basic way different from what it was like before the passion fruit mousse was added. It is not my aim here to rehearse the many problems that such an additive conception of rationality involves, in and of itself as well as an interpretation of Wittgenstein.

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All I want to do is to point out that the account I have given of the moments of transcendence present in the Dardennes’ films does not involve or presuppose any such additive conception. I do maintain that it is essential to these moments of transcendence that they elude standard intentional explanations or justifications. However, this does not mean that they are in some one-directed way more fundamental than cases in which such explanations or justifications can be given. In fact, these moments of transcendence are necessarily exceptions, and they are in this sense dependent on ordinary and so to speak “immanent” cases of morally significant action. Otherwise, the sense of transcendence would be inexplicable. It is as if Backström argues that all genuinely moral cases are of the transcendent sort. However, such cases require a background of innumerable ordinary instances of morally significant action where we do reason about what to do. These cases may be humdrum and ordinary, but they are crucial to our understanding of who we are as moral agents. Backström’s ideal seems to be that we should begin anew all the time in morality. But nothing new could begin if such revivals were the rule rather than the exception. Strictly thought through, the idea that all morally significant action could be a matter of transcendence and rebirth collapses  – for then there would be nothing old to transcend and nothing new to conceive.17 However, this also indicates that the notion of “rebirth” is perhaps more dangerous to use than what I have acknowledged in my discussion. For even if the moments of transcendence that I have been talking about involve a sort of new beginning, it is not a beginning from scratch. On the contrary, the transcendence makes sense only in relation to the lives that the characters have been living until then. Their history is in no way erased but is crucial to what happens and to how they are able to move on. A related point is that the notion of rebirth may give the impression that I conceive these moments of transcendence as moments when the characters get in touch with something they “share with the child [they] once were” (in Backström’s already quoted words), an idea that I meant to distance myself from in my rejection of the additive conception of reason.18 Backström (and Winch) are right to emphasise the moral significance of being open to other human beings in a way that goes beyond reasoning. Olivier, Igor and Samantha all exhibit such openness – an openness that for them involves a sense of necessity. That is one side of their lived paradox  – the “fated” character of their  This is not to say that the reason-giving involved in ordinary moral life is or should be a matter of employing some general theory of the sort developed in contemporary normative ethics. I share Backström’s view that the very aspiration of such general theory-construction is misplaced. 18  Thanks to Ulrika Björk for pressing me on this issue. Björk has also made me clearly aware that there is another feature of Backström’s conception that fits badly with my conception of the transcendent moments in the films, namely, the notion that we would be dealing here with “difficulties of the will”. Part of the “fated” nature of the characters’ actions, and of the “drama” involved in the transcendence, is the characters’ being drawn into a series of events, and being drawn into these events together with other human beings: Igor with Assita, Olivier with Francis, Samantha with Cyril. In a very important sense, what happens is not up to the characters or their individual “will”. This aspect of the films is crucial and deserves much more attention than I have given it, but I cannot pursue it here. 17

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actions, the unreasoned “must” involved. However, there is the other side of the paradox too, namely, that what they have to do is “impossible”. This impossibility is connected with the danger involved in such moments of transcendence, a danger that cannot be spelled out merely in terms of the perils of going against a collective, conventional morality. Rather, the danger involves losing one’s foothold in a more profound sense; it means putting one’s own self-understanding and sanity at risk. Not acknowledging the essential place that reason has in our ordinary moral life means depriving us of the resources needed to understand how deeply dangerous those moments are when we find ourselves morally forced to change our lives without knowing why. Navigating between Backström’s Scylla and Pippin’s Charybdis, I have tried to make it clearer how to understand this danger, and thus how to conceive the paradoxical clash between the “must” and the “cannot” that characterises Igor’s, Olivier’s and Samantha’s “I don’t know”s.19

References Agam-Segal, R., and E. Dain, eds. 2019. Wittgenstein’s moral thought. London: Routledge. Anscombe, G.E.M. 1963. Intention. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Arendt, H. 2018. The human condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Austin, G. 2004. The amateur actors of Cannes 1999: A shock to the (star) system. French Cultural Studies 15: 251–263. Backström, J. 2019. From nonsense to openness: Wittgenstein on moral sense. In Agam-Segal and Dain 2019, 247–275. Boyle, M. 2016. Additive theories of rationality: A critique. European Journal of Philosophy 24: 527–555. Campion, A. 1996, October 13. La Promesse de clandestins. Le Journal du dimanche. Conant, J. 2016. Why Kant is not a Kantian. Philosophical Topics 44: 75–125. Cooper, S. 2007. Mortal ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne brothers. Film-Philosophy 11: 66–87. Dardenne, L. 2019. On the back of our images, volume one: 1991–2005. Chicago: Featherproof Books. Gustafsson, M. 2019. Perception, perspectives, and moral necessity: Wittgenstein, Winch, and the good Samaritan. In Agam-Segal and Dain 2019, 201–221. Mosley, P. 2013. The cinema of the Dardenne brothers: Responsible realism. London: Wallflower Press. O’Shaughnessy, M. 2008. Ethics in the ruin of politics: The Dardenne brothers. In Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. K. Ince, 59–83. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pippin, R. 2015. Psychology degree zero? The representation of action in the films of the Dardenne brothers. Critical Inquiry 41: 757–785. Russell, F. 2014, December 26. Repetition and difference: “two days, one night”. In Los Angeles review of books.

 An earlier version of this essay was presented at Uppsala University and Åbo Akademi University. I thank the audiences for a valuable discussions. Special thanks to Maria Balaska, Ulrika Björk, Stina Bäckström, Francey Russell and the editors of this volume for their comments on various early drafts.

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Strandberg, H. 2021. Forgiveness and moral understanding. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, M. 2008. Life and action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, P. 1987. Who is my neighbour? In Trying to make sense, 154–166. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Martin Gustafsson is Professor of Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His main work is in the philosophy of action, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. His publications include papers on J. L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe, Stanley Cavell, Gilbert Ryle, W. V. O. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein  

“Try to Be Loved & Not-Admired”: Lily Bart’s Moral Struggle Kamila Pacovská

Most discussion of admiration in literature concerns admiration for great and distant public figures, such as celebrities, artists and politicians, but admiration has an equally important place in our personal relationships.1 It is mainly in this domain that it intermingles with love in a complex way. It happens most prominently in relationships such as friendship and romantic love between equal parties. The reason is that such relationships are to varying degrees a matter of choice and this choice seems to be based on the appreciation of the other’s particular qualities. But admiration exists also in the “involuntary”, not chosen, relationships of children and parents. It seems natural enough that people speak highly of their friends and partners and laud their qualities in a way that betrays both admiration for them and their (often amusing) partiality. Especially when the relationship is starting, we accept with complacency the exaggerated praises and the elated enthusiasm about someone who seems quite ordinary to our disinterested eye. Both aspects – the praise and the enthusiasm – attest that admiration is the proper term for the emotion at stake: there is agreement among authors that admiration involves a judgement of its object’s excellence and that it connects with a distinctively positive, happy feeling of wonder, a joyful “wow-response”, as Sophie Grace Chappell memorably calls it (Chappell 2019, 12f).2

 Chappell (2019) discusses public heroes; Zagzebski (2017, 66) claims that moral exemplars, heroes, saints, sages, are observed primarily through narratives; Archer and Matheson (2021) consider cases of famous politicians, athletes and intellectuals. 2  In this chapter, I will be concerned only with what I call “personal admiration”, that is, cases in which we admire a person as a person (that is, globally), not cases in which we admire a person for something specific (such as a great achievement or an excellent quality). Archer and Matheson 1

K. Pacovská (*) Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_3

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A sober, disenchanted observer will, of course, dismiss such admiration for its lack of objectivity. What you admire, she will say, is an idealised image: you exaggerate the positive qualities and overlook the defects. The object of your admiration is an illusion, not reality. You are putting her on a pedestal. But let us consider the possibility that my judgement is correct. What if I happen to have a really excellent, talented friend, or what if I happen to be in love with someone really great and wonderful, a person who rightfully deserves admiration? Is not admiration the proper response to such a fantastic personality? At this point, the philosophy of love offers an important lesson: whether in admiration or love, it is not possible to ground a relationship on just positive qualities, however excellent, because any such conception ends up with well-documented problems. Imagine you meet another person with similar or even more excellent qualities: you will have to form a relationship with her as well or trade your former friend for the better person. In a similar vein, if your excellent partner loses her excellent qualities, your relationship to her is no longer justified (see, for example, Jollimore 2011, 15–18). I believe that this holds true for admiration: if the object of admiration is, for whatever reason, no longer seen as excellent, the emotion loses its ground.3 The ensuing transformation of the relationship is difficult and often lapses into the opposite of admiration, into bitter disappointment and contempt.4 That is why there is a good reason for the admired person to fear the loss of admiration, a topic I will return to in the chapter. It remains the case, nevertheless, that my talented friend or wonderful lover can be the proper object of both admiration and love, and what is more, these responses can come from one and the same person. Can a person affect the response she evokes, or is it entirely in the hands of the other? And if the former is the case, as I will claim here, does she always opt for love on the basis that admiration is so unreliable? Many authors have expressed their strong belief that love, contrary to admiration, should survive any changes in the beloved (see, for example, Rorty 1986 and Jollimore 2011, 17–18). One of the reasons they give is that love does not depend on a belief in the other’s excellence. In an important way, love tracks reality. In love, we see and accept the beloved such as she is, including her defects, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Indeed, following Iris Murdoch’s account, Troy Jollimore makes a case for an even stronger claim that it is only through love that we can see the other person truthfully. In his view, love is both discerning, in that it sees the individual’s qualities and defects, and accepting, in that it does not scorn or judge the defects. With such non-judgemental acceptance, love – at least, the best kind of love – sees

(2021) rightly argue that not all admiration is global in the way that is important in the context of public figures. I believe, nevertheless, that personal admiration is an important kind of admiration that deserves special attention. One of its characteristics is that personal admiration can ground a relationship with the person admired – hence its closeness to love. 3  Archer and Matheson (2020, 669–670) take that as an unproblematic claim for admiration concerning character traits. 4  Importantly, sometimes this is not the case, and change in the admired person can provoke a change in the admirer. See Pacovská (2014, part 4), in which I describe such a transformation from admiration to love and from pride to humility in Mrs. Bulstrode.

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the beloved such as she is, cares for the beloved such as she is and allows her to thrive such as she is.5 In this way, love involves openness, intimacy and sharing. But it also involves nakedness, exposure and vulnerability. As opposed to admiration, which focuses on only the aspects that please us, love does not look away from what is unpleasant, shameful and painful, and offers acceptance and compassion. Moreover, contrary to admiration, love expects to be accepted and sympathised with in return. Love is thus much more difficult than admiration. This is true for the lover and, importantly, very often also for the beloved. The choice of the latter whether to evoke love or admiration is thus not clear, and striving for admiration can be a powerful temptation. The power of this temptation can best be illustrated by people with undeniable qualities and excellent achievements for which they are admired or maybe even famous. Such people often have trouble coming to terms with what they see as their own imperfection, weakness, failure or misfortune, which makes it difficult for them to accept love and compassion, and so they go for admiration instead. In this chapter, I will try to show how such preference for admiration can become a life strategy that can have disastrous consequences not only for one’s relationships but for one’s life as a whole. Moreover, it brings a moral hazard, one that Wittgenstein tried to capture in his caution, “Try to be loved & not-admired”.6 I will focus here on two great, admirable yet unfortunate literary figures: King Lear from Shakespeare’s eponymous play and Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Lear is a great and powerful king; Lily is a great beauty of New York high society. In spite of their different background and context, there are interesting similarities in their stories: both are successful and greatly admired. At the same time, we meet both at the end of their respective “career”, facing the decline of their admired qualities: the mental and physical weakness of old age for Lear, the loss of her bloom at the limit of marriageable age for Lily. Both stories depict their protagonist’s struggle, at the end of which they die a premature and (probably) self-inflicted death. Building on Stanley Cavell’s study of King Lear in his “Avoidance of Love”, I will claim that their tragic deaths have a similar cause: avoidance of love out of shame and trading love for admiration. My interpretation of Lily’s story furthers Cavell’s point in that it brings in the concept of admiration and elaborates on the moral aspect of adopting this as a life strategy. In part one, I consider Cavell’s analysis of King Lear and his interpretation of the opening scene: Cavell claims that Lear acts out of shame for his declining abilities and that his attempt to cover them contravenes the demands of love. I attribute his fear of love to his fear of vulnerability and loss of control, disadvantages that admiration evades. In part two, I turn to Lily Bart, first by considering the nature of the admiration she elicits. I point out that it is in tension with prevailing accounts of admiration because admiration of beauty is not based on praiseworthy achievement and is not motivational. I also suggest that admiration, contrary to love, can be

 Jollimore (2011); Furtak (2018, 151–153); see also Pacovská (2018, parts 4–6).  Wittgenstein (1998, 44), see also Kronqvist (2019).

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manipulated by appearances, something that Lily has mastered to perfection. The other side of the coin, however, is that such a strategy prevents Lily from engaging in a loving relationship. In the third part, I show in more detail how her habits of maintaining admiration and a lack of openness sabotage her relationship with Lawrence Selden. The final part recounts the story of Lily’s decline, which differs from Lear’s in an important way. Just before her death, Lily undergoes a profound transformation and comes to see the value of love. This change is connected with a moral change that saves her from moral fall, even though it comes too late to save her life. Lily’s story thus shows that the tension between admiration and love is rooted in a person’s value orientation and has significant moral implications.

1  Cavell on the Avoidance of Love Cavell’s original interpretation of the opening scene (the “abdication scene”) of King Lear connects shame, the avoidance of recognition and the avoidance of love. In this well-known scene, King Lear devises an embarrassing spectacle for his three daughters, asking them to publicly express their love for him in exchange for land and power. The two older daughters play the game, act the part of devoted offspring and receive their dowries. The youngest, Lear’s most beloved Cordelia, cannot do the same and thus triggers Lear’s wrath.7 He denies her dowry and banishes her. Cordelia cannot concede to such a false game, in spite of being the daughter who truly loves her father. But, as Cavell (2002, 290) points out, by refusing to play, she inadvertently exposes Lear. Exposure, however, is what shame fears most, and this is why Lear responds with such extreme rage (287). But what is Lear ashamed of? Cavell claims that Lear’s shame, the motive for his extraordinary behaviour, is actually very ordinary: it is the shame of an ageing man for the loss of his power and greatness, and for the belief that this loss makes him unlovable (288). The disastrous dimension of the consequences is proportionate to the dimension of greatness and power at stake: Lear is abdicating from the throne of one of the greatest empires in Europe. It is natural to wonder who the man Lear is when he takes off his crown, and to see why he should be terrified to be suddenly exposed as a mortal (289).8 It is not uncommon that ageing and retirement challenge a person’s identity, at a time when one has to come to terms with one’s fragility, vulnerability and loss of standing.9 Very often, this challenge crystallises in relation to one’s children, because of the switch of roles it implies: those who were being protected and taken care of become those who protect and take care.

 Compare Holiday (2018), who interprets her refusal as a paradigmatic case of moral incapacity.  See also Montes Sánchez (2014, 79), who attributes Lear’s shame to his identification with his role as king. 9  For an insightful discussion of Nussbaum’s (2017) view of retirement, see Hämäläinen (2019). 7 8

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But Lear cannot face the challenge and come to terms with his weakened position. He is profoundly ashamed of it. The opening scene is thus, according to Cavell, designed to hide his true, mortal self, the self he does not approve of. Here and thereafter his “dominating motivation” is, in Cavell’s (2002, 274) terms, “to avoid being recognized” (Cavell’s emphasis). Thus, in his interpretation of Lear, Cavell uniquely links two aspects of human psychology: one’s attitude to oneself and one’s relationship to others. Lear’s shame, his inability to accept himself, is reflected in his inability to let himself be accepted by others, which manifests in his avoidance of love. To push the point further: since he cannot love himself, he cannot have others love him. At this point, we could point out that shame and the avoidance of love are surely not the inevitable fate of all ageing people: as I mentioned earlier, and as Cordelia’s persistent love illustrates, the capacity to (perhaps gradually) accommodate change and the loss of qualities is a characteristic of both love and self-love. There is therefore something wrong with Lear’s idea of love and self-love. The problem is, of course, that it is based on qualities: Cavell (2002, 289) says that Lear “feels unworthy of love” when “the reality of lost power comes over him”. Losing his greatness, power, strength, all his qualities, he thinks he is “too wretched to deserve love” (Montes Sánchez 2014, 83). At the same time, he feels ashamed and “wards off” all sympathy and compassion by refusing other people’s tears for him: “Do not let me see what you are weeping for”, as Cavell puts it (Cavell 2002, 289). But Lear’s attitude to love in this later, wretched stage reflects also his conception of love before his fall. It is my claim that his idea of love is mixed up with that of admiration. I would like to suggest that what Lear really wants and seeks is admiration and not love, because admiration does not deprive him of a sense of control in the way love would. Admiration and love engage the control, dependency and vulnerability of the person subject to these emotions in very different ways. This difference is well illustrated by Montes Sánchez’s interpretation of Lear’s motive for avoiding love (2014, 82–83). She claims that his ultimate motive is fear. Accepting love would mean accepting the vulnerability that love brings, which is something Lear cannot bear. In his well-known account of love’s vulnerability, Velleman (1999, 361) emphasises the direct dependence of one’s emotional states on the beloved’s well-being, which derives from one’s care for the beloved.10 Montes Sánchez (2014, 82–83) points to an even deeper sense, namely, the fear of being rejected: opening oneself to the other, not hiding one’s weaknesses, insufficiencies and needs, carries the risk of not being accepted. People who are ashamed of their weaknesses are naturally prone to such fear. In opening oneself to love, one becomes vulnerable in one’s deepest self. In this way, Lear is terrified that once his daughters and his subjects see him as an old man, without his crown, they will dislike what they see and reject him as he rejects himself: “He cannot bear love when he has no reason to be

 Furtak (2018, 150) points to yet another sense of vulnerability connected with the other’s difference, separateness and difficulty of understanding.

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loved, perhaps because of the helplessness, passiveness which that implies, which some take for impotence” (Cavell 2002, 289). Such vulnerability is of the kind that cannot be avoided or mastered: “Love is dangerous because it places us at the mercy of specific others” (Montes Sánchez 2014, 86). For people who are used to being in control, such as powerful kings, this surely is frightening. One way of assuming control is by bribing the beloved. Another, more intricate way is to opt for love as admiration. Admiration is based on desert, and that gives a sense of security to those who do deserve it or to those who can “keep up appearances”. Finally, admiration is an asymmetrical and typically one-sided emotion: being admired does not call for any specific emotional response in return and thus does not induce any emotional vulnerability in the admired party. The one who is admired is thus proof of the profound fear of rejection we indicated above. This brings us to one important aspect of love that we have so far neglected, because Cavell mentions it only briefly. Love, unlike admiration, is  – at least in Cavell’s view  – reciprocal. Opening oneself to be loved at the same time means opening oneself to loving. Lear’s avoidance of self-recognition is connected with his unwillingness to recognise others (Cavell 2002, 274). Montes Sánchez (2014, 86) points out that Lear also has difficulty returning love: “[T]he wretchedness of the other is no less terrifying. […] love places on us a claim that demands a response, a responsibility. Love places others at our mercy, and that can be overwhelming.” Being loved and accepted generates a reciprocal demand to love and accept the other such as she is: free, unpredictable, but also imperfect. It means exposing oneself to vulnerability, redirecting attention from oneself to the other. Whereas being admired is safe, easy and pleasant, being loved is unsafe, difficult and occasionally painful. And yet failing to embrace love and opting for admiration can have disastrous consequences. In Lear’s case, the disaster is political as well as personal. Lily Bart’s case is personal, but even for her, avoiding love means ruining her life. Lear’s story shows that there are psychologically subtle ways in which a person can, by her behaviour, affect whether she will be admired or loved – subtler than the more obvious ways, such as bragging and showing off. The example of Lily Bart shows in more detail the strategies to invite admiration and exposes them as embodied in a certain way of life, a way of life shared by her social group that is governed by materialistic and hedonistic values.

2  Lily Bart and the Admiration of Beauty Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, is an extraordinarily beautiful and charming young member of American high society. As expected of girls in her situation, she is in search of a wealthy and well-connected husband. Such a marriage would be both the crowning success of her career and the end of her very serious financial difficulties. But even though Lily has mastered all the relevant skills and manages with ease to charm the chosen target, every time a man

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is about to propose marriage, she unwittingly sabotages the match. We come to know that this has been happening for 11  years and that Lily now faces her last chance. Unfortunately, her resolve to marry into wealth falters when she meets an old friend, Lawrence Selden, who is interesting and attractive, though a relatively poor man. She tells him (and herself) right away that she cannot marry him for financial reasons, but her growing feeling for him makes her realise the stark conflict between the values of her elegant yet superficial and materialistic social milieu, and the more genuine value of authentic human relationships. But this is not only a conflict of values as such, it is a genuine conflict within her values. Selden represents the world of inwardness, authenticity and honesty, and Lily’s growing love for him awakens the moral aspect of her character. Yet she is too deeply influenced by the values of her society. She was brought up for an elegant life that she professes she needs. She has not only mastered its rules but has, with exquisite taste, impersonated them to perfection. She is not only pretty and well behaved, but everything about her is charming and glamorous. All her movements are elegant, all her conversation is entertaining and witty, her manners perfectly attuned to the situation. She plays a perfect part in the social game, that of a beautiful woman whose role is to please. The pleasure she conveys is mostly aesthetic: she is an artist whose aesthetic product is herself and her performance. Her achievement culminates in her genial impersonation of the portrait of Mrs. Lloyd during a performance of tableaus vivants, which earns her tremendous applause and marks the high point of her short romance with Selden. Several critics take the performance as proof of Lily’s “desire to be an art object” and of her own tendency to objectify herself (for example, Tyson 1992, 4). I will not pursue this theme here. Instead, I track the connection between Lily’s aesthetic ambition and the search for admiration, leading eventually to the avoidance of love. But first, I want to highlight several aspects of admiration revealed by Lily’s case. First, beauty and art in general are natural objects of admiration, as is the beauty of a person. Chappell (2019) argues, against Zagzebski’s (2017) attempt to limit admiration to moral cases, that artistic genius and sporting heroism are undeniable arresting wonders that we admire. I believe that romantic admiration extends the domain of admiration even further. Focusing primarily on a genius achievement or grand victory gives only a one-sided picture of admiration, one that does not fit the ordinary (yet no less miraculous) experience of romantic admiration and falling in love in which beauty, and not any praiseworthy achievement or talent of another person, plays a crucial role.11 Yet the admiration of art and natural beauty offer important lessons about the admiration of people. Beauty has the ability to attract our attention and give us joy entirely independent of our motives and actions. The primary reaction to beauty is joyful contemplation, not action. Such contemplation is connected with

 Admiration is unique among reactive attitudes (next to, for example, respect and esteem) in being able to respond to beauty, natural and artificial. Hence its connection to erós.

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self-­forgetfulness on the one hand and respectful distance on the other.12 Similar to the admiration for a beautiful piece of art, the admiration of a beautiful person does not imply a desire for interaction because the person is admired from a distance, from the position of a spectator. Indeed, Tyson (1992, 4) argues that to be admired “from afar” is exactly what Lily wants, and Tyson mentions her avoidance of touch and all bodily contact as a proof of her fear of bodily love. I think Tyson is probably right, even though she overlooks Lily’s avoidance of touch in a less literal sense, to which I will return in a while. Second, I want to stress the problematic relation of admiration to appearance. The problem is prominent in the split between the public and private personas of stars and celebrities. Yet the difference between who we are and how we present ourselves to others often manifests in personal relationships as well. In many instances in her novel, Wharton suggests the theatrical quality of Lily’s behaviour, a kind of tastefully measured calculation of effect. Indeed, when Lily asks Selden why he has come to see her, he responds half-teasingly: “Because you’re such a wonderful spectacle” (Wharton 2002, 58). Lily’s theatre does not only concern her elegant manners. Even her conversation has a tinge of play-acting designed to entertain: she is full of playful flirtation, witty remarks and little games. She speaks quite openly about her difficult situation, but she always makes a little show of it. Of course, one does not confide one’s difficulties if the point of one’s conversation is to give pleasure and induce (or maintain) admiration. Lily has to keep up appearances, even though this increasingly means covering up the truth.13 Yet, as in King Lear, admiration can feed on appearances, but love cannot. This is shown in Lily’s relationship with Selden.

3  Lily’s Avoidance of Love To a certain extent, Lily stops playing her part when she is with Selden, because she thinks she cannot marry him anyway. She feels free with him, she can “be herself”: they smoke cigarettes together, but they also talk frankly about the problematic values of Lily’s social circle. For Lily, it is a discovery that it is possible to actually enjoy someone’s company and conversation, that one can share interests, pursuits, even ideas. She blooms during their meetings, and she also draws moral strength

 This topic has been emphasised by many Platonic authors, most prominently by Weil (2002, 149–150), Kierkegaard (1991, 233, 241) and Murdoch (1970, 5). For a recent interpretation of this account in connection with love, see Pacovská (2018, part 4). Contemplative admiration of beauty presents a good counterexample to the accounts claiming that admiration involves motivation to specific action, namely, to imitate the admired exemplar (Zagzebski 2017). Even though this account has been criticised (Chappell 2019; Compaijen 2017; Archer 2019), the tendency to seek a specific motivational force in admiration persists. 13  See Manne (2014) for a penetrating account of how editing appearances can become a life strategy that counts as manipulation. 12

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from Selden, thanks to his own value orientation and to his professed faith in her higher self (Wharton 2002, 280). And it is exactly this spontaneous enjoyment and the glimpses of an authentic Lily that make Selden change his attitude of disinterested spectator and fall in love with Lily. But Lily’s spontaneity is limited to sharing her joy, which is as far as their intimacy goes. When it comes to serious things, she avoids true confidence by intricate means. During both their initial meetings, Lily tells Selden about her tricky situation in society with surprising frankness and self-reflection. But there is no real confidence in her account, since she frames it with witticisms, irony and generalisations to lighten it up. She even tells him, with unexpected self-consciousness, of her acute need for true friends (8), but, again, this is only a game of intimacy; she is not fully serious in her pleading. Thus, she does not allow him truly to connect. But, more importantly, she does not allow him to know her enough to trust her later. In particular, she does not tell Selden (or anybody else) about her debts and about the large sums of money that she was receiving from Gus Trenor, who has tricked her into thinking that it was the proceeds from an investment. When Trenor tries to extract his reward from Lily the day after the tableaus vivants, she is deeply shocked and resolves to repay all the money when she receives her inheritance. Yet when Selden sees her leaving Trenor’s house late at night, he becomes jealous and begins to doubt her character. He starts to believe the rumours about her, turns away from her and leaves the country disillusioned. Similar to King Lear, Lily is afraid of true intimacy and love in which her real fears and worries would be visible. Lear makes a public show to cover them up, Lily’s show is more private, but its consequences are similarly disastrous. Lily’s increasing stress about her debts affects her sleep. In the second part of the novel, which covers Lily’s decline, her situation worsens as a result of a string of misfortunes: Lily is cast out of her social circle due to a plot by her social enemy, Bertha Dorset, and her aunt disinherits her because she believes the rumours spread by Bertha. Lily is less and less able to deal with her anxiety and exhaustion due to an increasing lack of sleep. After the final breakdown of communication with Selden in the critical Chap. 9, she starts avoiding her friends and develops a habit of taking the sedative chloral to help her sleep, an overdose of which eventually kills her. In her last stream of consciousness before she dies, a sense of deep loneliness prevails even over the hopelessness of her material situation (279). Lily’s habits of maintaining illusion, admiration and distance thus prevent her from entering an authentic relationship that could have prevented her fall.

4  Moral Change There is a difference between Lear’s and Lily’s stories of misfortune. Lear does not come to change under the weight of his terrible fate and terrible suffering. Even though he eventually recognises Cordelia, he does not admit his fault (Cavell 2002, 296–297; Gehring 2020, 10–13). Lily, on the other hand, undergoes a significant

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transformation at the end of her journey in which she finally realises the value of love, even if it is too late. In Chaps. 8 and 9, in which Lily takes a dubious job as Mrs. Hatch’s secretary, she still clings to her former values and invests all her energy into regaining her position in society. As her friend Gerty points out, “Lily was not one of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost” (Wharton 2002, 230). It is in these critical chapters that she breaks off relations with Gerty and Selden, who submits to Gerty’s bidding and unwillingly comes to warn Lily after three months of separation. When the job at Mrs. Hatch’s fails and Lily is forced to work as a milliner, she is left with one last option to return to society. Earlier, Lily came into possession of several compromising letters that Bertha Dorset had written to Selden when they were having an affair, Lily could use these letters to pressure Bertha to reintroduce her into society and thus regain her social standing. As her situation grows more hopeless, the dilemma of whether to use the letters or not becomes more and more pressing. To Lily, the letters come to symbolise moral compromise, the final seal on her wicked character. Moreover, because of their connection with Selden, she feels that using them would be a betrayal of their friendship. Yet, other options having failed, she is left with only this solution, and so she decides to put aside moral scruples and pursue it (265). On the way to realising her unsavoury plan, she is diverted from it by love. She promptly sets off to pay a visit to Bertha, but as she passes Selden’s street, the sudden recollection of him fills Lily with shame: “She seemed suddenly to see her action as he would see it.” She forgets about the letters and, thinking about how unfair she had been to him at their last meeting, feverishly turns to pay him a visit. It is at this final, almost delirious meeting with Selden that she casts off her scruples, finally opens up to him and tries ardently to express her innermost self: how important his help has been for her, and how it is thanks to him that she has “saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life” (269). In this moment of lucidity and decision, fortified by his presence, she sees clearly that she has killed his love, but she also finally sees her love for him and the meaning this love has for her life. Absorbed in their conversation, she realises the letters are in her pocket. When Selden turns away to fetch more wood, she hurriedly throws them into the fire. It is clear in the novel that the sudden and intense moral transformation that Lily undergoes when she sees Selden’s front door is connected to her acceptance of love.14 She would not have dropped her intention if she had not realised Selden’s importance for her life. At the same time, once she embraces her love and knocks on Selden’s door, it is impossible for her to pursue her former intention. Without thinking, she burns the letters. By the almost random fact of having to walk along Selden’s street, her former hesitation and indecision are overcome and the immoral alternative suddenly appears impossible.15  In a similar vein, Furtak (2019) describes Raskolnikov’s moral regeneration as connected with his ability to love. 15  In Pacovská (2019), I show in more detail a similar process of character unification through the experience of moral impossibility. 14

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Yet the tragedy of Lily’s story is that her transformation comes too late. She saves her moral integrity but not her life, since by her previous decision, she has irretrievably lost Selden’s love, and she knows that she is not strong enough to live without his support. That the transformation does not occasion any miraculous redemption is clear from Lily’s ruminations as she returns home and her former elation fades: “But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses – she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate” (280). It is one thing to make the right decision and quite another to live with it, and it is one of Wharton’s deep messages that life’s possibilities are limited not only by different quality of will but also by habit and the way of life one has been brought up into. That is why Wharton’s depiction of Lily is never moralistic.16 This point can be pushed a little bit further, though. I started my analysis by saying that the conflict between admiration and love is most prominent when it comes to admirable people, people of great talent, achievement, excellent qualities or beauty. Since they possess these admirable qualities, and the admiration of others is the appropriate response to these, admiration is part of their life in a way that it is not for ordinary people. This brings special challenges and trials that the admired are not necessarily able to meet. Lily Bart is a good example: her extraordinary beauty leads her into situations, such as Gus Trenor’s trick, that an average girl would not face. In order to face them, she would have to possess extraordinary moral integrity and strength, which she does not have. Without any family to back her up, and having failed to find a soul mate, she is “swept like a stray” from her life (279).17

5  Conclusion There are several moral issues connected with the desire for admiration. It seems to be one of the self-seeking motives, similar to the desire for fame, that we associate with the vice of vanity or, if it takes a pathological turn, with narcissism. The moral aspect I have considered in this chapter is somewhat different since it concerns the role of admiration in grounding personal relationships. Building on Cavell’s study of King Lear, I showed how in personal relationships, invoking admiration can serve as a means to avoid love by presenting a more pleasant and safer option. The tragic example of Lily Bart shows in more detail how admiration and love present different life strategies, life strategies that have a clear moral bearing. In Lily’s case, they take the shape of moral alternatives that crystallise into a moral dilemma, in

 See Phillips (1982, 26–28) for a similar point.  In a more moralistic way, Winch (1972) uses the example of Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” to show how admiration and fame can gradually externalise one’s motives. See Pacovská (2020) for a more detailed elaboration.

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which the way of admiration is the morally hazardous one. Lily’s final moral decision is at the same time a decision to embrace love. Admiration as a strategy in personal relationships does not present a temptation for everybody. It can be a relevant consideration that one is already an object of admiration on account of one’s excellent qualities or achievements. Since receiving admiration is easier than receiving love, one can incline to the former. But my focus on Lear and Lily shows that there can be a deeper reason for preferring admiration, namely, one’s inability to come to terms with oneself. Admiration attracts such a person because she fears the exposition of her weaknesses, flaws and vulnerabilities, exposition that love and compassion necessarily entail. Even though I focused on Lear and Lily, who are both admirable characters, the tendency to ground one’s worth on qualities, and to fear one’s weaknesses, is not limited to these imposing figures. The temptation of admiration is thus not limited to them either. Part of my mission has been to show that there are techniques to invoke and sustain admiration, which can become a life habit that prevents or at least obstructs love. What I have not addressed here is the perspective of the other party, of those who love or admire. Is there a clash between these attitudes? Is it possible to love while admiring, or does admiration stand in the way of love? That remains to be seen.18

References Archer, Alfred. 2019. Admiration and motivation. Emotion Review 11: 140–150. Archer, Alfred, and Benjamin Matheson. 2020. Admiration over time. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12324. ———. 2021. Honouring and admiring the immoral: An ethical guide. London: Routledge. Cavell, Stanley. 2002. The avoidance of love. In Must we mean what we say?: A book of essays, 2nd ed., 267–354. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chappell, Sophie-Grace. 2019. No more heroes any more? In The moral psychology of admiration, ed. Alfred Archer and André Grahle, 11–28. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Compaijen, Rob. 2017. Recognizing and emulating exemplars. Ethical Perspectives 24: 569–593. Furtak, Rick A. 2018. Knowing emotions: Truthfulness and recognition in affective experience. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. Love, suffering, and gratitude for existence: Moral and existential emotions in Crime and Punishment. In Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment: Philosophical perspectives, ed. Robert Guay, 46–69. Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature. New  York: Oxford University Press. Gehring, Stephanie. 2020. Attention, avoidance, and tragedy: What Simone Weil could have said about King Lear if she had read Stanley Cavell. Religion & Literature 51.3–52.1: 1–21.

 Work on this paper was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic).

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Hämäläinen, Nora. 2019. Work, aging and justice. In Martha Nussbaum: Ancient philosophy, civic education and liberal humanism, ed. Anders Burman and Synne Myrebøe, 127–146. Södertörn Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History 1, Södertörn Academic Studies 77. Holiday, David A. 2018. Cordelia’s moral incapacity in King Lear. In Stanley Cavell on aesthetic understanding, ed. Garry L. Hagberg, 75–108. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1991. Practice in Christianity. Trans. H. and E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2019. Review of new critical thinking: What Wittgenstein offered by Sean Wilson. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8 (1–2): 248–252. Manne, Kate. 2014. Non-Machiavellian manipulation and the opacity of motive. In Manipulation: Theory and practice, ed. Christian Coons and Michael Weber, 221–245. New York: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The sovereignty of good over other concepts. In The sovereignty of good, 77–104. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, Martha C., and Saul Levmore. 2017. Aging thoughtfully. New  York: Oxford University Press. Pacovská, Kamila. 2014. Loving villains: Virtue in response to wrongdoing. In Love and its objects, ed. C. Maurer, T. Milligan, and K. Pacovská, 125–139. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Love and the pitfall of moralism. Philosophy 93: 231–249. ———. 2019. Moral character and the significance of action: Judging Dmitri Karamazov. Philosophical Investigations 42: 333–349. ———. 2020. Wanting to be better: On the self-defeating character of moral perfection. In Ethics, society and politics: Themes from the philosophy of Peter Winch, Nordic Wittgenstein studies, ed. M. Campbell and L. Reid, vol. 6, 167–182. Cham: Springer. Phillips, Dewi Z. 1982. Allegiance and change in morality: A study in contrasts. In Through a darkening glass: Philosophy, literature, and cultural change, 9–29. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. 1986. The historicity of psychological attitudes: Love is not love which alters not when it alteration finds. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 399–412. Sánchez, Alba Montez. 2014. Shame, recognition and love in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Azafea: Revista de Filosofía 16: 73–93. Tyson, Lois. 1992. Beyond morality: Lily Bart, Lawrence Selden and the aesthetic commodity in The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton Review 9 (2): 3–10. Velleman, J. David. 1999. Love as a moral emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. Weil, Simone. 2002. Gravity and grace. Trans. E.  Craufurd and M. von der Ruhr. London: Routledge. Wharton, Edith. 2002. The house of mirth. Ware: Wordsworth Classics. Winch, Peter. 1972. Moral integrity. In Ethics and action, 171–192. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and value. 2nd ed. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. 2017. Exemplarist moral theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Kamila Pacovská is a philosopher working on ethics and moral psychology. She is a Deputy Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. She is the author of the monograph Vina, láska, náhoda ([Guilt, Love, Luck] Nakladatelství Pavel Mervart, 2018) and many international articles, such as “Remorse and Selflove” (The Journal of Ethics, 2021) and “Love and the Pitfall of Moralism” (Philosophy, 2018). In 2018 she was awarded the Young Scientist Award by the Learned Society of the Czech Republic for excellent work in the field of philosophy and ethics.  

Mortal Longings Tony Milligan

1  Ethics in the Wittgensteinian Tradition One of the characteristic features of ethics in a broadly Wittgensteinian tradition is a concern with our mortality, although this is more evident in works that are influenced by Wittgenstein than in his own fragmentary texts. It is particularly clear in texts that look towards synergies between Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. It is there in Stanley Cavell (1979) and Rush Rhees (1999); it is there in Raimond Gaita’s deliberations about goodness and our common humanity (Gaita 2004); it is there again in Iris Murdoch, in both the directly philosophical texts and the novels (Milligan 2007); and it is there in David Cockburn as well, together with a sense of the importance of time and our temporality (1997, 2010). Mortality and temporality are themes that help to bridge the differences between Wittgensteinian-influenced work on ethics and traditions other than analytic philosophy. The same themes are ready to hand in Heidegger, and they shape texts from the Kyoto school, and the sources that inspired them, e.g. Dōgen’s Uji/“Being-Time”. Connections between Wittgenstein and these kindred traditions have been well noted, by George Wrisley (2012) and Rein Raud (2021) among others. When Wittgensteinians who know their Dōgen meet, it can be a little like a family reunion, without the friction and the wrong sort of drunkenness. A multiplicity of things are shared across these traditions: a concern for lineage; a series of themes bound up with time and mortality; and a family resemblance shaped by philosophical sensibility, by an attitude towards what it is that good philosophy can do. Another way of making the point would be to say that these are traditions in which depth is viewed as more important than formalism. A vaguely confessional text (such as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) may T. Milligan (*) Cosmological Visionaries (COSMOVIS) project, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_4

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disclose more than one mimicking a mathematical proof. However, what is shown is liable to be deep in a particular way. Not in a way that involves something hidden but through a concern for matters that are difficult to articulate, yet they are situated at the heart of what we are and how we live our lives. On this approach, articulation itself becomes a major task, one that stands up on its own rather than simply operating as a prelude to argument (Taylor 1992, 5–8). A concern for depth, and the difficulty of articulating it, spreads across these kindred traditions, but with a sense that what is to be said concerns something out in the open, or not concealed until we begin to theorise about it. At which point a great deal of concealment or loss (Forsberg 2013) becomes possible. If we are good Wittgensteinians, or even good students of Dōgen, there will be a sense in which we accept that none of the things that really matter to being human are hidden (Dōgen 1995; Wittgenstein 1984, §435), but for various reasons it remains difficult to speak about them in non-­evasive ways. Mortality and love are like this. Their importance sits out in the open. The upshot of such sensibilities, and the concern with articulation of what is deep, is that those who write in these traditions tend to avoid an over-valorisation of fearless but utterly unrealistic thinking (Gaita 2004, ch. 17). Familiar examples from our own times include the argument that the universe is probably a simulation, that it is wrong to bring other humans into being, and that all value bearers are equal, all sentients are value bearers, and so the killing of annoying relatives is morally equivalent to the killing of wasps. These are arguments of a sort that we do not present, even in the name of courageously going against the stream. Rather, our focus tends to drift elsewhere. In line with the search for synergies with Weil, the kinds of things written about in the kindred traditions include mortality and love. This is a perceived area of strength among Wittgensteinian-influenced authors, and among others too. Others who are closer to the analytic tradition but who draw upon Weil, Iris Murdoch or both. Examples include David Velleman (1999) and Troy Jollimore (2011). My own work in the area of love (Milligan 2011) is similarly marked by the influence of both Murdoch and Wittgenstein. Weil is also more comfortable with Christianity and seems to have a far better feel for it than I could claim. It is a religion that I find both deep and perplexing, particularly on matters concerning love and, again, our mortality. Christianity tends to contextualise love by appeal to some manner of immortal longing, which does sound correct, for various familiar sorts of love. I am not sure that I could even begin to understand the many and deep insights into love that are to be found in St Teresa of Avila or in St John of the Cross without acceptance that such an immortal longing is both real and familiar. And, again, the latter of these authors is an important reference point for Weil and Murdoch. Often, we all seem to find something important in the same place. Yet there are important loves that do not fit at all well with the immortal-longings idea. Indeed, it may be difficult to even begin to understand certain kinds of love without recognising their acceptance of mortality, and the longing for something resolutely mortal, finite and transitory that they involve. What follows below will be an exercise in attending to love of this sort, with the attention in question shaped by philosophical sensibilities that are recognisably Wittgensteinian-influenced.

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2  Ways of Thinking About Love It is tempting to say that love is one kind of thing or one kind of relationship. But this introduces the risk of an essentialism about love, a failure to recognise that we use the concept in different ways, to perform multiple tasks. We speak about love in the context of intimate concern for others; in political contexts, as patriotism (love of one’s country); in situations that involve erotic desire. I do not wish to suggest that there are no continuities or uniformities across the situations in question. Indeed, I suspect that there are many features of love that are common across them, and across many other contexts: belief in the uniqueness of the love object; the presence of a history of care; a certain patterning of desires (such that many other desires come to be conditional upon one’s love); and various dispositions concerning feelings and emotional responses more generally. And I am far from denying the insightfulness of accounts of love that do attempt to distil it down to some sort of inner core, a song that remains the same while the singers and orchestration may vary. However, I do want to draw out some problems with a particular kind of essentialism about love, one that connects love too closely to religious notions of transcendence. But in doing so, I am challenging a way of connecting these things, rather than their standing as important. There are many ways of thinking about love in terms of transcendence, in terms of reaching beyond. Exactly what it is that we reach beyond is, of course, another matter. On an approach that is simultaneously demanding and undemanding, love helps us to transcend the ego. Or it aspires to do so. It reaches out beyond egocentricity or selfishness. As a qualification, these two are not always the same. Preoccupation with self is not the same as greed. It may instead be sacrificial but still self-preoccupied. For convenience, we may also set aside the idea of a proper, appropriate self-love as an inconvenience to be dealt with on some other occasion. The idea that love undermines the ego does not obviously entail the idea that all forms of self-love are thereby ruled out. This transcendence of the ego approach is undemanding in the sense that it does not require an appeal to any special ontology, or to views about the real existence of Good or a God. Love does not need to join us together in spiritual union with perfection, with a perfect being, or with an ideal Good. It requires only that we are what we are: care-worthy but flawed beings. At the same time, it is demanding precisely because we are what we are: our egocentricity turns out to be intractable. Even our best attempts to rein it in end with what Iris Murdoch has called a fairly honourable defeat (Murdoch 1970). We can hold egocentricity in check, up to a point, but we can never entirely go beyond it. Love is part of a struggle against a relentless ego that never quite lets go because it too is partly constitutive of what we are. Talk about love and transcendence is also often bound up with a second and different approach: love involves (in the notorious phrase from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra) an “immortal longing” of the sort alluded to in the opening comments. A desire to overcome our limitations, which may ultimately be understood as our finitude, mortality, even our humanity, and instead to connect with God or with

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some idealised notion of moral goodness. Not just moral goodness, but an idealised notion of it as perfected. Some or all of our many ways of loving are then best understood as spiritual strivings. In St Augustine’s terms, “our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine 2008, 3), or in the relevant idealised equivalent. And, of course, these spiritual strivings can be mistaken for something else. Cases of mistaken identity may even be the norm, especially in a world where open appeals to spiritual strivings are awkwardly situated within public discourse. Kierkegaard, in Works of Love (1847), and Simone Weil, in Waiting for God (1943), both argued for this mistaken-identity theory. Both claimed that love for others, who are clearly very flawed, is really a confused and indirect way of loving God, who is without flaw. Alternatively, and perhaps more in line with Kierkegaard than Weil, we might think of love as a matter of seeing the hand of God in others. And this is what we are drawn towards when we are drawn towards them. This is a story about love and transcendence that is rarely if ever separate from talk about love and the transcendence of the ego. Again, the ego must be resisted or overcome, but not just in order to connect up with others who are equally mortal and flawed or, in the terms of classical tragedy, creatures of a day, like ourselves. Rather, the overcoming of the ego clears a pathway to God or to a religious void. God may or may not sit somewhere on the other side. This second and more Augustinian tradition has a certain kind of intuitive appeal. If anything has spiritual significance, then surely love does so. And perhaps we need not worry too much about presupposed ontologies (about actual divine beings or real, separate, perfect Good). We may readily psychologise what is going on, and regard these objects of love as regulative ideas of reason, or as reality principles, or as something else that makes other aspects of life come out better than they otherwise would. Love can then be variously understood as part of a spiritual pilgrimage towards moral perfection or as a more covert form of egocentricity rather than as a genuine overcoming of the latter. There is a more elevated sort of love, and a bargain-­basement love. The options for interpretation are multiple, some more optimistic, some more pessimistic. And so too are the concerns. If love is thought of in terms of an immortal longing, a reaching out towards an incorruptible ideal, where then do we situate the real and far from the ideal people that love more obviously seems to be about? If love is truly an immortal longing, where do all the mortals go? A quick and easy solution, the classic Platonic one that we find especially in the Phaedrus, is that others are companions in erotic ascent. They have their own upward pilgrimage to take care of, but for various reasons progress requires us to team up. A little like partners in the Wild West, with each partner in search of something a little different and beyond the other, something that eludes both as individuals or in combination. Others are not then simply a pathway to something more important. They are not loved only because they may hold our hand in the dark, or because of some particular property that they bear. That particular view of Platonic love, in which the other is a dispensable property carrier, looks suspiciously like a convenient and clever story told to establish Christian precedence. The classic version of it, in Gregory Vlastos (1981), looks a little like this. But on a more plausible

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account of Platonic love, genuine care and love for the discrete particular other is inextricably bound into the longing for something else. Perhaps it is, again, a matter of philosophical temperament, but I find two things especially attractive about the Platonic picture. The first is that the care is real, but it does not place an impossible burden upon the other. We may like to say that others complete us, that they make us whole, or that love conquers all, but we know well enough that it does none of these things. Human lives are incomplete. The scars of loss, failure and rejection are present everywhere. They do not go away, and nobody else can remove them. We may say this while acknowledging that love conquers enough. That it makes happiness possible. It makes our lives better, even wonderful, and being loved is also a basic human need. Being loved is a key source of our sense of self-worth and in some respects it matters more than the recognition of autonomous rational agency. Reminding someone of the latter is unlikely to stop them from throwing themselves off tall, and sometimes not-so-tall, buildings. It might do so, but it seems like a poor strategy. Being loved and loving others has saved many of us. But to expect love for, or by, another person to make everything better, and to magically heal what cannot be healed, or to round off the many voids of a human life, is unreasonably demanding. Augustine tells us this much about our love for one another, in the message of the biographical part of the Confessions, and on this occasion he happens to be right, but not necessarily in the way that he wants, in a way that must drive us to seek something more. Imagining that the person we love will make us whole will tend to mutate over time into a more workable conception of love, one that takes pleasure in simple things and the sheer goodness of being together, or else it will end in disappointment. Ultimately, human life and defeat go hand in hand, and our love for one another can do nothing to stop this from happening. It cannot reshape the wood that we are made from, even if it changes the way in which we see the defeats. We need not overdramatise matters. Most of our defeats are, after all, trivial. Some make our lives better. Only a few are important in deep ways. (Again, the idea of depth seems irresistible in discussions of love.) There is a second feature of the Platonic imagery that strikes me as especially attractive. The idea of a partnership in longing can convey a sense of the mixed nature of love. This is, admittedly, a way of putting matters that would not have appealed to Plato. He was something of a puritan about “the mixed” and “the unmixed” and spent a good deal of time in his Philebus attacking mixture in favour of purity. Although, as ever with Plato, it is difficult to understand what to make of this, given the mixed nature of the text itself. Is he drawing out the gap between what we want and how things are? It is always difficult to tell. Even so, the mixed nature of love is something that he seems to be sensitive to, and it is part of love’s emotional character. Love is an emotion, or at least it involves emotion, or it has emotion-like features. I will remain officially neutral about which of these is the best description. Like emotions such as anger, jealousy, shame, contempt and grief, it is rarely if ever the case that love is about just one thing. The “intentionality” of emotion is often (I am tempted to say ordinarily) mixed. Person x gets angry with person y after having been mistreated at the office by persons a1, …, an. Are they really angry with person y? Sometimes yes. But are they

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exclusively angry with person y? Rarely, if ever. And love often seems to be like this too. Care for a particular other does not disentangle easily from care for other things and for other beings. Plato understood this. Freud too understood this: love draws from an entire history and is not just a response to what, and who, is immediately present. What and who we have cared for in the past shapes our patterns of care. We see this in the entanglement of loving others with the patterns of care shown in bereavement, when our ability to enjoy various simple things is for a time lost because a loved one is now gone. Yet what does our loved one, lost to time and being, have to do with the coffee that no longer tastes as good, the television programme that no longer keeps us amused or the work that we are no longer motivated to complete? A pattern of care spreads through an entire life, and love for a particular person may be a crucial part of this larger pattern, with connections reaching out in different directions. Those who say that they love God by loving others, and not just through loving others as a means, capture something of this point. Janet Soskice provides a nice example. The hard-pressed mother of a newborn infant, a woman who usually attends religious services, has visits from three priests. The first stresses the importance of religious devotion and suggests (in the nicest way possible, which is not altogether nice) that the woman should get up an hour earlier in the morning for “quiet prayer”. The second asks if her husband might get home earlier from work so that she could go to mass. The third tells her that care for her child is religious devotion. It is love of the sort that the Christian faith is all about. She is not only doing all she can. She is doing all that she needs to do at this point in time (Soskice 2008, 13–14). No doubt,  Soskice’s parable of the caring woman  requires qualification. There is some very suspect stereotyping of gender roles. But, after a little pruning, it presents an attractive picture. The love for the child is also, and clearly, not just a convenient pathway to a love of God. Not just a means. The child is genuinely loved, as Plato’s companion in longing is loved. But the love in both cases is not separable from a larger pattern of care and spiritual longing that exceeds the particular individual who is thought of as the more immediate object or recipient of love. This is not, of course, an approach that is restricted to the Christian tradition. Sufis have the tale of the Sufi master who is approached by a young would-be pupil. The master asks, “Have you ever been in love? Seriously, really?” And here he is not looking for signs of infatuation with the writings of Rumi. Rather, he means “Have you ever been in love with a person, with all of its physical longings and its initial sense of being ripped out of everydayness?” The would-be pupil, who admits that they have not, believing perhaps that this lack of experience may even be an advantage, is told to go away until they have the relevant experience. Without the self-­ transcendence, or ego-transcendence involved in loving another human, talk about the love of God will make little sense. Or, worse, it will be a dangerous imitation of the real thing. Love for God, on such views, requires both mediation through love for persons and accompaniment by love for persons, and these two mix together in ways that do not disentangle. A God who can be loved at all only if loved also in this way, through and with our love for one another, may be an attractive option for those who are theistically

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minded. Although I confess that I have little aptitude for dealing with matters of the greatest depth in such terms. I can, perhaps, see the depth when others speak about these things, but cannot reproduce it. The imagery of personalised deities leaves me dazed and confused. At times, I do not know quite what is meant. Yet matters of ontology may be beside the point here. Love might still be best understood as an immortal longing even if there are no special transcendent beings who answer to the longing in question. The fact that love does have mixed intentionality may even, with minimal additional claims, suggest that love does try to reach beyond in just this way. It is not only about the immediate object. I can accept that there may be some level at which my own intimate personal love is like this. My love for Suzanne, who unwisely married me, has taught me most about what it is to love. And it may involve an immortal longing of sorts, although perhaps only in an attenuated way that is also compromised by routine egocentricity and does not entirely constitute a break from it. I even have a fondness for picturing idealised future versions of myself but little inclination to work towards becoming such a person. In these respects, the love in question is normal and conquers enough, without demanding that the other make it conquer all and satisfy longings that we have as a result of personal history and human history but which bear little relation to anything that may be delivered within our kind of world.

3  A Sense of Physicality and Mortality As a qualification, it does not strike me that this reaching beyond, this immortal longing, is the most important part of what is going on when we love another person. It may be in some cases, but not in others. In some respects, it does not speak well to my own experience of love. And here, again, philosophical sensibilities play a role in what I have to say. I might choose to make something hidden, to disguise the fact that writing about love is often autobiographical, even when it is done by philosophers. But this seems unnecessary. Especially if depth is to be valued over formalism, in the way described at the outset, and in the way that shapes Wittgensteinian interests in Weil and Murdoch (neither of whom tend towards geometric precision). And so I will simply try to say what it is that seems most important, and then we may move matters along. Although, at this point, my position does begin to look more like an argument than simply an exercise in attending. I find it difficult to situate two things within any strong emphasis upon immortal longing. First, a sense of love’s physicality. A sense of where, in evolutionary terms, love comes from. A sense of our creaturely being. Put in terms familiar from the philosophy of emotion, it is all very well to acknowledge that emotions and similar states have a cognitive component, but this does not mean that we should model them upon their most cognitively demanding instances so that they are available only to people like us. We might instead model emotions upon their simplest instances. And if love is not so cognitively demanding, then it makes sense to speak of the continuity between my love for Suzanne, or rather the love that we have for

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one another, and love among other non-human creatures to whom spiritual aspirations and immortal longings cannot easily be ascribed. The longings of such creatures are all too evidently mortal. Another way of putting the point is to say that too elevated a conception of love may be at risk of losing touch with the world in which love occurs and of which it is a part. Whatever else love does, it relates in some way to our being in the world. This is not a point in favour of militant atheism but a familiar spiritual concern. It strikes me that Plato was aware of the danger in the Symposium, one of his three great dialogues on love, although it takes a particular kind of reading of the text for this to make sense. Picture the scene. A dinner party where speeches on the nature of love are being delivered. When talk around the table takes on an artificially elevated tone there is a loud banging at the door. Alcibiades, in his prime and drunk as a lord, bursts in and tells some home truths about the bodily longings and desires that are integral to the loves we all know so well. They are not regular accompaniments of such loves, but built-in features. Alcibiades is not just in the text for reasons of historical accuracy, or in order to present a mistaken account of love as a foil to Socrates’ brilliant insights. Rather, he is there as a reminder of love’s physicality, as a way of puncturing ethereal constructs. Ignoring this requires us to miss a good deal, not least of which is the Symposium’s relation to texts in which the body and norms of spirituality vie with one another in mutually constraining ways. Of course, such a puncturing move may be made while still appealing to a distinction between the wrong way of elevating love and the right way of doing so, and this is part of what Plato is trying to do. But physicality will have its due. Part of a story about love may include the point that we love as we do because we have the bodies that we have, and because of the animals that we are (Derrida 2006). If we are at all serious about this idea, then it will simply not do to set aside the numerous instances of non-­ human love that go on all around us, unhidden yet at risk of being concealed. Although it runs against various traditions, this is not a fearless thought but rather an obvious one. There are, of course, numerous spiritualised escape routes that will allow us to avoid the consequences that this line of thought has for any attempt to build a longing for transcendence into love. We may, for example, appeal to a Buddhist rebirth story that will allow animal love to be part of a longer progression towards a future human love, and then something even better. This is an option that carries heavy ontological demands: multiple and supernatural claims about the ultimate nature of reality. Or we may draw inspiration from the thoughtful mysticism of St Francis and St Anthony of Padua and include other creatures within the creation that in its entirety longs to return to God. This is a mysticism that may be hard to square with phenomenology, with our routine experience of what other animals are. Or we may simply go for a strong separation between ourselves and the non-human and insist that we love but they do not, at least not in the proper or philosophically interesting sense of “love”. This is the option that plays well to our vanity and often tends to be favoured. The thought that animals might genuinely love may even be received with incredulity, guilt and fear. It draws upon a view of other creatures that is by no means restricted to religious audiences concerned with transcendence, a view that

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occurs in a good deal of contemporary philosophical writing on love, particularly within the analytic tradition. It is there in Harry Frankfurt’s Reasons of Love (2004), and in the related analytic literature (Velleman 1999; Kolodny 2003; Helm 2010). And it is cast in particularly instructive terms away from the analytic tradition of philosophy by Jean-Luc Marion, for whom we alone are the creature who loves: “Man loves – which is what distinguishes him from all other finite beings, if not the angels” (Marion 2007, 7). If we make this move, then love as – in all important cases – an immortal longing becomes far less problematic. Other creatures do not have such longing for the same reason that they cannot love. This too is a pathway towards an understanding of love that I find hard to square with familiar sorts of experience. It seems manifestly clear that other creatures are capable of grief and most of us will have witnessed it. But love is a precondition of grief. Indeed, we cannot make sense of grief without it. We can only grieve over the loss of what is loved (Milligan 2014). And so, where Marion sees a strict separation, I see a shared vulnerability to loss, a shared vulnerability that is an important commonality, a joining point between us and them in spite of the many things that separate us. And some of the things that separate us are ways in which we and they love. Not whether we love, but how we do so. Yet the diversity of love should not lead us to deny its genuineness, even if spiritual longing sometimes seems to be absent. And, contrary to saints Francis and Anthony, genuinely absent. Really not there. Second, while some loves do involve an immortal longing, regarding all love in this light or primarily in this light risks losing a sense of the ways in which love can be all about finitude and about the acceptance of incompleteness. The ways in which it can be bound up with a thankful recognition of those imperfections that go with another’s humanity, with their standing as another being who hopes and dreams and suffers in the way that we ourselves do, without the need to point toward anything at all beyond their mortal life in order to see their worth. This understanding that love can be, and often is, a mortal longing also captures the sense that love’s intentionality is mixed. But it does so in a different way from talk about transcendence, and loving God or the Good, or perfection by loving someone else, and in a way that is inseparable from the latter. It does so in a way that concerns being at home in the world, rather than by appealing to an apparatus of otherworldly aspiration.

4  Firewood Becomes Ash My thought here, about the sense of mortal longing that is involved in a great deal of love between humans, runs against a familiar line of thought that stretches from Aeschylus and Plato to Teresa of Avila and beyond. A line of thought in which the transitory is devalued simply by being transitory. On a certain kind of metaphysical reading of Plato and Augustine, it may even be a mistake to speak about being transitory, for being is what the transitory lacks in its fullest sense. A metaphysical

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preference may drive us to the view that love of the deepest sort ought to attach itself above all to that which lasts, and perhaps only to that which lasts. This tends towards otherworldliness, but not necessarily towards an ethical carelessness about the finite, the limited and the mortal. Aeschylus, in his Prometheus Bound (if it is his text and not merely attributed to him), has the sympathetic and rebellious Prometheus give humanity the gift of forgetfulness about mortality, so that the gift of fire may seem worth using rather than merely a way to delay the inevitable. The gift presupposes care for creatures of a day in the face of divine disappointment with the way that we have turned out, and the resolution of Zeus that it might be better to wipe us out and begin again. In a sense the gift simply is care for humanity. And it is only humanity who have the truth concealed. Prometheus does not forget what is openly there to be seen, that we are marked for death, and quickly too. Yet the gift must be given if we are to become forgetful of our mortality. An awareness of mortality is the default condition; mortality is continuously shown. Yet care also continues. Similarly, the God of St Teresa will not get jealous if we love our neighbour, even if he may be offended if we love our neighbour in the wrong way. Simone Weil is, at least temperamentally, similar. Love of the deepest sort attaches necessarily to that which is infinitely distant. It can attach only to such an object because all other love is inevitably and naturally tainted by the ego, by prospects of reward. But she too wants us to care for one another. And who would ever want something else? Thoughts of this sort, even with qualified dualist undertones and otherworldliness, are intended to lead us towards an openness to others, and to love for others rather than disdain for worldly being. My worry about such texts is not that they lack insight or a genuinely loving attitude towards mere mortals. Rather, my worry is that such discourses shape the way in which others are to be loved but do so in a manner that I cannot share. And I cannot share it because the conception of love that is in play is inseparable from a sense of the primacy of the immortal and the non-transitory. It is not simply that I disagree intellectually with their preferred imagery of a transcendent deity or perfect Good, although that too remains a significant point of disagreement. Rather, I do not feel this way about love. I do not have the sense of the primacy that they affirm. They draw attention away from a particular kind of familiar, unhidden experience of being together in the world. And love, if it is about anything, is about that. In part, this is again a matter of philosophical sensibilities. To love the finite always in the light of something eternal strikes me as problematic partly because eternity provides too many hiding places for people such as myself. Others may manage the trick, but a flight towards the infinitely distant in order to escape the relentless ego may simply show someone like myself how relentless the ego really is. Imagine a man who has been warned about his demise and then sees Death in the marketplace. He promptly leaves town, taking the road to Larissa. A good, safe distance away. A bystander and Death look on as the man races to be elsewhere. The bystander asks Death, “Who was that?” only to be told, “Someone I have an appointment with, later today, in Larissa.” Flight from a human flaw, or from an embodied egocentricity, may lead us towards the very thing that we fear. More generously, perhaps others may manage to love primarily in the light of an immortal longing,

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without the love being taken over by dangerous forms of false consolation, but I do not feel so well protected from the risks. And I do not have any sense that there is deeply hidden motivation. That the transcendent is with me, even if I am not with it. Rather, I have a sense that in the end we lose everything. And a sense of this is integral to my experience of being with another, my sense that I must love Suzanne without any hope that we will be joined spiritually for all time, except in the limited but deeply valued sense that it will always remain true that we have loved one another. That this will remain true when we are no longer around is all the immortality that waits. This is also not to be confused with the quite different idea that such love is unconditional, that it can understand all and forgive all, or that it can bear all things. I suspect that no love is ever truly like that. The humans who are capable of bearing all things in the name of love are not the humans we meet in the streets but in uplifting narratives. This is another way of understanding limits and finitude, my own limits and those of humans in general. There is always something that may cause love to break, even during its brief experienced span. George Orwell’s lovers in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) turn upon one another when faced with something that they find utterly unbearable. And this is not an image of humans as failures, or not only as failures or as the broken creatures who might reasonably be wiped out by Zeus to make way for another and better creation. Humans can always be broken, and our love is part of what breaks. We are like that, but it need not be seen as devaluing us or devaluing our love. Rather, it makes sense to think of our love as more precious because it is vulnerable. There may, of course, be equally good reasons why we might think that an attitude towards eternity is sometimes liable to involve a far better and more realistic attitude to the world than an insistence upon our finitude. Even finitude has its consolations and hiding places, evident in ways of thinking in which all failings are eventually and gratefully lost in time. It may also be worthwhile to consider these matters in a more historical way. Realism and attention to human finitude have not always paired well together. I can also readily accept that ethical worries about the potentially corrupting influence of notions of eternity (worries that figure strongly in Simone Weil’s determination to place God at an infinite distance and not a reachable transcendent distance) draw as much upon aesthetic sensibilities as they do upon anything like a rigorous argument that might apply universally, to you, me and everyone we know. But what speaks to me is nonetheless an emphasis upon the ultimate transitoriness of things, captured in Dōgen’s thought that “Firewood becomes ash, and does not become firewood again.” And with it the sense that whatever we wish to put right, whatsoever we wish to do, had better be put right and done sooner rather than later. “Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death” (Dōgen 2013, 30). At a certain point, there will be no later. But it is above all my sense of the reasons that we have for love, and a sense of what we love others as, that drives my emphasis upon mortality and transitoriness, and with it the acceptance of each other’s imperfections. Traits so distant from any ideal of what we might become if given an indefinite amount of time. Acceptance

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also looks like the wrong term, implying that we tolerate rather than embrace at least some of the imperfections in question. Some we accept, and some we embrace. Our reasons for love are bound up with at least some of these things, and this is a thought that is placed far more awkwardly in attempts to build transcendent longings into love. There is always in St Teresa and St Augustine an intrusion of the eternal into our reasons for loving particular others, even though particular others are loved in a completely genuine way. Their story about why they love is always going to look different from my story about why I do so. Indeed, it strikes me that the reasons that Suzanne and I have for loving one another relate very much to matters which are contingent and temporal through and through, although I can imagine that Suzanne’s reasons might differ from my own, and that they might have more to do with a sense of the transcendent, a sense that plays at best a minor role in my feelings about the matter. How then do I love Suzanne? I love her as the analytic literature on love suggests I should love her, as someone who is unique and irreplaceable. That is to say, I love her rather than various others, and would not trade up for an improved model. Indeed, it is only in an attenuated sense that I can make any sense of the notion of an improved model. I have no particular desire for her to change, beyond a desire that she becomes happier, and beyond the usual desires that each of us has that the other might stop doing something or other. Or start doing it. And these things have little to do with our sense of evolving, or with the things that make us who we are rather than someone else. It is a contrastive move, concerning why we love one person rather than another, that gives the idea of reasons for love its greatest force. Of course, we are ordinarily lost when we try to spell out what this means in closer detail. If asked “Why do you love Mary instead of Peter” we might appeal to some instantly present trait or feature. To use David Velleman’s jazz-era example: the way they wear their hat, the way they sip their tea (Velleman 1999, 371). But this is, as Velleman points out, merely a convenient placeholder for a different sort of explanation. What is unique about each one of us is not any physiological feature that might (in principle) be reproduced using special futuristic 3D-printing biotechnologies. But unlike Velleman, who wishes to put a Kantian twist upon matters, I also do not think that it then makes sense to fall back upon an appeal to our sheer personhood in order to provide the reasons for love, just as it provides reasons for certain kinds of respect. There are, after all, lots of other people, each of whom is just as much a person as any other, and I do not love them all. This is a difficulty that may be answered, after a fashion, by appeal to love’s erotic economy. But it is not a convincing move. It misses out something important, i.e. the insight that what is unique about each of us, what helps to explain our reasons for loving this person rather than that one, is bound up with our past. Someone may have my hairstyle or physical appearance, but no one can have my personal history. And this is not even a matter of memories, that might also be duplicated and which, in any case, fade. Most of them are already lost. We forget more about the past than we remember. Rather, it concerns the sheer fact of having one past rather than another. Similarly, it is Suzanne’s past rather than the way that she wears her hat and sips her tea that make her unique beyond any kind of duplication, beyond any concerns that she could be

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traded for a better, more elegant hat wearer or a more voluptuous sipper of peppermint infusions. Why then do I love Suzanne rather than Monica, Erica, Rita or Tina? The reasons that I can offer will always be at most contributory reasons rather than rationally compelling ones, and for the most part they concern matters that are contingent. Things there to be seen, out in the open. Those who imagine that reasons for love must instead be rationally compelling, and perhaps associated with universal traits, are, I suspect, looking for something that probably is not there. Perhaps I would be figuratively mad if I did not love Suzanne, given our shared past, but I would not actually be irrational. And so my reasons for love may be thought of as part of an incomplete story. Suzanne is the person that I met at the end of my teens, the one who sat out with me under the stars. She is the person who has seen me at my weakest and worst, at my most unreasonable, but who has not turned away. She is the person who has watched me as I have argued repeatedly with the television and have not always come off best from the exchange. She is the person that I have cared for in her own moments of weakness. We have, in a sense, propped one another up, but without the sturdiness of trees. She is the person whose loss I have come to fear the most, yet I know that it must one day come. Or, rather, barring joint accidents, one of us will lose the other and our shared life together will come to an end without a satisfying sequel or repeat performance. There will be grief, a hopeless and unsatisfiable longing for togetherness never to end. And this is, as noted already, part of the price we pay for love. Thoughts that reach beyond mortality are still present in such thinking. Not only because of the fear of death, which is tolerable, but because of the fear of an ending of love and its reciprocation, and end to the sharing of love that death will bring even when one of us continues to love the absent other. While I have never figured out what the souls in Paradise are supposed to do with endless aeons of time, I can readily understand a desire that reciprocated love itself might go on. Love, in this sense, wishes for more. Yet, at some point, there will be nothing left to give, no time left in which it might be given and no one there to return it. Perhaps this places us, or those of us for whom love is at all like this, in territory where mortal and immortal longings vie with one another, without ever eradicating the other. Immortal longings would then remain part of the story, but not a part that always does the main work. In such cases, their role within our lives might be better understood if they are not disentangled from the more mortal of our longings, or given an imagined primacy over the latter. In which case, any attempt to present love’s mortal longing as confused, second-rate or indirect versions of the real and deep thing would do a disservice to longings of both kinds. Any subordination of our mortal longings would then seem to also risk misrepresentation of the immortal longings that we read about in Augustine, Simone Weil and more transcendent approaches.1 1  Earlier versions of this chapter were delivered at the 58th Annual Christian Philosophy Conference, St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, England, January 2018 and at an event on Love and Friendship, held at St Augustine’s Church, Edinburgh, in September 2017. I am grateful to participants at both events for their constructive comments.

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References Augustine. 2008. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Cockburn, David. 1997. Simone Weil on death. Mortality 2: 63–72. ———. 2010. Time in consciousness, consciousness in time. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 67: 183–201. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. The animal that therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press. Dōgen. 1995. In Dōgen’s pure standards for the Zen community: A translation of Eihei Shingi, ed. Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura. New York: State University of New York Press. ———. 2013. In The Treasury of the true dharma eye Shobogenzo: Zen master Dōgen’s Shobo Genzo, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi. Boulder: Shambhala Publications. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2004. Reasons of love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gaita, Raimond. 2004. Good and evil: An absolute conception. London: Routledge. Helm, Bennett. 2010. Love, friendship and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jollimore, Troy. 2011. Love’s vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kolodny, Niko. 2003. Love as valuing a relationship. Philosophical Review 112: 135–189. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2007. The erotic phenomenon. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Milligan, Tony. 2007. Iris Murdoch’s mortal asymmetry. Philosophical Investigations 30: 156–171. ———. 2011. Love. London: Acumen. ———. 2014. Animals and the capacity for love. In Love and its objects: What can we care for? ed. Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, and Kamila Pacovská, 211–225. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. A fairly honourable defeat. London: Chatto and Windus. Raud, Rein. 2021. Dogen and the linguistics of reality. Religion 12: 5. https://www.mdpi. com/2077-­1444/12/5/331. Rhees, Rush. 1999. Discussions of Simone Weil. New York: SUNY Press. Soskice, Janet. 2008. The kindness of god: Metaphor, gender and religious language. Oxford: Oxford University. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Velleman, David. 1999. Love as a moral emotion. Ethics 109: 338–374. Vlastos, Gregory. 1981. The individual as an object of love in Plato. In 2nd, ed. Platonic Studies, 3–42. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wrisley, George. 2012. Buddha still rides a bike: Wittgenstein, Dogen, and the entanglement of language and enlightenment. Presented at the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy. http://www.georgewrisley.com/The%20Buddha%20Still%20Rides%20a%20Bike.pdf. Tony Milligan is senior researcher in the Philosophy of Ethics with the Cosmological Visionaries project, based out of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. The key theme uniting his areas of research is otherness (other people, creatures, and places). Publications include Pravda v době populismu/Truth in a Time of Populism (2019); the co-edited white paper on Astrobiology and Society in Europe (2018); the co-edited volume The Ethics of Space Exploration (2016); The Next Democracy? The Possibility of Popular Control (London: Roman and Littlefield, 2016); Animal Ethics: the Basics, (2015); Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation (2015); the co-­edited volume Love and its Objects (2014); Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification and the Law (2013); Love (2011); Beyond Animal Rights: Food, Pets and Ethics (2010). He is currently finishing a monograph on The Ethics of Political Dissent, for Routledge, due for release in 2022.  

On the Difficulty of Speaking Hugo Strandberg

One of the things I find most important in the tradition of Wittgenstein-inspired moral philosophy is its emphasis on working with examples.1 In this essay, I will therefore do just that. Doing so is both difficult and rewarding. It is difficult, for the task is to stay close to the example, trying to see what can be found in it, instead of starting to talk about other things. However, it is precisely for this reason that it is rewarding, for it forces you to carefully consider what is relevant or not, and thereby helps you to avoid writing things that sound theoretically impressive but are in fact empty of content. Above all, since the example directs the discussion, the essay might unfold in a way that surprises not only the reader but the writer as well. In the case of this essay, I had the example before I had the topic of the essay. Or, to put it differently, the two film scenes I will introduce in a moment are the topic, and they lead me to discuss some philosophical questions, rather than the other way around. Of course, there is a reason why I found these two scenes worth thinking more about: the questions I asked when I watched the film might give rise to new insights if I give myself the time to think through them more carefully, in the form of a philosophical essay. In other words, the task is to listen to the people talking in the example and to try to understand what they mean. This requires listening also to what they do not say, to what they struggle to say but do not succeed in expressing. Above all, it involves trying to understand where the difficulties lie. Since failure to listen is a moral failure, working with examples will confront us with difficulties as  For ways in which this can be done, see Holland 1980, e.g. ch. 8, Winch 1987, e.g. ch. 11, Levi 1987, 1989, Wolgast 1992, Cook 1999, e.g. ch. 9, Gaita 2000, e.g. pp. 17–55, Hertzberg 2002a, Strandberg 2020. For a general discussion, see Beran 2021, ch. 3. 1

H. Strandberg (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_5

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well, and the “moral” in “moral philosophy” will then not only refer to a specific content.

1  Martha In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974), we follow Martha (Margit Carstensen) in her marriage to Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm). Briefly describing what happens in the film almost inevitably leads to the destructiveness of their marriage being downplayed and the moral meaning of the story thus being lost – an important philosophical insight, to which trying to write about this film gives rise. After having briefly met at the German embassy in Rome, Martha and Helmut first talk to each other when they happen to meet at a wedding. The scene is indicative of what is to come. Helmut tells Martha that she is ugly and disgusting, making her give herself over to him all the more easily because of her now even lower self-esteem. He, turned on by her tears, as he expresses it, kisses her violently on the neck, reminiscent of a vampire. They soon marry, and Helmut continues to abuse Martha, psychologically and physically, with everything taking place in very high-bourgeois settings. Furthermore, or as one form of such abuse, Helmut takes for granted that his will is to be followed. For example, during their honeymoon, Helmut briefly mentions that he finds it pathetic when a married woman has a job. Martha does not think much about it, but one morning when she comes to the library where she works, for once genuinely happy, the manager is surprised: “What are you doing here? Your husband has handed in your resignation.” She replies, in order to keep up appearances, but with tears in her eyes, “Yes, that’s right, I just want to borrow a book.” A couple of scenes later, we come to the first of the two scenes I would like to discuss in this essay. Martha is sitting by Lake Constance with Marianne (Barbara Valentin), a friend of hers. Martha has her back to Marianne, who is drawing. We hear birds, the sound of rippling water. It is sunny, with not a cloud in sight. Marianne: Well, how do you like it, married life? Martha: Oh … everything is still so new to me, and … Marianne: And not at all as great as you thought it would be, is it? You see, this is what I’ve always told you, not to indulge in too many expectations, that’s it. Martha: But … you know … as you have described it, that’s not how it really is, either Marianne: But? Martha: [turns her head towards Marianne] Well … mm … it’s difficult to say. It’s all so completely different, so … Marianne: Bah! At least you’ve got one of the most attractive men I know Martha: [happily] Yes! You think so? Well yes, he’s also … but … [her voice drops, very deep] a bit strange is he perhaps. Marianne: What does “strange” mean? He loves you, doesn’t he! Martha: [happily] Oh, yes! He loves me very much! Beyond all bounds! And yet … [her voice drops again] he still seems very strange to me. Marianne: Just wait! One day, very suddenly, he’ll seem very, very ordinary to you. Martha: You think so? Yes … that would be nice, that would be very, very nice, would it be

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Marianne: Martha … Martha, what’s so strange about your husband, then? Martha: Well … when you ask me in that way, then nothing really occurs to me … and yet … I certainly don’t want to say that he frightens me, but … a little bit it is however so, that sometimes I am almost afraid Marianne: Oh! You’re afraid?! Why then? Martha: [turns her head away from Marianne] Well … you know … again I cannot find the right word, it’s more a feeling I have, you know, a sensation. Marianne: What does he do then, does he beat you, or – ? Martha: [heated, cuts Marianne off] But Marianne, how could you ask such a thing, of course he doesn’t beat me! He … is … really … completely normal. Only … I cannot find my way, among the expressions, the right one never occurs to me. Perhaps because everything is really too new to me Marianne: So you are unhappy, then. Martha: But no, Marianne, no, I’m not at all unhappy, not at all, on the contrary, I’m happy, really happy, certainly! Only … [very deep voice] when making love for example … then … he’s so harsh, yes Marianne: Harsh? Martha: Not “harsh” in the sense of “harsh”, Marianne, he’s so violent Marianne: He’s violent?! Martha: No, no, not violent, he … [with a harsh, hard voice] just kisses me so hard Marianne: Where? [Martha shows her a hickey on the neck] Oh, then I guess he’s very unrestrained in his lovemaking, is that so? Martha: [very relieved, as if she has realised something important] Yes, I guess that’s it. “Unrestrained”!2

What is going on here? At first glance, Martha and Marianne might seem to be discussing language, trying to find a word that fits the case in question. Since the difficulty is not of an empirical kind, it would then be one that a particular style of philosophy of language might see itself as the solution to, by describing the conceptual structure of words such as “strange”, “harsh”, “violent” and “unrestrained”. Martha surely knows everything that she needs to know, empirically speaking, and since German is her mother tongue, she need not consult a dictionary in order to find explanations of the words she is thinking of using. So doesn’t the topic of their discussion have to be the kind of understanding of concepts that you cannot find in dictionaries, the understanding that a philosopher might see as his special field of expertise? Thinking the scene over, however, one quickly realises how distorted such an understanding of Martha and Marianne’s conversation would be. Martha describes Helmut as “harsh” and “violent”, but soon backs down, not because Marianne has presented any objections but just because she repeats the word that Martha has just uttered. For an understanding of the difficulties Martha struggles with, her saying “not ‘harsh’ in the sense of ‘harsh’” is especially telling, something that a logician might discard as a contradiction, as hence meaning nothing and everything  – in other words, as of no special interest. What Martha is indicating, however, is that she both wants and does not want to say that Helmut is harsh. She wants to say so, 2  My translation. I have tried to retain all “unnecessary” words, cases of unusual word order, etc., which means that the translation is not very elegant. But for the purpose of the philosophical discussion I would like to pursue here, these features are not inessential.

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because there is a sense in which he is harsh, even though there is certainly much more to be said about what Helmut does to her. But, all the same, she does not want to say that he is harsh. The difficulty is, one could say, that words cannot answer questions by themselves; the difficulty is that nothing (or no one) can answer Marianne’s questions but Martha herself. There is no other way of saying that Helmut is, say, harsh than by actually saying it. The very next scene in the film, the second of the two scenes I would like to discuss in this essay, underlines this. Martha is walking on the promenade by the lake, presumably on her way home after the conversation with Marianne. Suddenly, Mr. Kaiser (Peter Chatel), a former colleague from the library, with whom she had a merry conversation in a previous scene, addresses her: Mr Kaiser: Good day, Mrs Salomon! [silence, Martha does not answer] I happened to see you, I live nearby. Martha: Bah, then I must be going – bye [stiff smile] Mr Kaiser: Maybe I may accompany you for a bit? [she walks away] Or? For a while I’ve wanted to talk to you and ask you something. [he starts to walk, following her] You know, why did your husband do that, that with your job? Martha: [turns to him, shouts, very aggressively] What did my husband do!!! Mr Kaiser: He has … sent in your resignation without your knowledge. [she sits down on a bench, pale, motionless] That’s what happened, Mrs Salomon! Martha: [does not shout, but very aggressively] No, Mr Kaiser, no! That’s not at all what happened! And is my business, besides! My business, only mine! Goodbye! [gets up and leaves] Mr Kaiser: Goodbye … [watches her closely as she leaves]

Mr. Kaiser is not giving Martha an alternative, more fitting adjective than “harsh”, “violent” or “unrestrained”. Instead of using such rather abstract words, he clearly points to one example of what Helmut has done, thus providing what might seem to be the solution to the problem Martha had expressed in the words “nothing really occurs to me”. But, as we see in the scene, Martha is not happy and relieved, so for her this is not the solution. In one sense, then, the problem never was one of remembering, or of finding the right expressions. This does not mean that what Mr. Kaiser says to her is irrelevant to the problem she is struggling with, however, for in that case she would not react so aggressively. So, in another sense, it is true that “nothing really occurs” to her and that she “cannot find the right word” – if these were lies, she could just as well continue telling the same kind of lies when Mr. Kaiser approaches her – but her problem is not solved if someone else presents her with a word or an example. A philosopher or linguist, suggesting very refined expressions to her, would be of no more help than Mr. Kaiser is (or, to be more exact, would be of less help, for Mr. Kaiser is actually there, together with her). The problem is that anything she finds easy to say – such as that Helmut is unrestrained – has very little to do with her suffering; the problem is that she finds anything that has to do with her suffering very difficult to say. Saying something to someone is sometimes very difficult. Why? In Martha’s conversation with Marianne, we get some insights. Let’s return to some lines:

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Martha: […] he’s so harsh, yes Marianne: Harsh? Martha: Not “harsh” in the sense of “harsh”, Marianne, he’s so violent Marianne: He’s violent?! Martha: No, no, not violent […]

Martha uses a word, but when Marianne repeats it, Martha backs down. Something happens when somebody else utters the same words. It is important, I believe, that Marianne says “harsh” as a question, “he’s violent” as a question and in surprise, something I have tried to indicate with the use of punctuation marks. This means that the words, which she now hears from Marianne’s mouth, are for Martha no longer loose ideas she might be toying with – the illusion that it is easy to create for oneself by performing, as in a daydream, imaginary dialogues with real people in one’s head  – but words that require a continuation, perhaps by her explaining to Marianne in what way Helmut is harsh and violent, and so for the first time considering these things seriously also for herself. If Martha were to answer Marianne’s question in this way, her relation to Marianne would no longer be the same as before. The surprise that Marianne expresses means that she has not thought about Martha, Helmut and their marriage in these terms. Martha’s confirmation would thus change Marianne’s perception of her, and thus Martha’s perception of Marianne, since she would know about Marianne’s changed perception of her, and thus also, since Martha finds Marianne’s perception of her important, her perception of herself.3 Such a change – first surprise, then confirmation – might certainly concern something trivial. But this is not the case here. If one has said and meant that someone is, say, violent, the topic cannot be dropped and something has to be done, however unclear it might be what this something should be. It is not only Martha’s relation to Marianne that would change if she were to answer Marianne’s question in the affirmative; her relation to the difficulties she is struggling with would also change, and so would her relation to Helmut. Her words would commit her, and by uttering them to Marianne, Martha would commit Marianne too, however unwilling Marianne would be. Martha’s saying “And is my business, besides! My business, only mine!” to Mr. Kaiser points to this fact: Martha knows that since Mr. Kaiser knows what Helmut has done, it is not only her business any more. She can ask Mr. Kaiser to stay out of it, but she knows that he will be thinking about her situation nonetheless, something that will be particularly obvious when they, as they do now, happen to meet. Specifically, she can no longer deny that there is a “business”, whosever it is; hence the shock that Mr. Kaiser’s words trigger, and hence her relief at the end of the conversation with Marianne. One way of describing Martha’s struggle in these conversations is that she wants to say something without saying anything, so to speak. In other words, she wants to say something without its meaning anything to anyone, including herself, without its having any consequences. At the same time, this is why she, however unwillingly, feels the need to talk in the first place, otherwise she could just change the

 This is something I will come back to in the last section of the essay.

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topic and the painful conversation would be over. Even though Martha backs down, she has said something, a fact the importance of which should not be underestimated.

2  The Problematic Nature of Moral Philosophy In this essay, it is not Martha who speaks, however. I do. For example, when introducing the dialogue from the film, I said that Helmut was abusing her. Does this mean that this word – “abuse” – is the right one? I would be very surprised if Martha would not have vehemently denied the correctness of this description too. Does this mean that I am right and she is wrong? It is not as simple as that. If she were to say to Marianne or Mr. Kaiser that Helmut abuses her, her saying so would have immense significance. If we are to try to understand her situation, we cannot see this significance as an external addition to a saying that exists, and has a definite character, independently of it. My situation is obviously very different. For example, there was no difficulty involved in writing “Helmut continues to abuse Martha” in the introduction; in fact, I don’t think that I gave this sentence much thought at all. In a conversation, such as the ones Martha has with Marianne and Mr. Kaiser, the participants’ understandings of what they are talking about will be related to each other, however vague these understandings may be and however elusive the relation, creating the space for a deeper understanding to grow. In my case, however, no such relation to Martha can be established. Even though there certainly is a sense in which we are talking about the same thing, meaning the same thing, one of us then being right and the other one being wrong, there is also a sense in which we are not, precisely on account of the ease with which I wrote something that in her situation would be a very demanding thing to say. Without such a conversation, these different senses are only theoretical options, however; it is not difficult to see why pointing to the difference between Martha’s situation and mine is relevant, whereas the conversational context in which the first sense above would be relevant is lacking, the context in which I would be able to speak to her and, as Mr. Kaiser does, try to open her eyes to what Helmut is doing to her. These things are important to bring up for discussion, central as they are to the question of the possibility and nature of moral philosophy. To be worthy of its name, moral philosophy must be about what it claims to be about, our moral life. But, as I have just pointed out, the meaning of what we say and do to each other often changes dramatically when taken out of life and put into a philosophical text, in the case of Martha precisely because the struggles that are central to the moral character of Martha’s situation vanish when the film is turned into an object of philosophical commentary. This problem becomes all the more pressing the more dramatic the example is: the more dramatic the example, the greater the distance between the example itself and the situation of the philosopher who writes about it. Even though the moral sense of the example is thereby watered down significantly, as I have tried to indicate, the result might be a moral problem in its own right – the real worry that

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I am making use of someone’s pain to further a philosophical project. (Yes, fictional characters can also be abused, not only by other fictional characters but also by me.) How is this problem to be dealt with? What would a discussion in moral philosophy look like that is not devoid of moral meaning? For me personally, one solution would be to write about myself, to use only autobiographical examples. But in so far as the text I write is supposed to be read by others, this is no solution, for what the reader says to herself when reading and thinking through the text can be as devoid of moral meaning as what I said about Martha risks being. A similar solution would be to write only for people I know, thus relying on the conversational context that is lacking in the case of Martha and me. But in so far as the text is supposed to be read by people I do not know, this is no solution. It is precisely at this moment that one of the points of working with examples becomes evident. For what examples invite us to do – you as the reader and me as the writer – is to reflect on ourselves in a way that is not limited to our own experiences. What is important is simply, or in fact not so simply, to see the example from the inside, so to speak, to imaginatively see oneself as part of the example. In other words, what is important is to see myself in Martha, Marianne, Mr. Kaiser, Helmut, in one or several of them. Or to see myself in a new character, made up by me, who relates to Martha and the others in an alternative scenario. The feeling that I do something of importance when writing about this film might certainly be an illusion, but it need not be. By being aware of the safe distance from which writing and reading most often take place, and the emptying of moral sense that this distance risks bringing with it, a real moral engagement with the example will be possible. But only possible, for there are no guarantees here: I might still be writing about difficulties I do not really understand, even if I think I do, and the same goes for you as a reader. Furthermore, eventually I will leave imagination behind and speak as myself to people I can really address. Provided it was not something I did just to pass the time, the meaning of those things I have said when thinking about the example, the things I said as, say, Martha or Mr. Kaiser, will then show in what I say non-imaginatively. In the case of a philosophical essay, it will show in what I say to the reader, of course, but not only there, for it is not possible to isolate the context of meaning from one’s life as a whole. Compared to what troubles Martha, and to her possible words “He abuses me”, my “Helmut […] abuse[s] Martha” certainly pales into insignificance, but my statement need not be totally devoid of moral sense, for it, or rather my discussion as a whole, does shape my relations to those I say it to, however slightly and vaguely. To shed some light on what I am driving at here, the kind of imagination I am thinking of and what importance it has, let us pay attention to the role played by moral imagination when children listen to stories. Many of us, I suppose, listened to stories when we were young, stories from which we gathered insights not by learning explicit messages by rote but by reflecting on these stories, talking about them, playing them. Some of these stories accompany us for the rest of our lives, catching our attention in reflection again and again. Such stories  – involving, say, talking animals, fluffy monsters and nightgowns that act like people – need not be perceived as realistic to make their point. On the contrary, the more realistic the details, the

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more the story will be tied to a context that most likely is not that of the listener, while a mere representational copy of her life would not create a space for thought. The fanciful and schematic character of the stories is precisely what triggers the imagination, without which they would fall flat. As I said, these stories and what they made us see often follow us for the rest of our lives; the story, understood in this way, is thus used by the listener to create its moral meaning, a meaning that far transcends the original context of listening.4 Martha is surely very different from children’s stories. But I think that what I have said in the previous paragraph could be used to explain some of its peculiar features. While the dialogue, as described above, is realistic, the acting is sometimes, though not always, very non-naturalistic, and the film is overall highly stylised (for example, it is unclear in what decade the events are set).5 Therein lies its power. For it is very hard to approach the film as if it were no more than a story about a specific individual, the fate of whom we can discuss from the outside. Instead, Martha has the power to set off reflections that are not tied to, say, Martha’s situation. This creates, and is also the answer to, the difficulty I have been circling around in this section. The relation between what I say about Martha and her situation, on the one hand, and Martha herself and what she might say about it, on the other, is unclear, as we have seen, but this only means that the possible moral meaning of what I say when discussing the film must partly be looked for elsewhere.6

3  Wittgenstein and Meaning These reflections on the (problematic) nature of moral philosophy can be deepened by reference to some of the central points made by Wittgenstein in his later philosophy. He famously writes (1969, 4): “[I]f we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.” As a contrast, one can think of the quotation from Augustine that opens the first paragraph of the Philosophical Investigations (2009): When grown-ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound they uttered, since they meant to point it out. […] In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue around these signs, I used them to express my wishes.7

At the end of the quotation, Augustine seems to come to something like use. But if we go by his words alone, he only refers to expressing his wishes in the abstract; what he has abstracted from is the fact that he expresses his wishes to someone, to  Cf. Buber 1953, 330–331.  Cf. McElhaney 2012, 212, 215–216. 6  For this section, cf. Strandberg 2020, 2021, ch. 1. 7  See Augustine 1992, 1.8.13. 4 5

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the grown-ups (or to God).8 By paying attention to this fact, we also see what he has abstracted from in the previous sentences, the fact that the grown-ups talk to each other, and, presumably, to him. A very generous reading of Augustine would suggest that this is implicitly there in the quotation. The grown-ups are said to point objects out, and what then has to be added is why and to whom they do this – perhaps to the baby Augustine as a kind of game. This would then indicate that he is in fact part of the dialogue already before he can say anything, perhaps through the way in which he makes eye contact with them, the way in which he moves when they point to the objects, or perhaps through the sounds he makes or the way he smiles at them. Without people relating to each other in these and other ways, there would be no conversational context, no use and no life to signs.9 Moral phenomena – such as the ways in which people relate to each other – are hence not a possible addition to language, as, say, one object of speech, but are there from the very beginning, as what gives life to signs.10 In other words, questions Wittgenstein asks as part of his investigations – “[W]hom are we telling this? And on what occasion?” (2009, § 296) – are expressions of the importance of paying close attention to our relations to each other when trying to gain a deeper understanding of language and of philosophical problems generally. Philosophy (of language) will thus not get far without an acute understanding of such moral phenomena. The conversation between Martha and Marianne is one example of this. In order to understand the meaning of what they are saying to each other, we must attend to the fact that they are speaking to each other, that they are there together in a conversation, that their relation is beset with both difficulties, as we can see in the quoted dialogue, and possibilities. For example, after Martha says that Helmut is a bit strange, Marianne asks her: “What does ‘strange’ mean?”11 This question might seem to have a simple answer: just consult a dictionary! The dictionary entry might tell me that “strange” means “odd, unusual, unfamiliar, weird”. This is one way of using the word “meaning”. Of course, this way of using the word cannot be accounted for by referring to the dictionary I consulted in isolation, because the dictionary claims to capture the meaning of the word. What does such a claim mean? It might perhaps be tempting to try to answer this question by imagining some kind of immaterial dictionary, the property of all who speak the language, a dictionary that all written dictionaries correspond to in so far as they are correct. Apart from the fact that this might strike many as a too fanciful idea, it would not even be an answer to the question I just asked. For a dictionary has the specific form it has as a result of the scientific ideals of its creators, of their pedagogical aims, of the group of people it is intended for, and so on. But the immaterial dictionary is not  See, however, Augustine 1992, 1.6.8.  Augustine might make a similar point by saying that every human word depends on, and is a response to, the Word of God. 10  Here one could add that the very identification of something as a sign already points to the possibility of its being alive. Cf. Conant 2020. 11  This question sounds more natural in German than it does in English, but I have opted for a literal translation rather than a smooth one. 8 9

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supposed to be a creation in that sense, and it is therefore unclear what we are imagining here. When the dictionary gives “odd, unusual, unfamiliar, weird” as explanations of the word “strange”, the correctness of the explanation does not consist in its correspondence to such an immaterial dictionary, but in its capturing the understanding of people who use the word, what they would see as possible synonyms of “strange”. And since a written explanation, such as a dictionary entry, can be misunderstood, the understanding is not exhausted by such a written explanation. What does it then consist in? It is precisely at this point that we come back to the conversation. For what Marianne is asking is what Martha means when she uses the word “strange”. Or rather, she is not expecting an answer, but the question is her way of suggesting that whether Helmut is strange or not does not matter, because “He loves you, doesn’t he!” In other words, another question to ask, to which what I just said would be an answer, would be what the question “What does ‘strange’ mean?” means, a question that, if it were asked, would be a question primarily for Marianne, that is, a question about what she means. The basic phenomenon, and the direction in which the answer to the question asked at the end of the last paragraph should be sought, would then not be words meaning this and that but people meaning this and that, and meaning it to one another. If someone says something that I do not (fully) understand, I might ask her: “What do you mean?” This question of meaning arises when some kind of explanation is needed. I might try to find such an explanation on my own, but asking her is certainly a more direct way of arriving at the meaning of what she said. After all, it is her statement that I do not understand, that is, I do not understand her. Asking what she meant is therefore not a question that refers to her statement in isolation but is part of an ongoing conversation. For example, whether her answer to my question of meaning is an explanation of what she said or an expression of a change of mind is often indeterminate. One reason why this is so is because the explanation is usually not there before the question, which means that she would in any case have to rethink what she said, the result of which might be an explanation, a change of mind, or something in between. This is something that repeatedly shows in the conversation between Martha and Marianne: in an interrogative tone of voice, Marianne again and again repeats Martha’s words, asking her if she really means what she seems to be saying, but Martha’s answers, at surface level negative ones, could in their turn give rise to further questions about what she means when answering Marianne’s questions in this way. And the question of whether Martha really means what she seems to be saying cannot be understood in isolation from her relation to Marianne, as we have seen.12 A question about the meaning of words, as distinct from the question about what someone means, could arise at this point. Education is, among many other things, about learning to express oneself, in speech but most of all in writing, in a way that forestalls the question of what one means. This is useful, partly because people will not always have the time and energy to ask you what you mean, partly because if

12

 My line of thought here is partly inspired by Hertzberg 2002b, 2010, 2017, Cockburn 2014.

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you address people with whom you do not have direct contact, it will not even be possible for them to ask you this question. One way of bridging this gap between people is to use dictionaries, as well as the different kinds of unwritten conventions that we learn through education. But is this way of speaking possible for Martha? This kind of clarity would of course be possible if her situation was very different, that is, if Helmut did not abuse her. In her present situation, by contrast, this way of speaking would be possible for her as one way of trying to hide her difficulties from Marianne: expressing herself in a way that does not give rise to further questions would be one way of bringing the conversation to an end. And in her conversation with Mr. Kaiser, talking in such a way would be a more successful way of turning him away, if she had, say, prepared an answer to the question she might have anticipated that Mr. Kaiser would ask. Furthermore, the impersonal character of such speech, that it is meant to be understood, if not by anyone then at least also by people she does not know, would further emphasise the distancing effect. Philosophers who would generally side with this way of speaking would thus here side with the attempt at hiding the problems. Obscurity is, however, no less a part of language than clarity, for what we say to one another is generally no clearer than we are; the fact that the question “What do you mean?” can be asked does not point to something that contrasts to language in itself, for these struggles are part of our relations to each other. Wittgenstein rarely mentions these issues, but in the Philosophical Investigations (2009, § 546) he writes, “In this way, I’d like to say, the words ‘Oh, if only he’d come!’ are charged with my longing. And words can be wrung from us a like a cry. Words can be hard to utter: those, for example, with which one renounces something, or confesses a weakness.” Without making an in-depth interpretation of this paragraph, I think it is noteworthy that Wittgenstein makes this comment in the context of a discussion of the entanglements of meaning, truth and mattering (§§ 544–545), of how meaning is sometimes non-paraphrasable (§§ 527, 531, 533), of the intimate connections of understanding, on the one hand, and seeing and feeling, on the other (§§ 534, 535, 537). For what is hard is not to utter certain words or sentences – quoting someone saying them is not hard, for example – but to utter them meaning what you are saying, and understanding what someone is saying is then not a fundamentally different thing from understanding her.

4  Cynicism and Social Appearance Why is it so hard for Martha to speak to Marianne about what Helmut does to her? Can more be added to what I have said thus far? What is the more specific nature of the difficulties Martha struggles with? An interpretation of the film as a whole would of course be possible, but here I will restrict my discussion to what is to be seen in the dialogues quoted above. There are then two major points to make, I believe. The conversation starts with Marianne’s asking, “Well, how do you like it, married life?”, but she seems not to be asking this

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question out of a real interest in Martha’s situation, for before Martha has had a real chance to answer it, Marianne replies, as if she just wanted to create an opportunity for voicing her cynicism, “And not at all as great as you thought it would be, is it? You see, this is what I’ve always told you, not to indulge in too many expectations, that’s it.”13 (The conversation only resumes because Martha does not fully agree with what Marianne has just said.) Would Marianne consider as exaggerated the expectation not to be treated in the way Helmut treats Martha? I guess not, but from Martha’s perspective, the problem is already there as soon as the topic of “too many expectations” has been introduced, or the topic of expectations generally. The risk is now there of appearing as even more naive and inexperienced then she already says she is, simply because she wishes or longs for things to be different than they are. These dynamics are to be found throughout the conversation. Marianne points out that Martha has “got one of the most attractive men I know” and that “He loves you, doesn’t he!”, suggesting that expecting more than this is expecting too much, and claims that “One day, very suddenly, he’ll seem very, very ordinary to you”, suggesting that Martha is just lacking in experience. Martha, for her part, refers again and again to the fact that she has not been married for very long, suggesting that the solution to the problem is for her to get used to it. Getting used to it – the cynic’s (perhaps Marianne’s) solution to every problem. This shows the importance of understanding the struggle not simply in individual terms but rather in the context of the conversation. Without being aware of it, Marianne contributes to the creation of a context in which it will be more difficult for Martha to talk about what pains her. The conversation with Mr. Kaiser is also in this respect a contrast, but the fact that Martha refuses to answer his straightforward question shows that the way he addresses her need not be of more help to her, at least not in the short term.14 Furthermore, Marianne’s cynicism can serve as words of caution, especially to a philosopher. Experience and knowledge might seem to be unambiguously good things, but they could easily give rise to the attitude that longing for things to be different than they are is foolish, precisely because this longing, by definition, conflicts with the way things are, perhaps with the way things have always been. The future is only an object of knowledge if it is pictured by means of extrapolation from experience, so a future that breaks with these lines of development will not be possible to conceive of for someone who thinks that knowledge and experience have the last word. Hence the danger of cynicism, and in the conversation between Martha and Marianne we see where it can lead.15 In the case of language specifically, Martha again and again suggests that with experience and habituation, the  This interpretation can be strengthened by reference to the previous scenes in the film in which Marianne takes part. 14  It is however significant that Martha goes to see Mr. Kaiser in a later scene in the film. 15  One could even claim that with the attitude that the future is just more of the same, no conversation would be possible at all, for there would then be no point in listening to the other, as I am able to predict what she will tell me. 13

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right word, which she is unable to find right now, will come. And she could very well be right: a day might come when she will no longer be at a loss for words. But if those words are such words we use for what we have got used to, linguistic habituation would here be a threat, something that would make it even more difficult for Martha to speak about her suffering, precisely because she would then have words for it.16 The second major point to be made with reference to the dialogues I have quoted concerns the importance of social appearance. In her conversation with Marianne, what matters to Martha is that she appears to Marianne as happy and loved. But appearing to Marianne as happy and loved is not to be contrasted with how Martha appears to herself, for she sees herself from the same point of view. In the dialogues, this shows, positively, in how pleased Martha is with Marianne’s saying that Helmut is attractive and surely loves her, in Martha’s exaggerated emphasis on how happy she is, and in the relief she expresses when it becomes possible for her to interpret Helmut’s behaviour as passionate, negatively in the indignation she expresses when Marianne asks whether Helmut beats her (which is in fact one thing he does not do, so Martha is not lying), and in the threat she takes Mr. Kaiser to pose to her. Why does she react in these ways? The dialogues I have quoted do not give much of an answer, but when I introduced the film, I referred to Martha’s low self-esteem, how Helmut exploits it and makes her feel even smaller, and to the high-bourgeois environment in which the film takes place. A failed marriage is then a huge threat to Martha. One might of course wish for different cultural norms, with reference to which it would be possible for Martha to find success in other ways, even though the risk of failure would in that case only be displaced. But such change takes time and is therefore not a solution for her; the only change to the situation that is open to her means social failure. Social appearance is, however, not all there is. In what she says, Martha seems mostly to accept the importance of appearances, but in many other respects, for example in the way she struggles with herself in these conversations, she is aware of the fact that there is something else than appearance: being happy and loved. The reason why it is sometimes hard to speak about happiness and love, also in philosophical writing, would then consist in the difficulty of, indeed suffering in, acknowledging this conflict of appearance and being, in one’s own life and in the lives of other people. Denying this conflict, denying that there is anything other than social appearance, would, however, be closing oneself off to happiness and love.17 All this is much easier said than done, of course. But that is precisely why it is sometimes hard even to say it. And this difficulty is indicative of the importance to us of saying it.18  An example perhaps closer to home: think of how quickly students, after the initial shock, often get used to and adopt the spiteful tone of seminar discussions, having now learnt what it means to be a philosopher. 17  Cf. Adorno 2003a, 461, 2003b, 85. 18  This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, 16

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 2003a. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2003b. Philosophie der neuen Musik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Augustine. 1992. Confessions. Ed. James J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beran, Ondřej. 2021. Examples and their role in our thinking. New York: Routledge. Buber, Martin. 1953. Hinweise. Zürich: Manesse. Cockburn, David. 2014. Trust in conversation. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 3 (1): 47–67. Conant, James. 2020. Wittgenstein and the relation of sign to symbol. In The logical alien: Conant and his critics, ed. Sofia Miguens, 863–947. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cook, John W. 1999. Morality and cultural differences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaita, Raimond. 2000. A common humanity: Thinking about love and truth and justice. London: Routledge. Hertzberg, Lars. 2002a. Moral escapism and applied ethics. Philosophical Papers 31: 251–270. ———. 2002b. On the need for a listener and community standards. In The practice of language, ed. Martin Gustafsson and Lars Hertzberg, 247–259. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2010. Attending to the actual saying of things. In Language and world: Part one, essays on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Volker Munz, Klaus Puhl, and Joseph Wang, 125–133. Heusenstamm: Ontos. ———. 2017. Giving hostages to irrationality? Winch on the philosopher as judge of human thought. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6 (2): 7–30. Holland, R.F. 1980. Against empiricism: On education, epistemology and value. Oxford: Blackwell. Levi, Don S. 1987. Hypothetical cases and abortion. Social Theory and Practice 13: 17–48. ———. 1989. What’s luck got to do with it? Philosophical Investigations 12: 1–13. McElhaney, Joe. 2012. A nagging physical discomfort: Fassbinder and Martha. In A companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peuker, 204–225. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Strandberg, Hugo. 2020. In search of the context of a question. Sats 21: 199–213. ———. 2021. Forgiveness and moral understanding. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Winch, Peter. 1987. Trying to make sense. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Wolgast, Elizabeth. 1992. Ethics of an artificial person. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hugo Strandberg is associate professor of philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He is the author of several monographs, the two most recent ones being Self-Knowledge and SelfDeception and Forgiveness and Moral Understanding.  

registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. Thanks to Salla Aldrin Salskov, Christopher Cordner and Lars Hertzberg for comments on a previous version of this essay. I have also presented a previous version of it at the research seminar at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice; thanks to those who participated in the discussion.

Animal Investigations Anne Le Goff

1  Introduction Almost 60 years ago Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees use tools to fish termites (Goodall 1964). Since then, the study of animals within their environment has uncovered unexpected abilities and shown that many species not only formed societies but had culturally transmitted behaviors. Ethological discoveries have not ceased blurring the seemingly neat boundaries between humans and animals, each time removing what was once taken to be a distinctive mark of humanity. Yet, if the “revolution” of field ethology (Lestel 2001, 8) has sparked unprecedented rise in our knowledge of animal lives, it has not appeased conceptual contentions on what to make of such discoveries and how they should transform our concepts of animal life. The difficulty here is that our concepts of animals have been shaped by the legacy of a long-standing binary division of reality in Western thought, according to which human and animal are defined by their mutual exclusion. As philosophers of ethology Vinciane Despret and Dominique Lestel have each shown, our novel ethological knowledge of animals profoundly undermines this dualistic framework. It requires that we apply to animals concepts of subjectivity, thought, or friendship that used to be reserved to humans (Despret 2008; Lestel 2004). Yet, at the same time, concepts relative to norms, intelligence, or subjectivity tend to resist such extension to animals, precisely because they were defined with respect to humanity. In order to avoid the objection of anthropomorphic naivete, we need to apply to animals concepts that straddle the traditional binaries of culture and nature, or language and biology. To borrow Despret’s words (2016), we need a conceptual framework that enables us to “ask animals the right questions,” rather than confine them from the outset to a nature devoid of meaning. A. Le Goff (*) The Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_6

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I argue that Wittgenstein’s investigation of language in his second philosophy offers precious resources to unroot this conceptual opposition between animals and humans, a line of opposition that is first and foremost grounded in a certain conception of language. Like many Western philosophers, Wittgenstein holds language to be at the core of the human experience. But unlike most of them, he does not oppose language to nature or life. On the contrary, he intimately ties language to life, describing his investigations on language as “remarks on the  natural history of human beings” (Wittgenstein 1953, §415), and writing that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (§23). By showing how language is both natural and conventional, he unsettles the neat divide between nature and culture, and paves the way for an understanding of human life in language that is neither dualistic nor reductionist (Le Goff 2020). While Wittgenstein’s investigations focus on human life and language, I suggest that we can also learn from him by taking seriously his efforts to draw our attention to animals, and to the ways in which they are similar and dissimilar to us. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s work stands out in Western philosophy as it relies heavily on the comparison to animals, yet without rehearsing well-known oppositions or hierarchies (Le Goff 2012). In Wittgenstein, animals do not simply stand as a foil against which to contrast humans. His analysis does not hinge on an opposition between those who possess the logos and those who do not (DeGrazia 2001; Pleasants 2006).1 Rather, he unties language from characteristics that would be essentially human by undermining a view of language as the expression of mental capacities. He shows that language should instead be understood as an activity and part of a form of life. This conception makes it possible to envisage that other species that give a form to their lives access forms of meaning as well. Wittgenstein’s approach of language as an activity of rule-following that precedes explanations and rationalization rather than derives from them makes it possible to conceive that other living beings possess meaning. I will examine the relevance of Wittgensteinian concepts for animal forms of life using the case of peacemaking among chimpanzees as it is described and theorized by primatologist Frans de Waal. I argue that phenomena of reconciliation among chimpanzees are instances of rule-following, and examples of language games as defined by Wittgenstein. Importantly, these concepts are not to be taken in a metaphorical or anthropomorphic way. Rather, they enable us, as outside observers, to make sense of such interactions among chimpanzees, while allowing for key differences in ways for various species to reconcile. Wittgensteinian concepts about meaning allow us to conceptualize the various shapes meaning may take in various forms of life.

1  Contrary to what some influential interpretations pretend, as they  see in the importance that Wittgenstein confers to language a reiteration of the traditional view that the logos constitutes a radical distinction from animals (Leahy 2005).

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2  How Chimpanzees Reconcile In several books, primatologist Frans de Waal recounts six years of observation that he and his team made of a colony of chimpanzees living at the Arnhem Zoo, in the Netherlands. This colony of about twenty chimpanzees living on an island of two and a half acres mirrored, in its size and composition, small communities living in the wild. De Waal shows, against the prevalent framing of animal relationships through competition, that primates form cooperative groups that they actively work to maintain, in particular through efforts at peacemaking after conflicts. He describes below a characteristic instance of reconciliation among chimpanzees: On this occasion Nikkie, the leader of the group, has slapped Hennie during a passing charge. Hennie, a young adult female of nine years, sits apart for a while feeling with her hand the spot on her back where Nikkie hit her. Then she seems to forget the incident; she lies down in the grass, staring in the distance. More than fifteen minutes later Hennie slowly gets up and walks straight to a group that includes Nikkie and the oldest female, Mama. Hennie approaches Nikkie, greeting him with a series of soft pant grunts. Then she stretches out her arm to offer Nikkie the back of her hand for a kiss. Nikkie’s hand kiss consists of taking Hennie’s whole hand rather unceremoniously into his mouth. This contact is followed by a mouth-to-mouth kiss. (de Waal 1989, 39–42)

De Waal notes that “around 40 percent of the time opponents contact each other within half an hour of their aggressive encounter (de Waal 1989, 42). This percentage is high in view of the size of their outdoor enclosure: Hennie could easily have continued ignoring Nikkie, while Nikkie’s status as a dominant would have afforded him the choice of rejecting Hennie’s overtures. Thus, chimpanzees actively engage in peacemaking after a conflict. Several aspects of the observed scene suggest that it forms a codified sequence of events. De Waal notes that the gestures and attitudes displayed by Hennie and Nikkie are distinct in kind and quantity from the behaviors that can usually be observed when chimpanzees make contact: “the outstretched arm and open hand, which chimpanzees use to beg for body contact … more eye contact, yelping, and soft screaming, … much more kissing” (Ibid.). Most importantly, Hennie’s gestures and attitudes are understood by Nikkie, as his response demonstrates. That they are instances of a social behaviour of reconciliation of this colony is confirmed by the fact that the team of primatologists was able to observe the same patterns of behaviour after conflicts recurring at many other times in the colony.2 Now, what is the aim of Hennie and Nikkie in this interaction? Approaching Nikkie would be an unlikely choice for Hennie if she was seeking comfort after his attack, especially since other chimpanzees were in her vicinity at that time, and in particular an older female, Mama, that was protective of her. Rather, it suggests that the focus of her efforts is to repair her relationship with Nikkie. De Waal notes that, except in the case of fights for power, the initiative of peacemaking comes as much from dominants as from subordinates, suggesting that reconciliation does not 2  Statistically, reconciliation occurred “after 47% of conflicts among adult males, after only 18% of those among adult females, with reconciliation between the sexes falling in between” (de Waal 1989, 48).

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exclusively serve the own purposes of either dominant or subordinate but their relationship and their position in the group inasmuch as it depends on this relationship (Ibid., 44). Therefore, without needing to speculate on the psychological effects of reconciliation, we can observe that it has a social effect, namely, preserving “social stability” (Ibid., 38, emphasis in original). Reconciliation reaffirms not only the belonging of individuals to the group but also the cohesion and stability of the group itself. More broadly, de Waal argues that reconciliation among nonhuman primates relates to a broader category of “expectations” that they have about what happens in their societies, expectations that vary according to each species: In analogy with the human sense of justice, we may call this a sense of social regularity, which I define as follows: A set of expectations about the way in which oneself (or others) ought to be treated and how resources ought to be divided. Whenever reality deviates from these expectations to one’s (or the other’s) disadvantage, a negative reaction ensues, most commonly protest by subordinate individuals and punishment by dominant individuals. (de Waal 1996, 95, emphasis in original)

Expectations about how others should behave are expectations about certain regularities. Where these regularities are not tied to biologically determined behaviours but to behaviours that vary with the group in which they occur, they are deemed cultural: they depend on individuals’ acting in accordance with a rule established by the group rather than a genetic or environmental determination. Primatologists have uncovered the existence of many such cultural behaviours among nonhuman primates (Wrangham et al. 1994). Expectations about how individuals will behave in socially determined circumstances are about other individuals following rules. The existence of such expectations, and therefore of the rules that underlie them, becomes manifest through protest or punishment when these expectations are not met or, on the contrary, during successful interactions such as the one described above. In this case, the ability of Hennie and Nikkie to respond to each other and ultimately restore peace between themselves shows that they respond to the situation in a way that is appropriate and that they expect of each other. They followed the rule of what it is appropriate to do when chimpanzees in this group want to reconcile after a conflict.

3  What Is It to Follow a Rule? The use of the concept of rule-following might strike us as inappropriate or metaphoric when applied to chimpanzees. While their behaviour undeniably exhibits regularities, it does not entail that they are actively following a rule. The concept of rule implies a criterion of correction beyond regularities across behaviours that are produced in similar circumstances. An individual can be said to be following a rule not only if her behaviour can be placed in agreement with the rule but if her behaviour is determined by the rule. Clearly, chimpanzees do not possess the linguistic

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capacities that might enable them to consider a certain rule and rationally determine the behaviour that should be theirs in present circumstances, according to this rule. Yet, Wittgenstein showed that the conception of rule-following which implies reasoning and justification was flawed. To follow a rule means to understand what it prescribes and apply it in appropriate circumstances. It does not necessarily imply a mental act of self-explanation, interpretation or justification. While we can make explicit to ourselves or others, prospectively or retrospectively, the rule that determines our action, we do not need it in order to follow the rule. This intellectualist conception of rule-following stems from a conflation between the rule itself and the way we can express and discuss it. “[T]he teaching of language [to a child] is not explanation, but training” (Wittgenstein 1953, §5). We learn how to follow rules, and how to speak, by being trained to it: Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule – say a sign-post – got to do with my actions? What sort of connection is there here? – Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. (Wittgenstein 1953, §198)

We act in a certain way because we have been trained to do so, not because we are able to identify the right way of acting thanks to certain cognitive capacities, independently of this training. Under this conception, rule-following can be attributed to animals, even if they do not possess linguistic or highly developed mental capacities on a par with humans, as long as they live in multigenerational groups and have such capacities of attention and imitation that enable them to learn a behaviour from other members in their group.The cultural transmission of behaviour that underlies the existence of social rules has been documented among all nonhuman primates and many other species (Lestel 2001). “Cultural transmission of behavior is contrasted with the acquisition of behavior through individual learning or through genetic transmission: cultural transmission implies learning from others and, in its most effective form, teaching by others” (Wrangham et al. 1994, 1). The pattern of reconciliation that Hennie and Nikkie’s interaction illustrates is such a cultural behaviour, namely, a behaviour that they have learned from other chimpanzees in the group. The role of training becomes manifest in cases when juveniles, unlike adults, are unable to appropriately respond to certain circumstances. For instance, primatologist Kim Bauers noted that juveniles often failed to emit staccato grunts that other female chimpanzees tended to emit when approaching an infant with their mother – a type of grunt that mothers never used towards their own offspring. After such grunts, the mother would usually let the other female approach her infant. On the contrary, chimpanzees who were approaching silently were rebuffed (de Waal 1996, 91). This difference of behaviour between juveniles and adults and the ensuing consequences suggest that juveniles who fail to signal their approach in this specific way have not yet mastered the appropriate social rule, that is, a rule that amounts to “ask[ing] [a mother] permission” to approach their infant (Ibid.). However, the fact of training – whether for humans or animals – does not seem to be sufficient to account for learning how to follow a rule. Training seems to evacuate normativity and the concept of a rule altogether, as Wittgenstein himself remarked: “that is only to give a causal connection; to tell how it has come about

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that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in” (Wittgenstein 1953, §198). The repetition of training builds a causal reaction so that the trained individual will react in a certain way in appropriate circumstances. But it seems that if a pupil accomplishes a certain gesture because her response to the stimulus has been acquired through training, then this gesture is not done for the right reason, that is, to follow the norm given by the rule; it is merely done because it is causally determined by a conditioning schema. This objection is compounded by Wittgenstein’s precision that “I am using the word ‘trained’ in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an animal being trained to do certain things. It is done by means of example, reward, punishment, and suchlike” (Wittgenstein 1965, 77). It seems that reward and punishment create a disposition to automatically act in a certain way but cannot on their own produce understanding. Wittgenstein himself immediately addressed this objection in the following way: “I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom” (Wittgenstein 1953, §198). The rewards and punishments that are the means of training a pupil to follow a rule produce a disposition to behave in a certain way but also an understanding of the custom that exists in their society, according to which in such circumstances, one should act in this way, that is, an understanding of the rule. As John McDowell remarks, the difficulty here is that we are “impressed by the sparseness of the teaching that leaves someone capable of autonomously going on in the same way” (McDowell 1998b, 64). Learning to follow a rule, including the rules of language, requires no more than being trained to it within a community of congeners. At some point, when the training is finished, we command the rule. Thus, as McDowell notes, the fact of training is not per se a response to the question of how we determine the correct interpretation of the rule. Rather, it is the dismissal of this very question: following a rule is not interpreting it. We know how to act appropriately in these circumstances because we have been trained to this custom (McDowell 1998a). Our belief that training cannot produce true understanding and rule-following is based on mistaken assumptions about animal training. Wittgenstein, when he employs the term “training”, explicitly refers to our practices with domesticated animals, such as horses or dogs, by which we teach them how to behave, be it in their everyday lives with us or accomplishing specific activities such as racing. According to behaviourist theory, training consists in producing habitual behaviours thanks to repetition and reinforcement; in this view, training is a causal process that does not imply understanding. The experience of animal trainers undermines such a conception of training. Animal trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne highlights the thickness of the relationship between trainer and trained animal, a relationship of cooperation. It involves meaning and understanding so that “the more mutual trust there is, the more dog and human can rely on each other to behave responsibly” (Hearne 2016, 21). Hearne acknowledges that using the moral concept of responsible behaviour for a dog may sound odd, yet she adds that it is the right one to accurately describe certain situations. If training results in a dog’s being able to behave appropriately in certain circumstances, it is because the dog has understood what is

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demanded of him, not only because  he has been mechanistically programmed to do so. Because nothing more than training is required, some nonhuman animals are also able to learn to follow rules, provided that they possess capacities of attention and imitation and live in stable, multigenerational communities in which rules are perpetuated. They learn how to react in certain circumstances or, to borrow Alice Crary’s useful paraphrase, “what we do when”.3 Such a paraphrase can help us overcome the resistance of our language to expressing phenomena that straddle the gap between nature and culture. It is not accidental that the words by which we describe certain social and cognitive phenomena do not easily stretch to animal life for they have been defined in relation to the human experience and by contrast with what animal life was taken to be. It makes it intrinsically difficult to express the ability of some animals to follow rules in ways that do not imply conceptual and linguistic capacities like ours. Another useful concept to overcome this difficulty is the Wittgensteinian concept of language games.

4  Language Games Here is how Wittgenstein defines the concept of language game in the Blue Book: I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. (Wittgenstein 1965, 17)

A language game in the sense stipulated by Wittgenstein is a circumscribed activity of communication in which signs are used to convey a certain meaning. The concept highlights an intrinsic connection between language and its use in an activity; a language game is “the whole consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein 1953, §7). The concept of language game can be used either descriptively or heuristically. It can describe “one of those games by means of which children learn their native language” (Ibid.). Then, by virtue of their simplicity, language games might serve as a helpful model to illuminate the inner workings of our ordinary, highly complex language. The game of requesting and passing bricks and slabs between a man and a builder, described in the beginning of the Investigations, is an example of such a heuristic use of a fictional language game (Wittgenstein 1953, §1). 3  Crary develops a line of thought that is similar to the one pursued here in her analysis of dogs’ mental capacities. She shows that a dog that is faced with a new situation (e.g. an electric toy) is able to display “doings-appropriate-when”. The dog’s fearless reaction in front of a new electric toy demonstrates that it uses a form of categorisation. Such categorisations remain primitive compared to our concepts, since they lack justification. They are nevertheless a genuine form of mental activity (Crary 2016, 111 ff).

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I would like to argue that the aforementioned interaction of the chimpanzees Hennie and Nikkie is a language game as well. The claim here is not that they possess language in a way that would directly relate to human language; rather, I would argue that the concept of language game is apt to highlight a meaningful form of communication between them. This interaction corresponds to Wittgenstein’s definition of a language game in the following respects. During the peacemaking process, chimpanzees use certain gestures that express the offer of peacemaking and its acceptance. These gestures are nonverbal signs that are recognised and understood as such by their partner. Primatologists, as external observers, are also able to recognise the recurrence of similar signs in similar situations and to infer their meaning, although without absolute certainty. While these signs and their rules of use are much fewer and simpler than in ordinary human language, they convey a certain meaning. That Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, as primitive forms of language, might apply to certain interactions between animals, is explicitly suggested by the following remark: I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (Wittgenstein 1969, §475)

This remark draws a continuity between language - as human beings use it - and animal communication. While Wittgenstein does not conflate both, he does highlight a strong kinship between them by granting primitive, animal forms of communication the status of a logic. The process of reconciliation among chimpanzees that de Waal describes illustrates such a primitive form of logic. Wittgenstein further underlines this kinship by stressing that we should not be ashamed of this poor relation of ours. Thus, he points to an evolutionary continuity between the cognitive systems of different species that underlies the emergence of a full-fledged logic. This remark may also influence our study of animal behaviour by inviting us to consider it under the assumption that it is governed by a certain logic. However, some commentators have denied that an extremely simple language game such as that of the builders in the Investigations should be called language at all, as Wittgenstein insists. As per Wittgenstein’s stipulation, the language game that is made up by the words that the builders use constitutes the totality of their language. According to Rush Rhees, it means that they do not form a language at all: for words to have meaning they should be usable in different contexts of utterance. And for a pupil to have learned a word means that she can use it to express something new and not only in a unique situation (Rhees 1960). Therefore, according to Rhees, the words used by the builders are nothing more than “signals which cannot be used in any other way” (Ibid., 177, emphasis in original). By signal, it can be presumed that Rhees means an utterance or behaviour that has an indicative value but does not have the same expressive value as a linguistic sign because its meaning is fixed. But is it not Wittgenstein’s point that a signal such as a sign-post already carries meaning and requires understanding in the same way

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words of our language do? A sign-post or the words that are used by the builders do not have a definitely fixed meaning. Indeed, we can imagine that the meaning of the orders used by the builders would evolve with time, either in the course of their own practice or with new generations of builders. For instance, if the source of materials or technique came to change, “slab” might come to designate slabs of a certain material by distinction to others, or larger pieces by opposition to smaller ones. Rhees further deplores that “the activity of the builders does not give you an idea of a people with a definite sort of life”, while a language, as Wittgenstein insists, is intrinsically spoken and tied to a certain form of life (Ibid., 184). Arguably, Rhees’ dissatisfaction points to the intrinsic boundaries of the thought experiment itself: for such a thought experiment to be useful there needs to be elements in it that we can relate to; but at the same time, it demands from us that we imagine a form of life in which what we describe as building is truly different from what we know as building. Rhees’ suggestions betray a misunderstanding of the thought experiment that is offered by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein does not ask us to imagine a variation on human cultures, as Rhees suggests, rather a different form of life altogether. Rhees’s dissatisfaction originates from his inability to imagine a form of life so different from ours that it would have such a restricted language. While it is certainly quite challenging, it is not thoroughly impossible, as many works of science-fiction illustrate. Such major imaginative work is precisely what we need in order to understand the lives of animals and their primitive logics. We need such fine observation and imagination in order to see and recognize animal forms of logic that are so thoroughly different from ours. Cora Diamond and Alice Crary have, in a Wittgensteinian vein, shown the importance of imagination in animal ethics, in particular of literary imagination (Diamond 1991; Crary 2016). Literature directs our attention to what morally matters. Notwithstanding obvious differences in aim and method, ethology shares with literature a certain process: in a way, it requires an effort of imagination from scientists in order for them to identify and make sense of nonhuman forms of life. The kind of heuristic anthropomorphism that is defended by de Waal and that I describe below can be understood as such an exercise of imagination. Wittgenstein’s concept of language game leads to the radical thesis that even forms of expression and understanding that are extremely rudimentary are meaningful. They are already first steps in language, however distant they remain from full-­ fledged and highly complex forms of language games such as conversation. To apply the concept of language game to some forms of animal communication is important because it highlights their conventional and meaningful dimension. It offers a conceptual framework for examining and understanding animal forms of communication inasmuch as they produce and carry meaning, albeit in a modest way, rather than interpreting them in terms of mere causation devoid of proper meaning.

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5  From Human Life to Chimpanzee Life There still lingers the doubt that it might not be appropriate to use the concept of reconciliation to describe the language game in which chimpanzees make peace after a conflict, since it would imply that the same concept could apply to both chimpanzee and human behaviour. It raises the suspicion of anthropomorphism. By applying a concept that is defined by human behaviour to animals, the objection goes, we would fallaciously attribute human characteristics to animals on the basis of superficial resemblances. However, anthropomorphism is not per se a fallacy, as de Waal and others underline. It becomes one only when we project human features onto animals without evidence that they do possess such features. The “a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist” is equally fallacious (de Waal 1999, 258). De Waal dubs it “anthropodenial” (Ibid.). The ignorance of resemblances between our lives and those of the observed species is mistakenly taken for objectivity, as this recollection of early work by primatologist Jane Goodall highlights: As soon as I was sure of knowing a chimpanzee if I saw it again, I named it. Some scientists feel that animals should be labeled by numbers – that to name them is anthropomorphic – but I have always been interested in the differences between individuals, but a name is not only more individual than a number but far easier to remember. (Goodall 1988, 32, emphasis in original)

To give names to wild animals looks anthropomorphic because naming each other is not something that they do on their own; rather, it is a human practice. Naming animals seems to imply that we attribute subjectivity, personality or feelings to them as if they were humans. Yet, calling by name is how we, as humans, designate and identify individuals. Therefore, to designate animals by numbers rather than names implicitly suggests that the observed animals do not have properties that we normally attach to individuals. The methodological choice of using numbers, far from being neutral, is but another framework with unquestioned assumptions and far-­ reaching consequences, since it will prevent scientists from observing animals as individuals, even in instances when it would be relevant. In this case, names are more appropriate because they allow human observers to grasp features of the lives of chimpanzees that depend on their being individuated within their group. Being individuated or being able to reconcile with others are features that chimpanzees happen to share with us. What should we do with this resemblance? Rather than viewing reconciliation as a “marker of mind,” present only in humanoids, I would expect to find it in any species that lives in cohesive groups, with long-term relationships worth repairing after disagreement. The only capacities strictly needed are individual recognition and a good memory; both are present in many social animals, from hyenas to elephants and from dolphins to zebras. (de Waal 1989, 87)

That resemblances – being individuated or able to reconcile – exist between us and other species should not surprise us. We should expect cognitive and behavioural resemblances between species that are evolutionarily closely related and, most

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importantly, that share with us some features of their lives, such as living in cohesive groups. In the words of Wittgenstein, those are species whose forms of life are in certain respects similar to ours. Both de Waal and Wittgenstein invite us to abandon a hierarchical conception of human and animal life forms. In the traditional framework of the dichotomy between nature and culture, the focus is on dissemblance between beings that belong to the former and those that belong to the latter; resemblance can only be superficial. The holistic perspective sketched by both de Waal and Wittgenstein invites us to consider any behaviour in the context of the form of life in which it takes place, rather than, abstractly, against other behaviours in different species, and in particular human capacities and behaviours: What is happening now has significance – in these surroundings. The surroundings give it its importance. And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.) (Wittgenstein 1953, §583 emphasis in original)

We understand the meaning of a smile based on its “surroundings”, that is, its culturally defined context, according to which a smile can mean things as different as reassurance, joy, surprise or irony. But the biological form of our life also matters for a smile to be a smile. Among mammals, baring one’s teeth in order to communicate something means different things depending on the species. For instance, dogs express hostility this way while rhesus monkeys, like many nonhuman primates, bare their teeth when intimidated (de Waal 1999, 264). On the contrary, some animals may express with distinct behaviours an emotion similar to the emotions that humans express by smiling. By contrast, the phenomenon of hope appears to be more specific to the human form of life and its perception of time. Therefore, the relationship between processes of peacemaking among human and nonhuman primates is not one of direct similarity or equivalence that would allow for direct comparison. Rather, it is a relationship of analogy. The resemblance lies in the fact that the process of peacemaking plays the same role among chimpanzees as peacemaking among humans and proceeds in analogous ways in both cases. Both for human beings and chimpanzees, peacemaking occurs through a socially codified exchange of sounds and gestures between the two conflicting parties and, when successful, restores pacific coexistence after a conflict. It is also different in many respects. Language, as a performative exchange of words of apologies and acceptance, and meaningful silences, is essential to human reconciliation and confers on it its very form and profound complexity. Thus, we cannot help being anthropomorphic in our observation of animals if it means noticing resemblances that do exist between us and them. De Waal proposes to go even further and make a deliberate use of anthropomorphism as a “heuristic” tool, devoid of ontological claims (de Waal 1999). A strategic use of anthropomorphism as a heuristic device can help ethologists generate hypotheses that will provide new directions for interpretation and research. As de Waal notes, it is only after primatologists identified primates individually that they “realize[d] how much it matters to primates with which of their groupmates they are dealing” (de Waal 1989, 38). We cannot observe social interactions or rule-following among animal societies if we have preemptively set a methodological framework that prevents the

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observation of such social interactions. “Even though the reconciliation concept’s connotations derive from social interaction, the concept has prompted a fresh look at animal aggression and conflict resolution by generating new and testable hypotheses” (de Waal 1999, 269). These interpretative hypotheses are not taken as facts about the observed animals but as hypotheses that will be proven or disproven by minute observation, supported by standardised criteria and assessment tools. In turn, the hypothesis of similarities between human and animal behaviour with respect to reconciliation prompts us to be attentive to ways in which efforts to maintain social bonds might concretely occur in animal species. It can help us identify meaningful communication through other means than vocalization. From the analysis of such interactions, we can also induce that chimpanzees possess certain cognitive and social capacities. De Waal notes that Hennie waited 15 min before engaging with Nikkie. In general, “[chimpanzees] often delay their response to a particular situation, patiently waiting for the best opportunity, demonstrating memory and planning capacities. They also test the ground before making a social move, in the same way that they may throw small pebbles at a dead animal before touching it.” (de Waal 1989, 38) This latter observation testifies to the social intelligence skills of these chimpanzees. In occurrences of peacemaking, the observed chimpanzees demonstrate that they are aware of their own and other individuals’ social status within the group and are able to assess social conditions for action. Because such capacities are inherently enmeshed with language in human beings, it seems that they intrinsically require language. Observations of chimpanzees suggest that chimpanzees also do possess them, although in a different, nonlinguistic form.

6  Conclusion Our philosophical and scientific approach to animals has for too long consisted in asking whether they possess the beginnings or rudiments of distinctly human capacities, such as language, intelligence, or morality. Such questions are designed in a way that they can hardly bring more than negative results and teach us little if anything about what animals are and what they can do. A positive approach to animal life requires that we ask what language, intelligence and morality can mean when applied to nonhuman animals. Here, the accusation of anthropomorphism misses the point. Language, intelligence or morality will necessarily be quite different when applied to this or that animal species than what they mean when describing humans. By dissociating language from mental capacities and inviting us to consider language as activities, Wittgenstein removes an essential distinction between humans and animals. He makes it possible to think that some nonhuman animals engage in communication that carries meaning, despite differing from our own linguistic activities, and therefore to develop observational and experimental strategies to learn about the lives of animals. Importantly, with concepts of rule-following, form of life or language games, Wittgenstein does not give us a ready-made solution. Instead, he points to a problem

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and a field of inquiry. In each case, there remains to understand how nature and culture articulate in different aspects of the lives of the observed animals, in a way that can be reminiscent of, yet remains distinct from, our own lives. These concepts may sustain a social science or ethnographic approach towards animals that is most appropriate to the study of social and cultural animals, even if they are not human (Lestel, 2014).

References Crary, Alice. 2016. Inside ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Waal, Frans. 1989. Peacemaking among primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: Consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical Topics 27: 255–280. DeGrazia, David. 2001. Why Wittgenstein’s philosophy should not prevent us from taking animals seriously. In Slow cures and bad philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, medicine, and bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott, 103–117. Durham: Duke University Press. Despret, V. 2008. The becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds. Trans. A. Goffey. Subjectivity 23 (1): 123–139. ———. 2016. What would animals say if we asked the right questions? Trans. B.  Buchanan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, Cora. 1991. The realistic spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goodall, Jane. 1964. Tool-using and aimed throwing in a community of free-living chimpanzees. Nature 201: 1264–1266. ———. 1988. In the shadow of man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hearne, V. 2016. Adam’s task: Calling Animals by name. New York: Skyhorse. Le Goff, Anne. 2012. Living with animals, living as an animal. In Language, ethics and animal life: Wittgenstein and beyond, ed. N. Forsberg, M. Burley, and N. Hamalainen, 124–138. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2020. L’Animal Humain. Paris: Vrin. Leahy, Michael P.T. 2005. Against liberation: Putting animals in perspective. New  York: Routledge. Lestel, Dominique. 2001. Les origines animales de la culture. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 2004. L’Animal singulier. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 2014. Toward an ethnography of animal worlds. Trans. J. Bussolini. Angelaki 19: 75–89. McDowell, John. 1998a. Meaning and intentionality in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In Mind, value, and reality, 263–278. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998b. Virtue and reason. In Mind, value, and reality, 50–73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pleasants, Nigel. 2006. Nonsense on stilts? Wittgenstein, ethics, and the lives of animals. Inquiry 49: 314–336. Rhees, R. 1960. Wittgenstein’s builders. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 60 (1): 171–186. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen  – Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1965. The blue and brown books. New York: Harper Torchbooks. ———. 1969. Über Gewissheit  – On certainty. Trans. G.  E. M.  Anscombe and Denis Paul. New York: Harper & Row. Wrangham, Richard W., W.C. McGrew, F. de Waal, and P. Heltne, eds. 1994. Chimpanzee cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Anne Le Goff ’s research focuses on the intersection of biology and society. In her recent book, L’animal humain [Human Animal] (2020), she examined how human life is both rational and natural following a Wittgensteinian approach. She currently conducts her postdoctoral research on the ethics of contemporary biology and biotechnology at the University of California, Institute for Society and Genetics.  

Absolutely Personal: A Countercurrent in Moral Philosophy Lars Hertzberg

What is it that moral philosophers do? As we know, they approach their field in radically different ways. But do they all have something in common? Moral philosophers of different strands, it is true, tend to talk about many of the same things, such as the keeping of promises, lying and truthfulness, fairness and injustice, right and wrong, goodness and obligation, forgiveness and remorse, etc. But do they then also talk about these things in the same mode? Do they, in short, talk to one another? It may indeed be questioned whether they do. In this chapter, I wish to address one such divide between ways of talking, and to argue that here we have a case of both division and kinship. I am thinking, on the one hand, about certain mainstream forms of analytic ethics, and, on the other hand, about a range of criticisms aimed at the mainstream. These criticisms have been formulated by a group of philosophers, largely inspired by Wittgenstein’s work, many of whom had some form of connection with the former Department of Philosophy at Swansea. I shall start by sketching out some central positions in analytic ethics, which circle around the idea that ethical thought is dependent on the existence of an independent reality (Sect. 1). In Sect. 2, I shall present a critique of this conception, to the effect that the idea of moral thought requiring a grounding in an independent reality does not make sense; rather, moral reality is constituted by the use of moral expressions. On an alternative account, we learn the use of those expressions in learning to speak, this learning in turn being grounded in our responsiveness (Sect. 3). Finally, to illustrate this alternative account I discuss the way in which the possibility of moral responsiveness is conditioned by the cultural context of a person’s life (Sects. 4 and 5). Central thinkers in this tradition are Rush Rhees (1999), Peter Winch (1972, 1987), Roy Holland (1980), Raimond Gaita (1999, 2004) and D. Z. Phillips (1992). L. Hertzberg (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_7

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I would also like to mention five philosophers on the periphery of this tradition. Two are British: Elizabeth Anscombe (1958a, 1958b, 1978) and Philippa Foot (1958, 1958–1959). Three are American: Cora Diamond (1975–1976, 1980–1981, 2004, 2019) (who also spent time at Swansea), John Cook (whose book Morality and Cultural Difference [1999], though not rooted in the Swansea tradition, has interesting affinities with their work) and Stanley Cavell.1 I do not intend to provide a historical overview of the tradition or to present all the philosophers mentioned here; I simply want to discuss some characteristic themes within this tradition. Its core is what is often called “therapeutic”, that is, it finds its task in trying to free our thinking from certain intellectual fixations. The spirit of this approach to philosophy was expressed by Wittgenstein in his remark: “Working in philosophy ... is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s own way of seeing things” (Wittgenstein 1998, 16). In what follows, my presentation will mainly concern itself with critiques aimed by some philosophers in this tradition at certain predominant strands in contemporary analytic moral philosophy.

1  The Idea of Moral Reality The analytical mainstream in moral philosophy, it could be said, is centred around two questions that are closely intertwined. One is the question whether there is a moral reality that offers a standard for assessing the validity of moral judgements. The other is the question whether moral philosophy can offer a guide to action. An affirmative answer to the second question is often taken to presuppose that the first question has been answered affirmatively: it is moral reality, if such a thing exists, that gives authority to the precepts established through ethical reflection. The idea of a moral reality is often bound up with the view that there is a range of words that constitute the core of the ethical: words such as “good” and “evil”, “right” and “wrong”, “duty”, “rights”. Moral reality is what those words refer to. The task of moral philosophy is to try to map that reality. The idea of a moral reality, however, brings along its own set of puzzles: it leads us to ask whether the same morality is valid for all times and societies, or whether morality varies between cultures and between historical epochs. Cora Diamond characterises this climate of thought as follows. In spite of developments in philosophy, [t]he focus is still on “evaluations”, “judgments”, on explicit moral reasoning to conclusions that something is worthwhile, or a duty, or wrong, or ought to be done; our conception of what are “issues” for moral thought is still “x is wrong” versus “x is permissible”; the abortion debate is our paradigm of moral utterance. (Diamond 2004, 144)

1  See also Alice Crary (2007); Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor, eds. (2020), especially Simon Haines, “Shakespeare, Value and Diamond”.

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This type of discourse tends to be intertwined with another kind. On this other conception, there is no moral reality as such. Moral norms are instrumental: they are reducible to claims about which ways of acting will be beneficial for society (or for humankind, or for all living beings). This may be couched in terms of maximising happiness or wish fulfilment as applied to individual actions (Bentham, Peter Singer), or in terms of whether some practice is required for the good functioning of society: moral norms, it is often said, are needed for the regulation of social interaction for mutual benefit (Hobbes). A closely related form of ethical theory is contract theory. The alternative to these views  – that our moral judgements are grounded in a moral or a non-moral reality –, it is thought, is to argue that moral language “does not refer to anything”, has no “cognitive content”, that moral responses do not embody serious thought. Values, rights and obligations, it is pointed out, cannot be the subject of empirical inquiry (as opposed to the question of what values, rights and obligations are in fact upheld in some particular society or among a particular group of people); hence, we cannot employ empirical methods to settle moral disagreements. Moral judgements, accordingly, cannot be held to possess objective authority; they are, perhaps, expressions of moral emotions (Edward Westermarck, Charles Stevenson) or ways of formulating moral prescriptions (R. M. Hare).2 These three conceptions turn around the question of a grounding for moral thought. On one view, the grounding is specific to our moral thought. On the second view, there is no specifically moral grounding; rather, the grounding is provided by facts about the satisfactory functioning of human society. On the third view, in turn, there is no grounding, and hence no room for a claim of objective validity for moral judgements. Elements of these divergent views are current in popular thought about ethics, in what might be called “folk ethics” – that is to say, in popular ideas about what ethics is, which do not necessarily bear on the way people manifest their ethical concerns in actual life situations, but rather show up in how people reflect about morality. Thus, in line with moral realism, the public turns to the experts with questions such as “Do animals have rights?”, “Is euthanasia/capital punishment permissible?”, ”Would it be right for a person to rescue his/her partner from a burning building rather than a stranger?”, “What part of my income am I entitled to keep to myself rather than give to charity?”, etc. It is assumed that there is a correct answer to each such question, to be supplied by an impersonal expert. Along similar lines, it is thought that codes of conduct can be laid down for specific professions or specific contexts. However, in common thinking, side by side with such manifestations of moral realism, the idea that morality is really in the service of the good functioning of society, as well as the idea that morality is ultimately subjective, are equally familiar. We run from one account to the other, not really reflecting on the fact that they are in mutual conflict. On the other hand, when it comes to the way each of us,

2  The conception formulated by Immanuel Kant in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, as well as the tradition known as virtue ethics, does not fit into this scheme.

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as an individual, responds to moral challenges in particular cases, such thoughts about “what ethics is” will normally play little or no role.3 Whichever of these conceptions about the nature of moral reality is held, a shared idea seems to be that moral considerations are imposed upon a reality that is given to us in morally neutral terms, upon a world of “pure facts”. In setting herself to act, or to judge, the individual is called upon to decide how the moral criteria he or she considers valid are to be applied to the case at hand. Thus, morality is external to the world. There is an essential divide between facts and values: facts, as it were, are in the world; values are outside it. The idea of a fact-value divide is connected with a conception of what it means to become a speaker of the language. On this conception, the basic function of language is to record and convey pure facts concerning the way things are in the world. The learner faces the world as an observer who needs language in order to label the things that confront him. A central concern of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is to show how inadequate this conception is. On the one hand, words are used for many purposes aside from reporting facts. On the other hand, even the reporting of facts will take place in a context of human interaction in which the sense of what is said is dependent on the situation at hand and the relation between the speakers. What will count as a pure fact is a matter to be judged within that conversational context. Besides, the reporting of facts and other uses of language are not clearly delimited from one another; thus, what may be called a factual claim is often made with a practical purpose in mind. If someone says, “It’s hot in here”, what shows that I have understood what she is saying, in a given case, may be that I open a window – my simply nodding agreement may show that I did not understand her.4 When questions of meaning come to be focused around the uses of words in conversation rather than the composition of the sentences uttered, the fact-value dichotomy loses its grip, or rather its character changes. The force of a sequence of words is not determined by the words of which it consists but by the use to which they are put in a particular context of speaking. Thus, the word “murder” may be used to report a historical fact (say, “Lincoln was murdered in 1865”),5 or as a historical assessment (“It was unfortunate that the attempt to murder Hitler failed”), or in accusation (“You’re a murderer!”), or in exhorting someone to abstain from an action (“But that would be murder!”), or as a political slogan (“Abortion is murder!”), etc. And similarly, some expression that is commonly used in descriptive contexts may take on moral force in a given situation, for example “That’s my book!” 3  Popular ideas about what ethics is, rather than simply popular attitudes on specific ethical issues, might be an interesting area of research in social psychology. I am not aware of any such research being carried out. 4  See Rhees (1998) for illuminating reflections on becoming a speaker. For the relation between factual assertions and normative claims, see Anscombe (1958a). 5  However, even in a historical context someone who sympathised with Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, might reject calling the action murder, insisting instead that it was the execution of a tyrant.

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2  Moral Force According to several philosophers working in the tradition inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the question that unites moral realists and non-cognitivists, concerning the requirement of a (moral or non-moral) reality that underlies our moral thought and speech, is itself expressive of a philosophical illusion. The idea that the sense of our words might be determined by a reality that is constituted independently of – in advance of – our practice of using those words, is confused. This is so whether we are thinking about the words we use, say to speak of physical objects, or divine entities, or morality, or aesthetic qualities, or numbers, or anything else. The idea that the sense of the language we use in talking about physical objects flows from the existence and nature of those objects involves us in a logical circle, for it is only within that language that assertions about the existence and nature of physical objects have the meaning they have. Analogously, the sense of our moral talk is not to be taken as being dependent on a moral reality given in advance, but rather what it means to claim moral authority for a demand or exhortation is seen in the role moral considerations have in human interaction. The sense of the words we use in various contexts is not externally grounded but is constituted in the lives we live with those words. And similarly, the absence of a purported moral reality does not render the uttering of moral claims empty of intellectual content. What is a moral claim? As suggested above, it would be misleading to suppose that there is some such thing as a specific moral vocabulary. The words often thought to constitute such a vocabulary (“good”, “right”, etc.) have a variety of uses, in the case of many of which it would be misleading to think of them as having moral force (the goodness of a certain brand of olive oil, the right way to spell the word “exquisite”, etc). On the other hand, words spoken may be felt to have moral force even if they do not come from a specific list of “moral terms”. The question that must be answered next, it will be thought, is what “moral force” amounts to. I beg to be excused from having to provide a definition in answer to this question, other than to say that I rely on the reader’s familiarity with the motley uses of words such as “moral”, “morality” and “ethical” to provide enough of an indication of what the discussion is about. Perhaps one way of gesturing towards the meaning of “moral force” is to suggest that it has affinities with the use of the word “important” as it occurs in the following dialogue. Out of the blue, I once asked my granddaughter, who was then seven, whether it was more important to be pretty or smart. “Smart”, she said without missing a beat. I then asked whether it is more important to be smart or kind. Without hesitation she answered, “To be kind”. The interest of this story does not lie in the fact that she had no difficulty giving what we may feel were satisfactory answers to my questions, but that she was able to pick up on this somewhat peculiar use of the word “important” right away, without, say, asking “Important for what?” (I should point out that she is no more precocious than the next kid). I am sure this was not a use of the word “important” that she had been expressly taught; rather, through her conversation with others she had developed a sense of what might perhaps be called

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absolute or intransitive uses of words or of forms of reasoning in contrast to their more ordinary, transitive (in many cases, we may suppose, instrumental) uses. One way of thinking about moral uses of words, then, would be to think of them as claiming an authority that is not dependent on any additional consideration, say, in terms of utility, or decorum, or custom, or mental comfort, etc. One’s recognition of that authority is shown in one’s taking up an attitude, say, of respect, or admiration, or gratitude or, as the case may be, of condemnation, resentment or remorse, etc. (and, if one is consistent, in one’s acting accordingly when called upon to do so). It should be noted that for someone to have a sense of a use of words having such force or authority need not presuppose her thinking of them under the label “moral” or indeed as belonging to a specific category under any other name. When we call such uses “moral” we may simply be expressing a spectator’s perspective on them, which is not to deny that words such as “moral” may at some stage come to play a role in a person’s thought about such uses of words. How, then, is the idea that some uses of words may lay such a claim to authority acquired? There is no reason to think of all such uses of words as being learnt in some specific, unified way. We learn them as we learn to use words to express ourselves in various contexts. Consider, for instance, how we might learn the meaning of the word “cruel”. We may hear the word used, say, by someone trying to make Joe stop tormenting a cat, or by someone startled by his behaviour. If Joe’s treatment of the cat makes me recoil, that gives me an opening for grasping what the word is used to express. I may gradually come around to using the word myself as an expression of reproach or incredulity. It might be said that it is because many of us have a spontaneous tendency to recoil from cruelty that we are able to make the word part of our vocabulary. (Of course, having this tendency does not always mean that one will abstain from the behaviour oneself.) Suppose a person lacks this tendency. He could hardly learn how the word is to be used. He would be unable to see what different forms of cruelty had in common, or what the point would be of grouping them all under one label: why should pulling off the wings of a fly come under the same label as putting out a cigarette butt against somebody’s palm, or forcing a person’s head under water, or capturing a person’s child to make her recant, or subjecting someone to the silent treatment, or making asylum seekers wait indefinitely for a decision? He might try to guess how others use the word, but he would probably be hesitant about new cases (why isn’t the dentist “cruel”, say?). In fact, he would hardly have use for the word himself (except perhaps in an attempt to pass himself off as “normal”).6 In other cases, of course, the background required for developing a grasp of the meaning of a word will be more advanced, involving, say, concepts such as truthfulness, or ownership, or privacy, or honour, or sexual integrity, or fairness, etc. Now, responsiveness – in the sense of having an intelligible reaction to an event or situation that is not simply based on recognition or inference – is a central notion

6  Anscombe’s account of “stopping modals” provides an illuminating description of how one might think about the learning of language with moral force (Anscombe 1978).

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in Wittgenstein’s discussion of what it means to become a speaker: it is to an important extent by learning to convey my responses to other people or to react to their expressions that I become someone who can interact verbally with other members of the language community.7 Learning to use a word such as “cruel”, then, is continuous with learning other words in the language, such as calling a chair rickety or a knife sharp. Questions of responsiveness recur in much of the work of the Swansea tradition. It plays a central role, for instance, in Winch’s essay “Who is My Neighbour?” (Winch 1986), in which he presents the Samaritan’s response to the condition of the robbery victim as unmediated by convention or doctrine. However, we should not suppose that our responses to our fellow human beings are always benign or edifying, as D.  Z. Phillips makes clear in his critical comment on Winch’s essay: Moral teaching may exhort us to give some of our reactions a priority, but the reactions themselves, sympathetic and unsympathetic, seem equally primitive [i.e. unmediated] … For example, Winch emphasises pity as the conviction that someone is in pain. But is not recoiling also such a conviction? Moving away seems as primitive a reaction as moving towards, where pain is concerned. (Phillips 1989, 238)

The point is not that our unmediated responses will automatically guarantee that we will act in morally admirable or morally acceptable ways; rather, they constitute the background against which other people (or other living beings) come to matter to us, for better or worse, and thus contain the possibility – though not a necessity – that our relations to others may grow in the direction of compassion, consideration, generosity and fairness. Where a growth of sensitivity occurs, it will to an important extent involve the articulation of such concerns in language in interaction with other speakers. A seminal contribution to the philosophical tradition I am talking about is Peter Winch’s essay “Moral Integrity” (1964). The end of this essay has often been quoted: [N]either [philosophy], nor any other form of enquiry, can show what is worthy of admiration. The idea that it can … always involves an obscuring of possibilities … Philosophy may indeed try to remove intellectual obstacles in the way of recognizing certain possibilities …. But what a man makes of the possibilities he can comprehend is a matter of what man he is. This is revealed in the way he lives; it is revealed to him in his understanding of what he can and what he cannot attach importance to. But philosophy can no more show a man what he should attach importance to than geometry can show a man where he should stand. (Winch 1964, 191)

This passage invites reflection. Winch, I believe, should not be taken to be denying that philosophical reflection on moral issues could promote a lucid understanding of an issue, for instance by counteracting a tendency to deceive oneself; such lucidity, of course, might also be reached by pondering an issue with friends, or by reading a novel or a biography, or by watching a film. The point, however, is that moral 7  This aspect of language learning may be missed because of the focus on labelling building stones in the introductory part of the Philosophical Investigations. In the builders’ game the distinctions between the different building blocks have no immediate grounding in the participants’ expressive behaviour.

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philosophers do not possess an expertise that would put them in a position to tell you how to live your life. A slightly different point might be added here: it would be an illusion to think that moral philosophers could somehow dig up arguments that would give you reasons to be good, or instil in you a sense of reverence, or implant in you a craving for justice, unless those impulses are already in you. The passage calls for a couple of other comments. For one thing, on this day, apologies need to be made for Winch’s gender-biased form of expression. In 1964, when the essay was originally written, it was taken for granted that the word “man” was a proxy for both sexes. This fact, no doubt, was bound up with other features of the intellectual life of that time that can only be deplored. Second, it is obvious that by “philosophy” Winch primarily means moral philosophy. And third, the comparison of ethics to geometry might easily be taken in the wrong way. Ethics, unlike geometry, is not a strictly delimited field constituted by a range of concepts interconnected through definitions and axioms. Ethical inquiry is open-ended; indeed, much of its richness lies precisely in the fact that the terms and perspectives are not laid down in advance. Hence, rather than comparing ethics to geometry, I would propose comparing it to, say, history, and accordingly perhaps paraphrase Winch as follows: “[P]hilosophy can no more show us what we should attach importance to than history can show us how we should vote.”

3  Seeing the World in Ethically Salient Ways Within this tradition, the use of examples is central. This is connected with the attempt to remind us of the place moral responses have in our lives, rather than telling us how we ought to conduct ourselves. It is true that examples may also be used by philosophers concerned with action-guiding ideas, such as the notorious so-­ called trolley examples. However, it is no coincidence that in many cases the examples used by the latter are often schematic and artificial rather than concerning themselves with the sorts of situations that we might encounter in our normal lives. In 1986, Onora O’Neill published an essay with the title “The Power of Example”, in which she discussed the Wittgensteinian tradition in ethics. While praising the reflective use of examples by philosophers inspired by Wittgenstein, such as Winch, she complained about their being “remote from … the practical solution of moral problems” (quoted in D. Z. Phillips 1990, 70). In answer to her critique, Phillips paraphrases Winch’s approach as follows: It is important to grasp … that O’Neill has a conception of moral philosophy as a guide to human conduct. She never comes to grips with the fact that Winch is challenging that conception. For her, he is simply seen as someone whose examples lack the power to give us the moral guidance we need. O’Neill fails to appreciate that Winch is not offering examples which await our moral judgements. He is presenting examples of people making moral judgements. (Ibid. First italics mine)

While ethics in this tradition does not aim to be action-guiding, neither is it to be considered purely descriptive, in the sense of presenting us with judgements that we

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may either believe or disbelieve. It attempts to make us recognise ways in which we ourselves are inclined to act, react and judge. Perhaps it could be said that this is a form of thinking that moves in normative spheres but does not produce normative claims that may be comprehended in isolation from the considerations that have led up to them. For a person’s ways of responding to acquire the authority I connected with the notion of moral force is a matter of how others respond to them. What will carry authority will of course vary between different groups of people and between cultures. Some people may bestow authority on ways of responding that we would find weird or abhorrent. (Consider, for instance, the culture of omertà in the criminal brotherhoods of southern Italy, or appeals to family honour in connection with the killing of female members of families.) On the other hand, in some societies, authority may be denied to impulses that we would be inclined to regard as humane. In the account of ethics that I am trying to outline here the traditional perspective is reversed: rather than impose moral conceptions on a neutral world, to be an agent is to see the world in what for her are ethically salient ways, and moral philosophy becomes a matter of clarifying what is involved in seeing the world thus, a clarification that may help us towards lucidity. While for mainstream moral philosophy the discipline is sharply marked off from the other branches of philosophy, on the alternative view it is closely enmeshed with epistemology, with the philosophy of mind, of language and of logic, involving reflection on the way the use of words such as “knowledge” or “fact” or “reality” or “understanding” or “intention” or “meaning” or “will” is itself expressive of moral commitments: calling something a fact expresses a readiness to stand behind it; attributing an intention to someone is bound up with what we may hold her accountable for; attributing a meaning to what someone has said is making a claim about what she can be held to, etc. (Cf. Winch 1971.) In “Moral Integrity”, Winch formulates a closely related point: It is characteristic of many of the philosophers I have mentioned that they think of the relation of morality to conduct in terms of the reason a man has for doing one thing rather than another. A philosopher … who has sharply criticized this conception is Jean-Paul Sartre who said, perhaps with exaggeration but still with point, that when I come to deliberate – to consider reasons for and against doing something  – “les jeux sont faits” (“the chips are down”). If we wish to understand the moral character of a particular man and his acts it is, often at any rate, … important to notice what he considers the alternatives to be … Let me express this point by saying that a situation, the issues which it raises and the kind of reason which is appropriate to a discussion of those issues, involve a certain perspective. If I had to say shortly how I take the agent in the situation to be related to such a perspective I should say, as I think would Sartre, that the agent is this perspective. (Winch 1964, 177f.)

4  Moral Possibilities and Cultural Variations In what follows, I wish to bring up two discussions that concern the relations between moral possibilities, available language and cultural variations.

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Consider the following passage by Peter Singer, a well-known representative of the mainstream tradition in analytic philosophy: Those who lie and cheat, but do not believe what they are doing to be wrong, may be living according to ethical standards. They may believe, for any of a number of possible reasons, that it is right to lie, cheat, steal and so on. (Singer 1979, 9)

In fact, it is hard to grasp what sort of imaginative exercise we are supposed to carry out here, in supposing that the force of words such as “lie”, “cheat” and “steal” carry no moral force in their normal use. In 1960, Winch published an essay called “Nature and Convention” in which he takes a position opposite to that of Singer. He maintains that morality is not (at least not entirely) based on convention; rather, some aspects of it are presupposed by any convention. “There could not be a human society which was not also, in some sense, a moral community” he writes, and goes on: [A]dherence to the norm of truthfulness goes along with the distinction between true and false statements; without the one there could not be the other …. An individual who can talk can of course deliberate on a given occasion whether to tell the truth or not. But he will already have learned what telling the truth is; and what I wish to argue is both that learning this is part of the process of learning to speak and also that learning this involves at the same time learning that speaking the truth is the norm and speaking untruthfully a deviation. (Winch 1959–1960, 62)

Winch then goes on to defend the claim that the norm of truth-telling is a moral and not just a practical condition of language. Winch’s account of the truthfulness requirement should not be mistaken for the sort of reductive account that I described above. His point is not that this norm is useful from the point of view of social interaction, and that, accordingly, its authority can be derived from its utility, but rather that it is constitutive of what it means to have a language. However, Roy Holland, in an essay published in 1970, “Is Goodness a Mystery?”, criticises Winch’s line of argument. While the main target of Holland’s critique is the attempt to reduce moral thought to a concern with social well-being, he argues that some of the same criticisms can be directed at Winch’s reasoning. Referring to Winch’s essay, Holland writes: Consider … the life-form argument in the version which concludes that it is impossible to conceive a human life in which truthfulness would not be generally regarded as a virtue. This conclusion is soothing to the intelligence as long as you do not enquire into the concept of virtue that is being employed. But ask … what sort of truthfulness might be at issue … and immediately your attention is caught by what the argument does not do ... [I]f the concern of some [people] for truth be such that they would hazard all their prospects for it there is something yet to be accounted for. For the only truth thus far explained is the sort that is told in the degree to which it supports the surrounding organization or gets you by without disrupting the existing social pattern … [M]y point is that alongside it there could co-exist for at least some people in the society a concern with truth of an altogether different character, in which not to falsify became a spiritual demeanour. Where then could this spirit come from? (Holland 1970, 106)

What kind of comportment would fall beyond the purview of the truthfulness requirement as envisaged by Winch? It seems to me that he may be read in two

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different ways, each of which may be illustrated by a different example. One example of what Holland has in mind might be this. Suppose my friend extracts from me a promise concerning the way I am to dispose of his not inconsiderable estate. After his death it turns out he wants the money to go to some purpose that seems to me to be frivolous (say, a care home for aging canaries) or downright deleterious (where the beneficiary is certain to use the money to support his drinking or drug abuse) rather than permitting his hard-up children to inherit the money. How am I to act in this case? My response would presumably depend on the details of the situation. In any case, I would most likely experience a quandary: whatever I end up doing, I would find it hard simply not to grant any authority to my friend’s last wish, quite independently of any real benefit that would ensue from the arrangement he had stipulated. This, then, would be a case in which the moral force of a claim can be grasped in the absence of any regard to consequences. A different reading of Holland’s argument could be brought out, say, by considering a case such as that of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who put his life and liberty on the line in the attempt to expose the mendacity and corruption of the regime under which he lives. Maybe we could say that in a case such as Navalny’s, the struggle for the truth, in its total absence of self-regard, “becomes a spiritual demeanour”, in Holland’s phrase. But when Holland goes on to ask where this spirit comes from, it is not clear what answer he has in mind. He may be suggesting that the question has no answer: absolute goodness is a mystery. (The phrase “absolute goodness” should not be taken to mean that a person as such is without flaws but that the action in question is not governed by ulterior considerations.) And, of course, it could not be argued that the behaviour comes from Navalny’s having been brought up in a society where the children are taught to be truthful: most people in our or any other society would not be ready to follow an example such as Navalny’s. But suppose, on the other hand, that we pose the question to Navalny himself, and suppose he said that he acted the way he did simply because he had been taught that the truth is important. In a sense, that might be a perfectly satisfactory answer. He would be denying that there was anything remarkable about what he did: it was simply what he had to do. Here, then, are two perspectives that appear to be in conflict. But are they really in conflict? One question is, as it were, asked in the third person, the other in the second person. The first question raises sociological issues: under what circumstances can people in general be expected, say, to behave honestly? But when our imaginary Navalny answers our question, he is presumably not contemplating any sociological hypotheses. He is not reaching out for an explanation of what he is doing; rather, he is discarding the need for any explanation. Here someone may be tempted to say that there has to be some explanation: maybe Navalny was expecting some favourable outcome in terms of monetary rewards or power, or maybe his mental constitution made these kinds of sacrifices easier for him than for somebody else – otherwise he could not have acted the way he did. Yet to say that there has to be some such explanation would seem to be a subterfuge: it would be an attempt to belittle his actions and at the same time provide an excuse for not following his example – as it were, to deflect the challenge

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his actions pose to us. As Holland puts it, “these explanations only relativize the value”. In connection with this he says, “Why this goodness is what it is or why it should be present at all is left as the mystery it needs must be” (Holland 1970, 109). Yet it might be questioned whether Holland’s critique hits its target. What it means to be truthful is not a unified thing, as Holland acknowledges. The truthfulness requirement makes itself felt when there is a temptation to lie (say, out of a fear of repercussions, out of vanity, to gain an advantage, etc.) or maybe a simple temptation not to bother about finding out the truth. Being taught to speak the truth is to be taught to try to overcome such temptations. But there will also be an issue of the importance of speaking the truth in the situation at hand, the interlocutor’s claim on our truthfulness, etc. Suppose it is a question of lying to protect a classmate from being bullied. To regard the weight of the truthfulness requirement as dependent on the situation at hand is not necessarily to think of the importance of truth-telling as limited by “the degree to which it supports the surrounding organisation or gets you by without disrupting the existing social pattern”. The fact that the truthfulness requirement is inextricably involved in, and grows out of, anything we could call social life does not entail that in each given instance the requirement is contingent on the social utility of living up to it or on its impact on individual well-being. Even if there may be problems with the way Holland’s critique is to be understood, it did have an impact on Winch’s thinking, as he testifies in the introduction to Ethics and Action. He says it helped him shift his focus onto the question “what is involved in, and what are the conditions of, a man’s attempting to arrive at a moral understanding of his own life and of the relations between this and his understanding of his relations with his fellow men”, “questions about the moral significance which a man can attach to his own acts, as distinct from the significance to him of other men’s acts” (Winch 1972, 3f, 5f.). This is connected with the idea that no one else (say, “an expert on applied ethics”) can make my decisions for me. How I am to respond to other people’s actions is a separate issue that I may have to make up my mind about. This shift of attention, I would argue, came to characterise the tradition I am discussing here, and thus to involve an even greater distancing from the idea of moral philosophy as concerned with action guidance. It may be noted as a difference between Holland’s and Winch’s style of thought, however, that the latter did not express his conception of what is morally admirable in terms of wonder or mystery.

5  The Problem of Relativism John Cook, too, discusses the relation between morality and culture. Like Winch and Holland, he argues against the attempt to reduce morality to the norms prevalent in a society, though his method of argument is somewhat different. His style is much more down-to-earth than Holland’s. On the whole, his treatment of the issues is a valuable complement to those of Winch and Holland.

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Cook’s primary target is moral relativism. In fact, he asserts that the conventional dichotomy between moral absolutism or universalism and moral relativism is spurious. This is connected with his critique of the idea of morality (moral reality) as constituted by a set of rules or principles, whether common to all people or limited to specific societies. Cook defines the moral relativist as someone who argues that “a moral principle is properly formulated only when a ‘relativizing clause’ is attached to it, so that you would have something like ‘For Americans headhunting is wrong’” (I take it Cook is here talking about headhunting in the literal sense). According to Cook, philosophers have been too prone to accept various examples of alien practices as proof of moral relativism. One case he discusses is the practice of honour killings in certain Middle Eastern societies. This is a practice that most of us would unconditionally condemn, and if we met someone who contemplated killing his sister, say, because she was pregnant and unmarried, we would be shocked and would do all we could to talk him out of it. Yet the moral relativist seems committed to arguing that this person has a moral obligation to kill his sister. Evidently, she would subscribe to the principle, “A member of such-and-such a culture has a sacred duty to kill a family member if she is unmarried and pregnant”. What is unclear, however, is exactly what such a claim would amount to. As Cook puts it: It must be … that our ordinary understanding of morality is not the same as the relativists’. The latter think that to discover what a person’s moral obligations are we need only observe what members of his or her culture typically say their obligations are and whether they act accordingly. One can, obviously, learn much in this way, but there is also much that this procedure may fail to detect … one will not learn in this way, nor will one have evaluated the moral cogency of what they say, for instance, whether the moral justifications they give are [not?] self-serving rationalizations. If we are not already relativists, we are likely to think that these are important matters. For we understand that people can be morally obtuse, self-deceiving, lacking in imagination, and overly conventional, that their thinking can be riddled with clichés, burdened with misconceptions, and ruled by fear or hatred. (Cook 1999, 84f.)

Here I wish to give my own formulation of Cook’s argument as I understand it. Moral relativism, to be of interest, cannot simply be the claim that people live in radically different ways, some of which we find abhorrent, and that they may characterise those ways of life in moral terms. This is common knowledge. What, then, is the force of the claim, “They have a different morality”, when made about some group or society? Does it express anything over and above the insight that customs vary (which may of course constitute a mitigating circumstance when it comes to judging the actions of someone from an alien culture)? One would think that moral relativism should have implications for our attitude to unfamiliar or alien practices: it should involve an exhortation to respect them as morally binding for their practitioners. But as we saw with the case of honour killings, that is not how we think one ought to respond in various actual cases. Nor do we think one should respond in that way, say, to someone who is involved in the trafficking of Nigerian women to forced prostitution in Europe, and who justifies lying to the police by claiming a sacred

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duty of loyalty towards the criminal organisation to which he belongs.8 In short, the mere fact that individuals or groups of people live and act in some particular way and that they dignify their way of life in terms laying claim to moral authority would not by itself be enough to make us call their stance a moral one in the sense in which applying that term to them would mean that we would owe them respect. Some may object that in withholding our respect from the morality of the honour killers or the traffickers, we are employing our standards in judging the lives of people who do not fall under their purview. But nothing was said of “employing standards”, much less of favouring this or that set of standards. If I am struck by the cruelty of capturing women and forcing them into prostitution, I do not think of my condemnation as needing support from some higher principle. If someone fails to see the cruelty, on the other hand, all I can do is to try to open his eyes to it (whether or not I shall succeed is a different matter). That someone should acquire the ability to see the cruelty of an action is no more in need of special explanation than that she should learn to use many other words – although, again, a person’s cultural background may make it harder for him to attend to what others find concerning about the action. At this point, someone may raise the question: if moral understanding is just another aspect of what is involved in learning to speak, why do moral disagreements often seem so intractable, compared, say, to disputes about the colour of objects? The answer, I would suggest, is that in calling someone cruel, or unjust, or greedy, or admitting to those qualities in oneself, the practical and emotional stakes involved may be much higher, and hence the temptation to turn a blind eye to them much greater, than in the case of many other words of the language. On a different understanding, moral relativism would amount to the claim that an individual’s capacity for moral thought is limited by the culture to which he belongs. His culture provides the moral vocabulary to which he has access. Thus, belonging to this culture, an individual will simply lack the intellectual resources to question the idea that he has a duty to kill his sister. On closer inspection, however, this idea is hard to grasp. Let us imagine the following story. A young man is told by his parents he has a duty to kill his younger sister. He recognises that what they command him to do is precisely what he has been taught is required by a family member in a case such as this. On the other hand, he is very fond of his sister and the command shocks and grieves him. He is angry at her for her weakness, but then he comes to reflect on the fact that in a fit of passion we are all apt to forget about consequences. He becomes convinced that she did not act the way she did out of contempt for the family, and in fact she has always been a loving and dutiful daughter and sister. He realises that the consequence of not killing her is that he and his family will be held up to shame and ridicule; for sure, this will be a terrible burden to bear, but he still thinks his sister’s life is too heavy a price to pay for saving his

8  Compare the discussion of Igor’s dilemma in Martin Gustafsson’s essay “‘I don’t know’: Agency, self-understanding and new beginnings in three films by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne” in this volume.

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family’s honour. Perhaps he will even come to see that a preoccupation with family honour is self-serving. Now which part of this reasoning is supposed to be absolutely beyond this man’s reach? To be sure, what I am describing here may be a very hard perspective for a member of his culture to take up; indeed, it may be unbearably hard, and so those who are prepared to follow this line of thought are very few indeed – maybe it never actually happens within this society. The point, however, is that it is difficult to see how a person’s culture would make it, shall we say, logically impossible to think the way this man does. What the culture may explain is why this change of perspective is so rarely taken up: it cannot explain why it should be beyond a person’s comprehension. Yet this, it appears to me, is what a moral relativist needs to argue if his claim is to be anything but trivial. The moral relativist envisages the moral system as a cage. But it is a cage with the door left open. Perhaps we would call this man’s reasoning a form of moral awakening. That description might not be available to him or his kin. On the contrary, they may call him a traitor, and, if he were to revert to the old ways, he might then be said to have returned to moral seriousness. This makes no difference to the point I am making, which is simply that human beings are not locked into the morality in which they have been brought up. Of course, there are plenty of analogous tensions within our own culture, say between those who condemn homosexuality as a moral failure and those for whom such condemnation is itself a violation of humanity, or, on a different level, a tension that may be felt within an individual between the idea that the primary way for him to prove his worth is by devoting as much as possible of his time and energy to his work, and the idea that he owes it to his children to be present to them when they are growing up. Moral relativism is sometimes presented as an exhortation to tolerance. And it is true that we often make the mistake of judging the actions of others without sufficient understanding of the concrete circumstances and the cultural surroundings in which an action is performed. People tend to lack the imagination to realise the radical extent to which human lives and experiences may differ. Sometimes, too, we need to realise that we have no standing to pass judgement in a conflict in which we have no personal involvement. We often need to be reminded of these matters. But in the end, this is all common sense; there is no need to dress it up as a philosophical theory under the name of moral relativism.

6  Conclusion I grow into an understanding of morality as I grow into language; indeed, the former process is an aspect of the latter. This dual process, which has no definite end, is partly shaped by the cultural context in which I live. At the same time, what I make of that context at any given stage of development is a reflection of what I myself bring to the process. Moral growth requires being prepared to work on myself, on my responsiveness, on how I see things. In that regard, it is analogous to the growth

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of understanding that constitutes work in philosophy. There is no independent moral reality that I have to reach through my thinking. Rather, what that reality is for us is continually shaped through our thinking and talking together.9

References Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958a. On brute facts. In Anscombe 1981. ———. 1958b. Modern moral philosophy. In Anscombe 1981. ———. 1978. Rules, rights and promises. In Anscombe 1981. ———. 1981. Ethics, religion and politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cook, John. 1999. Morality and cultural differences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crary, Alice. 2007. Beyond moral judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1975–1976. Eating meat and eating people. In Diamond 1991. ———. 1980–1981. Anything but argument?. In Diamond 1991 ———. 1991. The realistic spirit: Wittgenstein, philosophy, and the mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2004. Having a rough story about what moral philosophy is. In The literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, 133–145. London: Routledge. ———. 2019. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe going on to ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foot, Philippa. 1958. Moral arguments. Mind 67: 502–513. Gaita, Raimond. 1999. A common humanity: Thinking about love and truth and justice. Melbourne: Text Publishing. ———. 2004. Good and evil: An absolute conception. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Gleeson, Andrew, and Craig Taylor, eds. 2020. Morality in a realistic spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond. New York: Routledge. Holland, R.F. 1970. Is goodness a mystery? In Holland 1980. ———. 1980. Against empiricism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Phillips, D.Z. 1989. My neighbour and my neighbours. In Phillips 1992. ———. 1990. The presumption of theory. In Phillips 1992. ———. 1992. Interventions in ethics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rhees, Rush. 1998. In Wittgenstein and the possibility of discourse, ed. D.Z. Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. In Moral questions, ed. D.Z. Phillips. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winch, Peter. 1959–1960. Nature and convention. In Winch 1972. ———. 1964. Moral integrity. In Winch 1972. ———. 1971. Trying. In Winch 1972. ———. 1972. Ethics and action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1986. Who is my neighbour? In Winch 1987 ———. 1987. Trying to make sense. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and value. Revised edition. Trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

9  Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference Alternative Contemporary Ethics, Rome, 14 September 2017, and at the philosophy research seminar at Åbo Akademi, January 2018. I am grateful to the participants at those occasions for their comments. My special thanks are due to Salla Aldrin Salskov, David Cockburn and Merete Mazzarella who read the paper and made substantial suggestions for improvements.

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Lars Hertzberg  is professor emeritus of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He has written essays on ethics, the philosophy of language, philosophical psychology and Wittgenstein, some of them collected in The Limits of Experience (Acta Philosophical Fennica 1994) and in the forthcoming Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language. He has done some translations of Wittgenstein into Swedish.

Part II

Historical Investigations

Love in Teaching and Love of the World Raimond Gaita

THOMAS MORE: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one. RICHARD RICH: If I was, who would know it? MORE: You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that. (Robert Bolt, A Man For all Seasons)

Teachers, many people appear now to believe, put into the heads of students content that they could, in principle, always get from elsewhere. A teachers’ presence and enthusiasm, even her love of her subject, they think, facilitate reception of that content and perhaps encourage its retention, but imaginatively constructed programmes for sophisticated technologies might do the same. Whether that happens, this thought continues, is an empirical matter and will depend on the contingencies of our (human and individual) psychology. Teachers are thought to do for their students what autodidacts do for themselves. Perhaps that is why one hears so much about Learning (capital intended) but little about teaching. “Teachers are losers”, I heard a bright young man say at the end of his schooling. He would not have disparaged Learning: he needed it to qualify for a place in a prestigious law or medical school. He would accept that, as things stand, we need teachers; but we need rubbish collectors too. The view I sketched is the expression of a more general one – that what is in our heads and the cause of all that we do, could, in principle, have been put there in an instant, by God perhaps, rather as a programme is put into a computer. From this perspective, living a life with others over time and learning from them is a form of R. Gaita (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia King’s College London, London, UK University of Pardubice, Pardubice, The Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_8

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information gathering. The information is processed by a cognitive capacity whose character makes no necessary reference to the lives of those who possess it, in our case, the lives of human beings. Defending an essentially Kantian account of morality, Alan Donagan located himself in the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition and called that capacity Reason. It is, he said, “a capacity to perform acts whose content belong to the domain of logic” (Donagan 1977, 235). In much of my work I have tried to reveal why it is, and why it matters, that morality is sui generis, that is, not fully explicable by connections it has to ends that could be described independently of it. I would say the same about teaching: although it serves ends that can be described independently of it, its deepest value transcends the efficient service of those ends. Teacher and student may, in their different ways but necessarily together, be engaged in the exploration and progressive discovery of a value that cannot be specified independently of their engagement and its necessary mutuality. A teacher’s love of her subject and her joy in teaching it can bring students to an entirely new understanding of the worth of their initiation into a subject – of, indeed, what it may be for something to be subject – and to one of the many, but most nourishing, forms of intrinsic worth. They may come to see it as something to which a life may worthily be devoted and, as the sacrifices of some academics living under tyranny remind us, for which it may worthily be given. Many academics are suspicious of subjects and disciplines (I take philosophy to be a discipline, moral philosophy or epistemology be subjects in it), because they tend to think of them as discouraging creativity and originality, and because they are liable to degenerate into specialisms. The Scottish philosopher of education, John Macmurray, was particularly worried about the ascendancy of science in education. “To increase the number of trained scientists”, he said, “means to increase the proportion of our population which knows more and more about less and less”. He refers approvingly to someone who said that a “specialist is a man who doesn’t know anything else” (Macmurray 1965). There is truth in that, especially today when even philosophy has fragmented into increasingly many specialisms. But it also misses something important. Until recently – until the language in which we could seriously speak of a vocation began to die on us – the idea of a subject and that of a teacher were, to some degree, inter-­ defining, at least in universities, where subjects were developed and nourished. The extent to which the love of her subject could become part of a teacher’s identity is captured in the intimate resonances that can, in certain contexts, be heard when, speaking of a teacher, we say that this or that is “her subject”. And in the fact that when teaching is considered as a vocation rather than a profession or, still worse, a career, thinking about what it is to be a teacher and, more specifically, a teacher of this or that subject, could deepen without limit. It makes sense to say that an entire age has lost an understanding of teaching as a vocation, but it makes only attenuated sense to say that of a profession and barely sense at all to say it of a career. That is not, however, because thought about what it means to have a teaching vocation is about a Platonic Form of it, free of the conditions of time and place. Nor is it about an historical paradigm. It is thought – at least insofar as it is about teaching that serves a discipline  – that is inward with a distinctive enactment of an

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historically contingent form of the life of the mind developed in communities governed by a spirit of collegiality. It is thought in dialogue with a history of reflection that goes back at least to Socrates. That historical depth, rather than a metaphysical essence or an historical paradigm, ensured the possibility of the kind of depth that secured for ways of thinking about teaching some distance from times and places. It enabled teachers to judge whether their desires, aspirations and the spirit of their times were faithful or faithless to a serious understanding of what it means to be a teacher, which though often expressed in the singular, was of course, never just one thing. This is thought of the kind that can, as I said, deepen without limit, and can, therefore, never be exhausted in a set of definitions or policy statements. It requires inwardness with values slowly apprehended by living the life of the mind in community with fine exemplars of it and can awaken in teachers and students alike desires they never had in response to values they had never before encountered and perhaps had never dreamed of. A subject has of course impersonal standards, but in ways I hope will be at least implicit in what I say later, the ever-deepening kind of reflection that I have described as intrinsic to a teaching vocation is partly a function of the way it is personal: one must rise in what I call an individuating responsiveness to its history and exemplars, living and dead, that move one to a trusting fidelity to the intimations of vocation. This implies, I think, a conception of a subject as inseparable from the spirit in which it is studied and taught. In his notebooks, Wittgenstein agonises over whether his work is infected by vanity. “Infected” is the right word, or “polluted” may be, because he was not worried that vanity would increase the number of mistakes he made, or in other ways distort the content of his work as we think of that content when we lecture on him – on the private language argument or on rule following, for example. For him, the spirit in which philosophy is done is intrinsic to its nature. Seen in the light of the conception of a philosophical life, including an academic philosophical life, as a vocation that is perhaps not remarkable. In the light of a conception of that life as a profession or career, it is likely to seem precious or neurotic, which is one reason why many philosophers (and others) respond with urbane condescension to his fierce intensity. He was, to be sure, a difficult man whose behaviour was sometimes preposterous, but what we make of that complexity is a function of the concepts under which we see its elements. I would think, though, that even now, most people would acknowledge that it would be absurd to describe Socrates as a great professional, and we know that is not only because the option was unavailable to him. But it would not be absurd to say that when he said, under the threat of death, that he could not give up philosophising because the “unexamined life is not worthy of a human being”, he expressed an ethical necessity intrinsic to his sense of philosophy as his vocation. It is true that philosophy was not an academic subject for Socrates, and Wittgenstein had a complexly tense relation to academic philosophy, but though the expressions “academic philosopher” and “professional philosopher” are now virtually interchangeable, it was not always so. Although Wittgenstein often spoke contemptuously of academic philosophy, he always had one foot in it because, though his sense of the problems of philosophy

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could not be contained in, neither could they be separated from, philosophy as a discipline. And despite his need of solitude, the kind of discussion he believed to be essential to philosophy (a philosopher who avoids discussion, he said, is like a boxer who never goes into the ring), necessarily engaged, even if ambivalently, the community of academic philosophers, living and the dead. That community, defined by a spirit of collegiality, is now severely undermined by the increasingly authoritarian nature of university administration. When I teach students who study philosophy, I tell them that I do not set the most important of the standards in whose light they should see what they do. Nor does the department or the university or even the community of philosophers worldwide. My colleagues and I try, with our students, to rise to the subject whose nature and standards are set by the great figures in it and by those, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, who had a tense relation to the academic practice of it, and those, like Socrates, for whom philosophy was not, and could not have been, a subject. What I say to them relies on a sense of the intrinsic worth of what they are doing. More importantly, it requires a continuing, ever deepening exploration of what it can mean to do philosophy for the love and joy of it and the obligations that love imposes. More often than not we academics must acknowledge that we fail our students and ourselves when we judge what we do by those standards, but we would fail our students even more seriously if we did not make them and ourselves answerable to them. If I am right, then our task is to see how much of the intimations of depth, in our rhetoric of “the intrinsic value” of the scholarly and intellectual life, is honestly and lucidly accessible to us in living and authoritative speech. It is tempting to represent this as a task to discover what we really believe or what we can honestly and consistently believe after we have examined the conflicting intimations of our ways of speaking. But discovering whether we can strike a non-rhetorical note in our talk of the love of truth, for example, is not a matter of discovering whether we believe in the love of truth. It is more like coming to discover which of the concepts whose structures we can still abstractly articulate – by for example, what philosophers used to call conceptual analysis – are still fully available to us for living use. That discovery and striking the right note are interdependent. It is rather like finding which admired ways of living are real options for us without sentimentality or bathos or some other form of inauthenticity. It is therefore important to ensure that the language of university administration and of research and teaching does not make us tone deaf. It is naive, for example, to believe that one can keep an ironic distance from managerial newspeak and keep alive the language that can identify the treasures we owe each new generation of students. The value of the life of the mind, what it can humanly mean, can only be revealed in the reflective appreciation of the way it deepens the lives of people who care for it. We do not have a sense of it independently of such exemplars. If you want to know what justice is you should look to the just man, said Aristotle, but of course, you must have eyes to see. The same is true of our understanding of the life of the mind in all its forms. Or, to change the metaphor for a better one: examples will move us to see depth where we had not before only if they speak to us in a language

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that lives for us. By the same token, language that reveals value of any depth depends on examples to make it vital. Obviously the limited family of concepts to which that of a customer or a provider of goods and services belong, and which have now overtaken much of education, will not take us far in the direction of understanding what is at issue here. They won’t even enable us to understand the disagreements about the deepest values of the teaching life and of what it is to do history, or philosophy or physics, for example, well. Or, in the case of philosophy, what it is to do it at all. *** I shall try to make what I have said more concrete by reflecting on a teacher from whom I learnt much of what I shall try to say in this essay. Not long after I began to teach, when I despaired of it, he told me that there are two ways to think about teaching. One is to dream of pulling a switch that will make a thousand lights come on. Another is nourished by the image of passing a candle from one person to another, or of planting seeds, not knowing when or where they will grow. His name was Martin Winkler. Winkler taught me German towards the end of my school years, not at the boarding school that I attended, but at another school in the same city. He was perhaps the wisest man I have known. Eccentric, and a strong, passionate personality, he was more than a little daunting, but in the penultimate year of my secondary schooling we became close because, threatened with expulsion from my school, I found refuge each week in his study. Influenced by Elvis Presley, Jimmy Dean and Marlon Brando, my energies at the time were directed more to becoming a juvenile delinquent than a scholar. My most vivid memories of my school years, however – and the ones that still give me most pleasure and inspire my deepest gratitude – are of the times when Winkler went to the small organ he kept in his book-lined study and played Bach trios and cantatas and talked about them to me. I was entranced by his untroubled confidence that he had revealed to me some of the great treasures of a cultural tradition bequeathed to him and that he cherished. It never occurred to me to ask why he did it because I knew, as everyone does, that people enjoy sharing what they love. Winkler was initiating me into a form of what Plato called pedagogical Eros, initiating me into the art of loving as Socrates puts it in The Symposium. Why did he play Bach to me when I came to learn German in order to read Humanities at university? Winkler did more than was necessary to prepare me for the exams, but he revealed to me how the love of his subject and his love of Bach and Handel and of much German cultural history were inseparable. He taught me what it can be to love a natural language, shaped by and shaping the life and history of a people. For him, the study of a language was a kind of anthropology that enabled one to understand a people in their way of being human in their language. Conscious though Winkler was of the greatness of much of the European artistic and intellectual heritage – he was steeped in and formed by it and German through and through – knowledge of its evils lacerated his soul as much as love of its treasures nourished it. For a man like him it could not have been otherwise so soon after the Holocaust. One of the least complacent people I have met, he knew the dangers inherent in revering tradition. He knew that a certain kind of respect for it – perhaps

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the most common kind  – silenced voices when it did not exclude them and paradoxically, by wrapping them in respectability rather than honouring them with critical respect, muted even those it celebrated, depriving them of the power to shake us. He knew, also, that because, as George Steiner (1966: 15) put it, “we come after” – that is, after the Holocaust – we cannot justifiably have the confidence of people who came before in the capacity of the humanities to humanise. Perhaps this was a greater shock to Western intellectuals than it should have been, since the humanities and high culture more generally had proved no obstacle to the massacre of indigenous peoples across the world. It took many years for even the Holocaust to make “civilisation” an ethically compromised notion. But Winkler believed that the Holocaust should not banish Bach and much else of German culture from his love. As a human being he wanted, and as a teacher felt obliged, to share what he loved with his students, hoping that they would find it worthy of their love and that it would nourish in them a love of the world, as it had in him. Thinking about the Holocaust – about how it should be characterised morally, legally and politically, about what it shows about the prospects for a sense of a common humanity amongst the peoples of the earth and about the hopes we can soberly place in education – has been fundamental to my intellectual and moral life. Winkler’s capacity to fully understand its distinctive terribleness while refusing to allow it to undermine his sense of goodness as it showed itself in culture and in life more generally was a gift to me. “Inspiration” is a word that is too general to describe Winkler’s effect on me, covering as it does a multitude of virtues and vices. One can be inspired by things that are corrupt and also, sometimes passionately by things that reflection reveals to be banal. Everyone knows, of course, that enthusiasm can be catching, so it is often regarded as a pedagogical asset for good or evil ends. Love, on the other hand, as Plato was perhaps the first great philosopher to see, is in complex ways conceptually related to the good. One can be an enthusiastic debunker, even an enthusiastic nihilist, but love longs to celebrate the beloved. Most importantly love can be revelatory. That is partly because we distinguish real love from its many false semblances, and we do it by appealing to a range of critical concepts whose application secures a connection between love and truth. At least as much as enthusiasm, love can, of course, energise students who are bored with their studies. More important than that, however, is the fact that it is sometimes an indispensable way to see the value of something. Often, we see something is precious only through the eyes of love, ours or someone else’s. Ten or so years after I left school, I read in the writings of another fine teacher, a philosopher who awakened me to Plato, what I had learnt from Winkler. When I was writing my PhD in England in the mid-1970s, the department in which I worked reviewed its teaching practices. Some of its members wrote long documents. One, who thought he was at the cutting edge of his subject and pedagogical theory, conducted a postgraduate seminar. To twenty or so students at the seminar he showed a small piece of paper. “This”, he said contemptuously, “is what one of your professors says about what he does as a teacher”.

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We all knew to whom he referred. I can’t remember the exact words on that paper, but the maligned professor wrote similar ones in an essay published in his collection, Against Empiricism. There he advised teachers to “concentrate on making available to those whom we teach the very best and most beautiful things we know, and as far as possible, only those things”. His name was R. F. Holland. I was blessed to have him as my supervisor. After he had discussed the qualities of mind and character needed to become competent in a discipline Holland writes: In our officiation over the various levels of relative mastery, we are concerned as teachers with the conditions of a possibility which has still to be categorised in its deepest aspect. I shall now try to say what I most of all want to say about it. It is the possibility of coming into an inheritance. It has to do with no less a question than whether a man can be at home in the world – whether he can find it a good world despite the ill (...). By being brought into contact with forms of understanding and apprehension in which some good is to be encountered, some wonder to be seen, whether in nature or the work of human beings, a person might be helped to see the beauty of reality, helped to live more fully, helped to be glad that he is alive. The expression knocking at my mind is nourishment of the soul.

He then quotes Pablo Casals: For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning it has for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being (...). I do not think that a day has passed in my life in which I have failed to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. (Holland 1980: 59f)

I know nothing else that expresses so wonderfully a love of the world in the key of gratitude. In the same interview from which Holland quotes, Casals added “I am not religious, but if I were it would be the Bach religion.” Were it not said by Casals, that might sound frivolous and contrary to the spirit of Bach’s deep piety. Iris Murdoch, following Weil, says that when prayer is not petition, it can be attention to something pure and good. Casals’ morning practice was such an act of attention, which expressed and nourished his spirit.Talk of the treasures of our tradition can invite condescending smiles, I know, but it is a fact that is beyond controversy that there are things in our intellectual and cultural tradition – works of art, philosophy, literature, music and so on – that have inspired in some people love of the world in the face of great affliction and great evil, when hope, conceived as an orientation to the world based on a favourable assessment of how things will turn out, was weak. Simone Weil believed that they could probably be counted on the fingers of both hands. She did so because she included only those works she judged to speak truthfully of good and evil and our vulnerability to affliction.1 She would have been astonished that anyone could believe that it is elitist to cherish them and to look

1  She expressed this belief in many of her writings. See for example, “Morality and Literature” (in Panichas 1977).

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upon it as a responsibility, fundamental to an understanding of what it means to belong to a generation, between past and future, to introduce them to each new generation. When she was a radical activist working at the Renault factory in France before World War II, she said that only the very greatest literature was good enough for those who suffered the affliction of soul-destroying work. She read her translations of Greek tragedies to large groups of workers, many of whom responded with gratitude. There is, of course, much else to be admired, prized and even gloried in – companions in adventures of the mind and spirit that teachers will put before their students, seriously, joyously and with passion. But to someone who is shrewdly aware of love’s many counterfeits, enthusiasm, intense interest and even passion will not pass for love and are not, in the same way, food for the soul, to use an expression that recurs in Weil’s writings. The distinction that she draws between works that speak truthfully to affliction and good and evil and other works should not, I think, be taken into the argument about whether there should be a “canon” of “great books”. I suspect she would not be interested in that argument, certainly not in the forms that it takes in the culture wars. In an essay, “The Crisis in Education”, which she wrote in the 1950s and included in her book, Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt expressed the obligation I had in mind when I said that Winkler felt an obligation as a teacher to share his love of some of the treasures of the past, hoping that they might nourish in his students a love of the world. Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something foreseen by no one, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world (Arendt 1977, 285).

One evening, when I was in the second year of undergraduate studies, Winkler said something that shook me. I had been defending a friend who expressed a prissy, condescending conception of social responsibility, disdainful of what he called the “mass hysteria” of kids at Beatles concerts in the 1960s. Winkler detested what I was defending. He listened for a long time. Just past midnight, he placed his hands on the table, lent forward, holding me fast in a look I could not avoid and said, “Gaita. Do you know what the core of reasonability is? It is responsiveness to the needs of another in a lived encounter” (I’m quoting from memory.) I didn’t understand what he meant, but I was moved. He said I should read Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I didn’t understand that either. Almost 30 years later I dedicated my first book, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, to Winkler. I could have subtitled it, “Responsiveness to need”. Winkler probably knew I didn’t understand, but he trusted that one day I might. When he drew himself up at the table that evening, he called me to a kind of seriousness – to consider a possibility that had not occurred to me, but also just to think, for he detected intellectual and moral laziness in me. I was grateful for his loving severity.

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To hope that I would later understand what he tried to say that evening, Winkler had to trust that I wasn’t seduced by his charismatic personality, powerfully expressed in his dramatic demeanour that evening. He cared for me and wanted me to learn to think for myself. He called me, as I have put it elsewhere, to “an individuating responsiveness”, to be fully critically alert, to answer and later reflect on what he told me, allowing it to be informed by and to inform experiences that were my history and had made me who I was. Plato said that we become like what we love. Winkler’s love made him the kind of person I trusted and was right to trust, though, like on the evening I have recounted, I often didn’t understand until much later – sometimes many years later – the full significance of what he said. Wisdom, as we distinguish it from knowledgeableness or expertise, necessarily takes time to achieve and can only be achieved in living a life. We become wise only by living with others and learning from them, for there is no wisdom without understanding others, and we cannot understand others without rising in trust to them, to their deeds or their words. Trust lays a claim on us partly because, as I’ve illustrated, we often do not understand everything that others say at the time they say it and must allow what they say to enter our lives, to find, in its own time, ways to engage with what we already know and with our capacities – emotional, intellectual and spiritual – for understanding. Winkler often impressed me by what he said and by the way he lived that distinctive form of the life of the mind – a teacher of a subject. When I spoke of this earlier, I said that inspiration was not the most important world to capture his effect on me. It doesn’t distinguish the teacher who inspires and seeks disciples, who abuses their trust by eroding their freedom to dissent, from one who, like Winkler, moves a student, not by the forcefulness of his (indeed strong) personality, but by the love of his subject and his desire to share it. Inspiring people can move us to consent to things that we realise later, after reflection, we shouldn’t have consented to, perhaps because our ear for tone or for what rings false is undeveloped, or perhaps because we were sentimental. The need to overcome such failings define and discipline a sensibility and its subject matter. To render oneself answerable to that discipline is to be engaged in one kind of “trying to see things as they are”.2 Winkler honoured his responsibility to the world he loved, and because, as Plato put it, “love does neither exercise force nor submits to it” (The Symposium, 196b), he honoured the responsibility never to strike from the hands of his students “their chance of undertaking something”. *** Readers will have wondered who I include and what I assume in my repeated use of the first person plural. I have no empirical generalisation in my mind. My use of it is an invitation to consider possibilities, hopefully sometimes to agreement, which  I have elaborated the distinctive cognitive domain in which such a sensibility operates and what, in that domain, it is to “try to see things as they are”, what, indeed, it is for things to be as they are in it. I have called that domain “the realm of meaning”, and argued that it is a cognitive domain in which thought and feeling cannot be separated. (Gaita 2004: Preface and chap. 15, and Gaita 2017: Foreword and Afterword and chap. 6.) 2

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presupposes that some readers might decline the invitation or take a raincheck. But even to hope for qualified acceptance presupposes, to some (necessarily indeterminate) degree, a common understanding formed by certain traditions of European thought. When I spoke of Winkler’s pleasure in introducing me to traditions that had nourished him, I was careful not to refer to them as constituting Western Civilisation – for a number of reasons, including the role that the expression now plays in culture wars. I believe it was Winkler who first told me of an interview Gandhi allegedly gave to a journalist in London. The journalist asked him what he thought of Western Civilisation. “It would be a good idea”, Gandhi replied. Winkler had been profoundly affected by the indigenous peoples of the New Guinea Highlands when he worked with them just before the outbreak of World War II. (He was taken prisoner as an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp in Australia.) It was from them, he often told me, that he learned how fundamental our embodied being is to our humanity, to anything that seriously counts as a relation between I and Thou. I believe they echoed in his rebuke to me that evening. And though I referred to his influence on my book Good and Evil, the many conversations with him over the years, often illuminated by stories of his work and life in New Guinea, influenced what I say about our “creatureliness” in The Philosopher’s Dog. Though I did not realise it then, his earthy translation to me of Bach’s Magnificat was a fine and early example of to what degree people who were formed by European cultures could have their understanding of what they cherished in it transformed and deepened by close and living contact with people who were then regarded as primitive savages. In recent years we have become increasingly aware of the role that colonialism has played in the systemic racism endemic in many of the institutions of the nations of the Global North. Colonialism is no longer seen only as exploitation of weaker nations by stronger ones, some of which developed large empires, but as inseparable from the assertion of white supremacy. There have therefore been calls to “decolonise” nations and their institutions. In Australia, from where I am writing, there have been calls to acknowledge that non-indigenous peoples, white and coloured, are settlers, that the continent called Australia “is and always will be Aboriginal land”. The 1980s saw the development in the US of critical race theory. Academics, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, developed theories that claimed that even many people who had participated – sometimes at risk to their lives – in the US civil rights movements are still sleepwalking through interdependent, intersecting structures of privilege and oppression, unaware of the many ways they are caught up in them. Central to various forms and developments of the theory is the idea that the concept of racism is sometimes necessary to explain practices, institutions, occurrences, failures of policy and so on, without regard to the attitude of the people involved in them. The focus turned from psychological explanations of individual attitudes to social, anthropological and historical explanations of institutions, practices and so on, that were consistent with true denials of racist motivations on the parts of agents involved in those institutions and practices. There were similar turns in discussions of feminism and gender. I am generally sympathetic to such arguments, although I dislike the role they have played in the culture wars that invariably distort them and their political

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applications. Culture wars poison at its source any impulse to acknowledge, in a spirit of intellectual and ethical generosity, that simplistic, foolish, and even offensive elaborations of a position are sometimes the distorted expressions of traditions that need to be taken seriously and perhaps reclaimed. We seldom fully understand the deepest source of our ethical beliefs. I also find the language in which critical race theory and later developments such as critical whiteness theory are expressed philosophically uncongenial. They strike me as spoiled by jargon that renders the theories unnecessarily obscure. Such language makes conversation between citizens in a democratic polity impossible. But to show what I believe is right in them I shall elaborate an Australian example. Many Australians who are appalled by the racism directed against Australia’s indigenous peoples believe that if justice were done, then indigenous and non-­ indigenous Australians could say “we Australians” in ethically uncompromised political fellowship. Non-indigenous Australians no longer look upon Aboriginals as amongst the lowest of “primitive” races. Many now believe they can learn from indigenous cultures – and not only about practical matters like tracking or caring for the environment, which even racists have conceded. They are now ready to discuss with Aboriginal Australians what it means to lead a good life, what is shallow in our lives, what we have lost in our materialism, competitiveness and our evasion of mortality, our vulnerability to chance, and the relations between generations which the Covid Pademic exposed as far more fractured than we realized. In the 1950s virtually all, and in the 1960s and 1970s probably most, Australians would have found that possibility unintelligible. Many Aboriginal people do not regard themselves as Australians in a way that goes deep in their identity. For that reason, the assumption that if Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples were to agree on what kind of “we” they could truthfully and justly speak in political fellowship, it would be “we Australians”, is likely to be mistaken. Truthful understanding by the non-indigenous peoples of Australia of the ethical significance of the dispossession of the indigenous people of their lands might preclude them from honestly believing that they and the indigenous people could live in one nation, or, at any rate, in a nation called Australia with the resonances that name now has. Chelsea Bond, an aboriginal activist and academic, has spoken of a future in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians “negotiate conditions of coexistence”.3 That appears to entail political relations considerably more distant than one would hope for in a form of national political fellowship. But for what Bond believes or for the doubts I have expressed even to be taken seriously would require discussion of them to be conducted in a different ethical/conceptual space from the one in which Australians now argue about whether January 26 should be called Invasion Day rather than Australia Day, or even over whether the federal and state governments should negotiate treaties with many Aboriginal groupings that regard 3  In a panel debate about racism (of the “Ideas and Society” series organised by La Trobe University); see the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyvZ_VrTBbU & t=3761s. (Bond’s entry starts roughly at 57 min.)

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themselves as sovereign and insist that they have never conceded their sovereignty. Even discussions of treaties, as they are now conducted, still presuppose that if treaties are negotiated and accepted as just by all parties to them, then the day when indigenous and non-indigenous peoples can say “we Australians” without ethical reservations is near. Were that to change, were the conceptual and ethical conditions that would enable voices like Chelsea Bond’s seriously to be listened to by an electorate sufficiently large to make a political difference, then, I believe, the outcome of discussions that would follow between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians could not, in principle, be foreseen. That’s partly because the outcomes of all real conversations are unforeseeable. More importantly, it’s because the concepts that would tell us what justice would require may not yet exist, waiting for our discovery of them. Those concepts would probably be forged in many conversations. The contribution of Aboriginal people to their development would ensure that some of these concepts would be unfamiliar to Western political thought. The input of universities to those conversations would therefore be sought, but to participate without condescension, with self-knowledge about how they have been institutions of white privilege as much as any of the other institutions they will be critically reassessing, they must acknowledge that they cannot be part of the solution until they understand to what degree they have been part of the problem. That would require them to reassess obvious matters such as entry conditions, employment, and promotion practices. More radically, and more to the point of this part of my essay, it would require them to consider the place of Aboriginal knowledge and epistemology in the predominantly discursive traditions of the academy, and to be open to the call to decolonise academic disciplines – to decolonise philosophy and classics as much as history and political theory, for example. Or, to put it in another way: recognition of the need to rethink radically the nature of the university and its disciplines under the imperative to determine what, if any, kind of political national unity can be truthfully be sought between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Australia, is partly what gives substance to the call to decolonise the universities and their disciplines. Though my example is of Australia, it has wider implications, but I will leave to others better qualified, academically and morally because of their place in similar conversations in other nations, to determine their extent. I have raised these issues because I am aware that some readers might believe I have been blind to, or astonishingly insouciant about, the need to defend what I wrote about teaching against the charge that it is Eurocentric, and offensively so to the new sensibility I sketched earlier that is critical of Europe’s colonial exploits and its assumption of white supremacy. *** I shall now try to answer a criticism that what I have written about teaching is elitist, impractical and high-falutin, because – astonishingly for a teacher – it seems to be oblivious to the fact that many ethically passionate young people move almost daily between hope and despair.

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I am not blind to it. Many people of all ages appear to fear that perhaps within 10 years of so, national and international politics will be dominated by crises that are caused and inflamed by the shameful gap between the rich and the poor nations, aggravated by the effects of climate change. Deepening political instability in many regions of the earth may cause even more people to be uprooted than were uprooted in the last century. Strong nations are likely to protect themselves in ways that become increasingly brutal, testing the relevance and the authority of the parts of international law that we naturally think of as dealing with war crimes, crimes against humanity and, perhaps, genocide. It is almost certain that my grandchildren’s generation will not be protected as we have been from the terrors suffered by most of the peoples of the earth, because of impoverishment, natural disasters and the evils inflicted upon them by other human beings. More and more, I fear, the reality of affliction together with the reality of evil will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to degree almost too awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it. Earlier I said that it is beyond controversy that there are things in our intellectual and cultural tradition – works of art, philosophy, literature, music and so on – that have inspired in some people love of the world in the face of great affliction and great evil, when hope, conceived as an orientation to the world based on a favourable assessment of how things will turn out, was weak. I said this in defence of Weil’s claim that those works could probably be counted on the fingers of both hands, because she would include only those works she judged to speak truthfully of and to good and evil and our vulnerability to affliction. Of the writers I have mentioned, it is Weil who would have been most sympathetic to much of the current discussion about decolonising nations and their institutions, including their cultural institutions and institutions of learning. That is implicit in her criticism of the baleful influence of admiration for the “greatness” of Ancient Rome on academic curricula in Europe, in her grief for cultures lost, usually because they were destroyed, and in her persistent exposure of the racist disdain European nations showed for the indigenous peoples in their colonies and their ruthless exploitation of them. I said that no one knows quite what the conceptual landscape would look like in which discussions of the decolonisation of academic institutions and their curricula could seriously take place in ways congenial to a conversation between citizens in a democratic polity, and what new ways of thinking they would enable. I cannot believe, however, that we would ever have reason to reject Holland’s belief that teaching at its finest will “concentrate on making available to those whom we teach the very best and most beautiful things we know, and as far as possible, only those things” so that thereby “a person might be helped to see the beauty of reality, helped to live more fully, helped to be glad that he is alive.” Or that we should cease to be inspired by Casals’ testimony – it could have been Weil’s – that there are works of human creativity that can inspire a love of the world, which as I put it earlier, survives “in the face of great affliction and great evil, when hope, conceived as an orientation to the world based on a favourable assessment of how things will turn out, was weak.” To the contrary: our need for them is likely to be great and perhaps desperate.

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Many ethically passionate young people, I said, swing between hope and despair. Their despair is not caused only by their fear of the impending calamities described earlier. It’s also caused more recently by their grief that the inequalities in the distribution of vaccines between the rich nations and the poor, who still suffer the injustices of foreign exploitation, will likely transform festering resentment into fierce hatred. What could assuage that hatred? Only justice, Weil and I believe Casals, would say; justice in the humbled accent of atonement. It is in the light of what justice requires that we are best able to see the true ethical significance of inequality. Those who suffer the material harms of inequality and the humiliation that often attend them, also suffer, as a form of harm sui generis, the irreducible harm of injustice. That is why they often cry for justice before all else. Simone Weil tells us why: The just must be thanked for being just, because justice is so beautiful a thing . . . Any other gratitude is servile and even animal. The only difference between the man who witnesses an act of justice and the man who receives a material advantage from it, is that in such circumstances the beauty of justice is only a spectacle for the first, while for the second it is the object of a contact and even a kind of nourishment. (Weil 1973, 140)

Plato was preoccupied with the question: from where should those who are truly committed to justice when injustice seems everywhere on the increase, should draw their energy? The contrast between despair and hope suggests that it should be from hope. Only if you are lucky, I think Plato would answer. To explain why I think he is right, I’ll begin by distinguishing hope from optimism. Optimism and pessimism are features of our personality. They are relatively stable and long-term dispositions to believe; in the one case, that things will turn out for the best, in the other that they will not. Both are relatively superficial. It’s good to have optimistic friends because they are often cheerful, but if many of our friends are pessimists that shouldn’t matter. It cannot matter to serious friendships. Hope is different. It takes two forms, neither of them a form of belief; both an attitude to the future. The first is simply the hope that this or that will happen – its object can be trivial, that the weather is sunny tomorrow; or serious, that one’s friend recovers from illness or that there will not be a war. But whether trivial or serious, such hope is episodic: it occurs when occasions prompt, and ceases when one gives up, or when there’s no more reason for it – when one’s friend falls ill and then recovers. The second form of hope is a continuous orientation of the human spirit to the world. In different ways, both forms are vulnerable to whatever happens in the future. The second form of hope can be one of the deepest expressions of courage, an affirmation of life. Its ability to survive unrelenting disappointment relies to a degree on whether it can sustain faith that the good in the world will defeat the ill in it. It also depends on retaining faith in humankind: it must be able to trust that enough people will remain decent even in the worst of times. Like the tribute that hypocrisy pays to virtue, disillusionment acknowledges the values it believes have been betrayed. If it begins to lose its grip on those values, disillusionment can lead to despair; should it lose its grip altogether, it turns into cynicism and mocks those values. One of the most poignant examples of this second form of hope is Nadezhda

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Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope – hope as an orientation of the soul to the future. It was followed by the heart-breaking Hope Abandoned. There is another kind of orientation to the world. It is an unconditional love of it of the kind Casals expressed. Albert Camus had it too. His novel, The Plague, was first published in 1947, but the Pandemic assured it of new audiences world-wide. In its first life it was taken as an allegory of “the brown plague” of Nazism. Though its allegorical political content was not uppermost in the minds of its new readers suffering a deadly real plague, I suspect it also resonated against growing authoritarianism in many democracies. Camus is known for making Sisyphus an existentialist hero, someone who disdained false hope and false consolation as fiercely as the soldier in the first act of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, who says that he would not give a farthing for the mortal whom false hopes could set afire. He might therefore seem an improbable companion to Holland, Casals and Weil, but he described Weil as “the only great spirit of our times”. He did much to secure the publication of her work after her death and was so inspired by her essay “Human Personality” that he transcribed many of its passages into his notebooks. The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the astonishing claim that “there is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”. That is posturing and muddle followed it, which is perhaps why James Wood, who introduced the Penguin edition of 2000, suggested it should be read as the art of a great story-teller rather than as philosophy. That strikes me as special pleading. Even so, The Myth of Sisyphus contains something finer than exists in most of the works of Camus’ more clear-­ headed critics. To find it at its best, one should read the lyrical essays on Algerian cities and on the desert in Oran. Nowhere is Camus’ tragic humanism more attractive than in his celebration in those lyrical essays of the loves of the young men and women of Algiers. And nowhere is the celebration of their yearning for a happiness, whose fulfilment is always short-lived, more tenderly qualified by a sense of the tragic, made all the more heartrending by the poetic beauty of its expression. Weil could never have written in that spirit, which is why I have introduced Camus to this discussion, for the sake of people who are uneasy with aspects of Weil’s work or are even repelled by it. The Algerian essays are marked throughout by a passion about what it means to live truthfully that now seems alien to us, especially if we are inclined to admire cool urbanity. It would be a mistake to assume that in Camus it is merely another expression of the intensity with which French intellectuals characteristically respond to philosophical questions about meaning, value and purpose. When it is authoritative rather than grandstanding, the intensity of The Myth of Sisyphus is the expression of Camus’ fearful love of the world – fearful because he is always conscious of the many ways he might betray it. Camus’ need for lucidity (the word appears often in his writings) is not a response to abstract philosophical doubts. It expresses his need to be faithful to his love of the world. As does his rejection of the kind of suicide that would leave the world “as though it were a smoke-filled room”, as Kant put it. Camus writes scornfully against people

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who disdainfully turn their back on the world, especially if they would make an aesthetic, a morality or even a philosophy or a religion out of it. Despite his torments, Camus’ Sisyphus discovers a joy that expresses unconditional love of the world, mediated by its beauty. But like everything else, love is vulnerable to misfortune. To think otherwise would be hubris, for at any moment we can lose everything that gives sense to our lives. Unconditional love is not an unconditioned love: it must acknowledge that affliction can destroy it. But because severe affliction can destroy everything in a person, its power to destroy a person’s love of the world does not give one reason to think that the love could not have been unconditional. I call it “unconditional” because, unlike the deepest form of hope, it is not in its essence an orientation to the future in any of the forms of that orientation. It is therefore not answerable to a clearheaded, sober assessment of how things will be in the future, for it is not based upon an, perhaps unacknowledged, assessment. It’s consistent with melancholy, deep-seated pessimism and perhaps even with hope abandoned. No descriptions of how terrible the world can become would force it, under pain of high-minded frivolity, to admit that it must after all be conditional, and no conditions would necessitate its extinction in anyone who is ethically sober. Even in Auschwitz there were people blessed with such love. Others, we know, responded to talk of it with disgust. Casals’ love of the world, informed by beauty in nature and certain human achievements, is evident, but, like Camus, he was pained by the evil and cruelty that his fellow human beings were capable of. For that reason, he was a man of intense political commitment. Thomas Mann believed his art was “allied to rigid refusal to compromise with wrong, with anything that is morally squalid or offensive to justice.” (Tapper 1962). I think he believed his love of the world and his commitment to justice were inseparable. So, I am sure, did Camus. In “Return to Tipasa”, perhaps the most poignant of his Algerian essays, a war-weary Camus reflects on what at first appears to be the tension between a life obedient to the demands of justice and his innocent love of the sun and the sea and the moods of the Mediterranean sky. But the choice, he reminds himself, is illusory. A love of the world, inspired and nurtured by its beauty, that retreats from the demands of justice is in danger becoming a form of misanthropy, a self-mutilating form of hope abandoned. Eight years earlier in one of four “Letters to a German [Nazi] Friend”, published clandestinely, he had written “I chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world”.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1977. The crisis in education. In In Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought, 170–193. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Donagan, Alan. 1977. The theory of morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gaita, Raimond. 2004. Good and evil: An absolute conception. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ———. 2017. The philosopher’s dog. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics. Holland, R.F. 1980. Against empiricism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Macmurray, John. 1965. Reflections on the notion of an educated man. Unpublished. Panichas, George A., ed. 1977. The Simone Weil reader. New York: David McKay. Steiner, George. 1966. Language and silence. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tapper, Bernard. 1962. Cellist in exile: A portrait of Pablo Casals. New York: McGraw Hill. Weil, Simone. 1973. Form of the implicit love of god. In Waiting on god, 137–215. New York: Harper and Row. Raimond Gaita is Honourary Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London and Senior Consulting Researcher, Centre for Ethics as Study of Human Value, University of Pardubice He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, which was made into a feature film of the same name, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, The Philosopher’s Dog, After Romulus, and, edited with Gerry Simpson, Who‘s Afraid of International Law.  

The On-the-Ground Radicality of Police and Prison Abolition: Acknowledgement, Seeing-as, and Ordinary Caring Naomi Scheman

I will set out on this journey, although I do not know the way. (Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The First Time I Said, ‘I’m Trans’”, New York Times 23 January 2020, https://nyti.ms/3aHIaeS) The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and the sickness of philosophical problems could be cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual. (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 57)

Calls for police and prison abolition in the U.S. are typically regarded as an unrealistic diversion from more realizable reforms, grounded in an overly idealized vision of society, out of touch with everyday reality, including in poor communities of colour experiencing devastating levels of violence. While a full discussion of abolition is beyond the scope of this paper, I want to suggest that this characterization is misleading and that several recognisably Wittgensteinian themes can illuminate – and be illuminated by  – the radical and radically “ground-bound”1 nature of the abolition movement. I will take up three such themes: groundedness as a form of radical critique and of vision that rejects foundationalism and ideal theory; the importance of seeing-as, of what we (different ones of us) see when we “just look”; and the ways in which caring, notably in the context of “the extraordinary ordinary,” 1  The term is Talia Mae Bettcher’s. Bettcher is a trans philosopher whose work has informed my own, notably in helping me see the ways in which understanding follows from, rather than being a precondition for, immersion in a world of sense that upends what one has taken to be ordinary. See especially Bettcher 2019.

N. Scheman (*) University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_9

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guides the paths toward radical change.2 These themes are strikingly evident in the writing of abolitionists: the emergence of radical vision from on-the-ground, everyday struggle; the importance of acknowledging how the world appears from the perspectives of those targeted by racism; and the necessity and transformative potential of attentive care.3

1  The Rough Ground It is certainly true that abolition is a radical vision, in the sense of getting at the root; but “radical” hardly needs to connote unrealistic, any more than it is unrealistic in weeding one’s garden to be attentive to pulling up the weeds at the root: merely trimming above ground may be easier, but it isn’t more practical – it’s ineffective. And while getting at the root can seem to call for going deep, digging far down beneath the surface, some plants spread and propagate rhizomatically, through entanglement on or just below the surface, forming part of what constitutes the ground, so that getting at the root entails grappling with those entanglements, with how one set of harmful circumstances feeds on and sustains others. “Ground-bound” philosophy is akin to what Cherríe Moraga has called “theory in the flesh [which] means one where the physical realities of our lives – our skin colour, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (Moraga and Anzaldua 1981, 23). Such conceptions of theory and theorizing contrast with ideal theory, which can be thought of, in Wittgenstein’s terms, as “a medicine invented by an individual,” a detailed map (to switch images) of the destination: knowing where we ought to end up is taken to be crucial for guiding our journey. Nonideal theory, by contrast, sets out not toward some theorized destination but rather away from a situation of experienced harm, in the caring company of fellow travellers, toward a destination always over the rolling horizon, and in directions that might shift in response to the terrain encountered on – and, crucially and unpredictably, changed by – the journey.4 The requirement (to use Cora Diamond’s term, 1991, 28) of a well-theorized destination to orient political action is of a piece with the requirement of justificatory bedrock to ground empirical judgement (or of divine or otherwise non-­practice-­ dependent guidance to give force to moral obligation). In all these cases what is demanded is a form of guidance or orientation that is justified by appeal to something that transcends (being either below or above) the contingent particularities of 2  The term “extraordinary ordinary” is mine (See Scheman 2015), but the concept of the ordinary under dire conditions is explored in depth, especially in relation to Wittgenstein and Cavell, in the work of Veena Das (2020), and exemplified and theorized in the writing especially of Black feminists (See, for example, Nash 2019, Sharpe 2016, and Woodly 2021). 3  These themes are articulated throughout the collection of writings by Mariame Kaba, a leading abolitionist theorist and activist (Kaba 2021) as well as in Woodly 2021. 4  On ideal vs non-ideal theory, see Mills 2005.

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our present enmeshments. Well-known critiques of foundationalism (that I take to be decisive and as applicable to divine skyhooks as to bedrock) have sometimes led to a particular post-structuralist, post-modern rejection of any talk of ground or groundedness.5 By contrast, Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism is far more radical in rejecting the foundationalist’s requirement of bedrock to meaningfully ground our practices. Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism draws our attention to the actual (literal and metaphorical) ground under our (literal and metaphorical) feet, in contrast to the foundationalist’s demand for “ground” that is of necessity always untouched and out of reach. Wittgenstein’s urging us “back to the rough ground” is thus akin to the non-ideal theorists’ urging us to set out moving away from clearly experienced injustice, forging paths whose directions will emerge with increasing clarity through our actions, as those actions lead us to see the world differently. “Back to the rough ground” is a radically anti-foundationalist slogan: the roughness of the ground is on and just below the surface; it is where we move and live, and we are responsible for its contours. And when we forge paths across that surface, we change the physiognomy of the earth. Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism resonates with conceptions of emancipatory theorizing that grapple with the question of how to articulate a radical critique of the only ground one has to stand on. In her forthcoming book, Katharine Jenkins takes on this task, arguing for the possibility and necessity of resisting the practices (notably around gender and race) that give form and intelligibility to the social world. She draws on the work of Iris Marion Young, whom she quotes at length: Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher is always socially situated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she either reinforces or struggles against them. With an emancipatory interest, the philosopher apprehends given social circumstances not merely in contemplation but with passion: the given is experience in relation to desire. Desire, the desire to be happy, creates the distance, the negation, that opens the space for criticism of what is. This critical distance does not occur on the basis of some previously discovered rational ideas of the good and the just. On the contrary, the ideas of the good and the just arise from the desiring negation that action brings to what is given. . . . Each social reality presents its own unrealized possibilities, experienced as lacks and desires. Norms and ideals arise from the yearning that is an expression of freedom: it does not have to be this way, it could be otherwise. (Young 2011, 5–6; quoted and discussed in Jenkins forthcoming)

Wittgenstein’s chastening of the philosopher’s attempts to transcend the practices that give meaning to our words – even to our most radical aspirations and discontents – has led some to characterize him as a social conservative.6 It is true that the paths he takes us on are meant to lead us back to our ordinary lives, to the homes that give meaning to our words, to the rough ground we have fled in search of something purer, more absolute. But there are – here, in the world we live in – people for 5  Along with many others in the U.S. academy, especially in the 1990s in what was then women’s studies, I experienced this judgement not as a matter of arguments by particular theorists, but rather as a pervasive sense that we were not among the cool kids – not, that is, as truly radical as those who eschewed not only bedrock but also grounding of any sort. 6  For a critical discussion of these ways of seeing Wittgenstein, see Lugg 1985.

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whom the rough ground of common sense, of what all competent users of the language are presumed to know, instead of providing traction that makes walking possible is rather strewn with roadblocks, trenches, and landmines. Such awareness could lead to a desire to escape, to tether one’s hopes to a skyhook of ultimate vindication, to give up on trying to make sense here and now; but instead it can lead to setting out on a path with fellow travellers, to creating and inhabiting new “worlds” of sense, new forms of life.7 One might respond that the sorts of agreements that Wittgenstein is relying on – like counting by two’s – are not in this way tendentious or exclusionary and do provide sufficient genuinely shared ground for us – all, as human – to be mutually intelligible.8 There is something to this response, but it fails to capture the lived experience of people who do find themselves  – in ordinary, everyday settings and interactions – failing to make sense to those around them, or else making terrible, deadly sense: as Bettcher says about being trans: “they want to kill us.” And it fails to capture what for Stanley Cavell is central to Wittgensteinian skepticism: “the fragility of our mutual attunement” (Baz 2018, 30). What can we learn from attention to – and acknowledgement of – those for whom that fragility is not a universal – and for the privileged among us an abstractly theoretical – possibility (even if confronting that possibility leads to genuine fear), but rather part of the texture of their everyday lives, forming the rough ground under their feet? As standpoint epistemologists have long argued (going back to Marx), the problematic roughness of the ground  – the obstacles to easy movement through the world  – can be a source of insight into the structures of systemic inequity: José Medina refers to this resource as friction (Medina 2012). The field of epistemologies of ignorance takes as its starting point the ways in which privilege fosters distinctive epistemic liabilities and vices, and one form those can take is well captured by drawing on Medina’s discussion of the absence of friction.9 For Medina that absence is importantly wilful  – a resistance to the vulnerability that comes from acknowledging others’ experiences and perspectives, especially when those are shaped by structures of power and privilege that one benefits from. Without discounting Medina’s emphasis on wilfulness and culpability, I want to think about some of the structural, material ways in which, regardless of individual intention, privilege facilitates ignorance, specifically through the imagery of moving through space. Privileged modes of transportation are relatively frictionless, affording little to no experience of the rough ground: at an extreme, think about airplanes, which move you from place A to place B without your being in any place in between. Highways are of course earthbound, but typically provide only highly selective information about, and no real experience of, the places that lie between your starting point and your destination: they are engineered to facilitate the rapid 7  See especially the work of María Lugones and, influenced by her, José Medina and Talia Mae Bettcher. 8  See Cavell’s wondering if there are some – women? – who would resist being spoken for as he does. (2010, 6). For discussion, see Scheman 2011. 9  On the epistemologies of ignorance, see Sullivan and Tuana 2007, especially the first chapter, by Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance” (2007), which launched the field.

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movement of individuals between specific, taken-to-be-important destinations. Dominant conceptions of agency work like this, producing the illusion of a straightforward individual seamlessly translated into effective action while masking the enormous amount of social labour that makes it all possible.10 The reduction of friction is part of the point, and the cost is the inability to feel the rough ground. As Wittgenstein says, we need friction if we are to walk, but privilege provides other modes of movement, either relatively free of friction or at least providing insulation from it. The antithesis to airplanes and highways is paths – improvisational, experiential, always someplace, not just on the way to some place.11 Paths are collective endeavours, and especially when they are paths meant to lead away from a place of harm, it is crucial that fellow travellers care for each other along the way and in so doing lay the ground for the new forms of life they are seeking. As Deva Woodly argues, “the politics of healing,” including care for oneself and others, is at the heart of the Movement for Black Lives, starting with acknowledgement of the extent of racial trauma and the need to start theory and practice from the experiences and perspectives of those who have been most marginalized (Woodly 2019, 2021).

2  Seeing-as Grounded in the Black Lives Matter movement, calls for police and prison abolition start from the acknowledgement of the role that policing and incarceration in the United States play in people’s – especially Black people’s – lives.12 Police are seen as an occupying force; prisons are seen as cages and sites of torture; incarcerated people are seen as kin and neighbours. This connection between acknowledgement and seeing-as is another Wittgensteinian theme: one acknowledges another as human, as a friend, as kin, as worthy of respect, as whom they take themselves to

 This is an insight I have always associated with María Lugones, though I cannot find any specific reference. For the general background to this insight see Lugones 2003. 11  I started thinking specifically about paths as the result of a conversation I had in 2015 with Fan Zhao, then a graduate student at Beijing Normal University, where I was giving a series of lectures on Wittgenstein in the present-day world. Fan Zhao told me of a frequently cited quote from the early twentieth-century left-wing writer Lu Xun: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like paths across the earth. For actually the earth had no paths to begin with, but when many people pass one way, a path is made.” Lu Xun was making a point about hope, and paths were a useful way of making that point: it is presumably obvious that there are no paths prior to their being trodden, but they are no less real for that, and those who would lament pathlessness ought rather to start walking. But Fan Zhao told me this story not to make a point about hope but to note that the point about paths is interesting in its own right – as I have very much found it to be (See Scheman 2016a, b). 12  My discussion is specific to the U.S., notably grounded in the historical role of carcerality in the afterlives of slavery. The question of the future of policing and incarceration elsewhere is beyond both the scope of this paper as well as the competence of its author. 10

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be. Failures of acknowledgement can take the form not of failing to notice the other at all but rather of noticing them in a demeaning or dehumanizing way. It is commonly noted that being invisible often goes hand-in-hand with being hypervisible: racist and sexist stereotypes, for example, render people hypervisible as targets even as they render them invisible as the particular people that they are. Seeing-as is also relevant to disputes about policing, which often have their roots in whether people see police as protective guardians or as an occupying army. Discussions of seeing-as typically note that we don’t, under ordinary circumstances, see something as what it simply is: seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck depends on the possibility of seeing it as a rabbit. One doesn’t see an unambiguous drawing of a duck as a duck; still less does one typically see an actual duck as a duck. It is not, however, always clear just what counts as “ordinary circumstances,” nor what counts as simply seeing what is obviously there. One might, for example, − as, presumably, their friends and families do – simply see children, but if those children are Black, many white people will fail to see them as children, routinely over-­ estimating their age and their size. And, as Claudia Rankine has poignantly noted (Rankine 2015), Black people are not seen as unarmed when Black skin is seen as a weapon. When police and ordinary citizens (supported by “Stand Your Ground” laws) are licensed to kill those they “credibly” fear, such racist ways of seeing – seeing someone as a threat – can be literally deadly. Being seen as – through racist interpretive lenses – stands in the way of being seen as the person one is – that is, being simply seen. Being seen as the person one is becomes noteworthy against the background of its denial. Think about people who are incarcerated. For many white people, and in mainstream media (using allegedly non-normative, descriptive, simply “factual” language  – not taken to encode a particular way of seeing), incarcerated people are inmates, felons, prisoners, offenders, criminals, and convicts. They are not “us”; they are anonymous, bad and dangerous. For many in Black communities, which have borne the brunt of mass incarceration, incarcerated people are sons, fathers, brothers (or, increasingly, daughters, mothers, sisters), cousins, neighbours, friends.13 Even if they are believed by those who know and love them to have done harmful, hurtful things – not, that is, to be among the many wrongfully accused or incarcerated for offenses that would never land a wealthy white person in jail – they are still members of families and communities, and people typically struggle to keep up contact, to hold those who are incarcerated in relational personhood, to see them as the full persons that they are. Identifying incarcerated people as criminals or inmates typically passes unnoticed: that’s just who they are. Within dominant worlds of sense the interpretive frame is invisible – unless, of course, the person in question contravenes racist and classist stereotypes. When people are taken to conform to those stereotypes, it can seem to make little sense to say that they are seen by dominant groups as criminals or inmates, as though there were a live alternative. But there is, of course, an

13

 For a theoretically rich and personally devastating discussion see Allen 2018.

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alternative, however unalive it might be for privileged perceivers. Incarcerated people have, and are, kin, friends, and neighbours. We don’t normally see people in our lives as our kin: we simply see our sibling, parent, child (or our friend or neighbour). That’s who they are, even behind bars, as dissonant as that might be. But given the pervasiveness of dehumanizing perception it becomes, in dominant spaces, meaningful and important to note, both that how privileged perceivers are seeing incarcerated people is, in fact, a particular way of seeing them, and that others, humanly connected to them, see them differently.14 Wittgenstein’s injunction that we “just look!” – meant as a curb on theory-based insistence on what must be the case – needs to be tempered by attentiveness to the ways in which seeing can, even without our being aware of it, be a matter of seeing-­ as.15 In turn, how we see is shaped by what we see, by norms of visibility and invisibility. It is easier to see police as protective guardians when we do not see them mistreating, even killing, people who pose no threat to them or to others. It is easier to see prisons as appropriate places for punishment and sequestration of dangerous predators when we do not see – as “we” are meant not to see – what goes on inside. Prisons came about as reforms to practices of public corporal punishment. It has become, in much of the world, increasingly unseemly to inflict punishment in public, whether in stockades, by whipping, or by hanging or shooting. Prisons moved punishment out of the sight of “respectable” people; and torture, even behind the prison walls, took on a different form – formally sanctioned beating replaced by solitary confinement, a less spectacular and an allegedly (though only allegedly) more humane practice. (One crucial exception to this unseemliness, which continued in the U.S. long after the introduction of prisons, was, of course, lynching, which drew crowds of respectable white people to watch the hanging and often extended torture of Black people.) Prison reformers, such as Jeremy Bentham, developed the concept of the penitentionary, where the prisoners were under the constant surveillance of designated professionals, out of sight of the general public, presumably to reflect on and inwardly atone for their transgressions. Prisons are meant to be “out of sight, out of mind” for the relatively comfortable, and social and residential segregation put most of the other manifestations of anti-­ Black racism outside of the immediate experience of most white people. As epistemologists of ignorance have stressed, however, knowledge about what is going on is hardly inaccessible, and it can take considerable effort not to see, not to know  (Mills 2007). But especially when the failure is best understood as one of acknowledgement rather than of knowledge – something fails to register, to matter,16

 For a discussion of a “linguistic manifesto” by prison activist Eddie Ellis, making the case for replacing dehumanizing, essentialising language, such as “inmates”, “convicts”, etc., with language that refers to people in certain confining circumstances, without confining them to those circumstances, see McConnell-Ginet 2020, 252–256. 15  For a discussion of the politically salient complexities around what we see when we “just look” see Scheman 2016b. 16  See Laugier 2015, also Scheman 2016b. 14

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it is typically a failure to see something as what it truly is or as it is seen by those directly affected by it. Calls for police and prison abolition make sense – as radically grounded – when what one sees are one’s kin and neighbours captured by the forces of an occupying army and thrown into cages and tortured. Even when those so treated have done grave harms to others in the community, this response can seem monstrously wrong – meeting violence with violence, offering nothing of reparative value to the victims, inflicting collateral damage on those left behind without parents and providers. Proposals to reform such a system can seem as misplaced as proposals to reform slavery would have been. And while people certainly had thoughts about, even plans for, what emancipation might mean, for how people freed from slavery might move into full citizenship, that path has hardly been a smooth one, as shown by the subsequent history following the abolition of slavery, starting with the fierce resistance to the initial roadmap laid out by Reconstruction and the violent destruction of nascent Black communities and economic structures, leading to Jim Crow and other, often federally administered, forms of Black subordination and marginalization, and continuing with the massive racial disparities in wealth and health. But even giving full weight to the harsh and continuing afterlives of slavery hardly provides an argument against abolition. The path toward true freedom and equality is longer, less direct, and far more arduous than people might have dreamt, but that doesn’t undercut the necessity of having embarked on it – moving decisively away from enslavement. Calls for reforming policing and prisons typically presume that the ills calling for reform indicate that the systems are not working as they are supposed to, that they are failing at their intended purposes. Those calling for abolition, by contrast, ask us to consider that, rather than failing at one set of purposes, policing and incarceration in the U.S. might actually be succeeding at something else altogether, something that, historically, they were explicitly designed to do. As instruments of public safety, police and prisons in the U.S. are abject failures; as instruments of subordination they are strikingly successful. From the early days of capturing those escaping slavery, to enslaving Black people caught violating special laws enacted expressly to criminalize everyday behaviour, to crushing labour organising, police and prisons have been quite good at subordinating certain groups of people while protecting others and, especially, the property of those others. Despite a range of programs in prisons aimed at education and rehabilitation, programs always subject to limitation and curtailment, the guiding purpose of prison in the U.S. is punishment, and punishment and threat of punishment have always disproportionately targeted Black people and communities. Programs of restorative justice around the country are implementing alternatives to incarceration, alternatives that are grounded in the actual needs of the direct and indirect survivors of violence – needs that require accountability on the part of those who have inflicted harm. Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice, one such program, argues persuasively that imprisonment, as a form of punishment, predictably fails to meet the need for accountability, since the conditions of incarceration make it overwhelmingly difficult or impossible for those who are

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imprisoned to do what their victims and their communities need them to do: make restitution to those they have harmed, provide for the needs of those who are dependent on them, and transform themselves into people whom those around them can trust. Her book is both a devastating indictment of the U.S. carceral state and a movingly hopeful guide to building paths to a radically different future (Sered 2019). Many of those involved in radical forms of restorative justice have adopted the terminology of “transformative justice,” acknowledging that what is needed goes beyond the restoration of matters as they stood before a specific act of violence, and that those called to accountability go beyond the specific perpetrator of that act. Individual acts of violence do not occur in a void, and much of the violence that leads to mass incarceration arises out of historical and ongoing systemic racism, poverty, marginalisation, exploitation, neglect, and despair; and accountability is needed for that. This expanded focus in central to Sered’s book, which moves to calls for “reckoning,” specifically on the part of the U.S. – a coming to terms with the violence and harm that have threaded through the history of the country, leading to truth-telling, acknowledgement, reparations, and a commitment to “becoming people who will not cause harm again” (Sered 2019, 246). Part of what is needed is a radical shift in perspective – in what we see when we “just look.” As Sered argues, learning to see the past and the present from the perspectives of those who have been systematically harmed is crucial to moving forward: . . . only the discipline of anchoring our future in our past – not in a way that is constrained by it, but in a way that grows from it – will honor everyone who has been harmed and will strengthen those of us who have caused harm in our ongoing accountable rise out of shame. And for those we have hurt, like for most survivors of violence, what will happen on the other side of such a process, what healing or rage or transformation may arise from it, is unknowable on this side; but the fact that it is unknowable does not make it any less urgent or any less deserved. (Sered 2019, 251)

3  Care and the Ordinary The ethics of care draws our attention to the ordinary, to what we are unable to see, to what is right before our eyes and is for this very reason invisible to us. It is an ethics that gives voice and attention to humans who are undervalued precisely because they perform unnoticed, invisible tasks and take care of basic needs. And, more often than not, these humans are women, often non-white women. (Sandra Laugier, “The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary, p. 218) a politics of the ordinary as a stitching together of action and expression in the work of bringing about a different everyday – I call this the birthing of the eventual everyday from the actual everyday. (Veena Das, Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein, p. 58)

As compelling as the purely negative argument for police and prison abolition might be, and as inappropriate as it might be to demand a worked-out answer to the question – if not police and prisons, then what? – there is clearly a need for laying the

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ground for a livable future, for something short of, and quite different from, the articulated blueprint characteristic of ideal theorizing. And here again there are resonances with Wittgensteinian themes, specifically in the work of Veena Das and Sandra Laugier, both of whom theorize care in ways shaped by their reading of Wittgenstein, especially as inflected by Stanley Cavell. For both of them, questions of (in)visibility are central: the care work that the relatively comfortable do not, cannot, will not see, and what is visible to those who do care work and hence imaginable from within the worlds of that work. For both Das and Laugier care is importantly ordinary, everyday. Laugier explicitly draws on the definition of care provided by Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto: “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40; quoted in Laugier 2015, 220). Central to the activity of caring is discernment – attention to the specificities of those needing care and to the relationships in which they, and those who care for them, are embedded. “Those needing care” are, of course, all of us, as we are all vulnerable; but the sorts of care we need and the forms our vulnerability take are indefinitely variable, and caring calls on attentiveness to and acknowledgement of differences and of how those differences inflect and are inflected by relationships. The worlds of those who are relatively comfortable – socially and economically privileged, able-bodyminded – are sustained by normatively invisible labour, maintaining the twin illusions that the world of the background just works smoothly and that one’s own notable achievements are attributable to individual talent and hard work. (See Lugones 2003). Things look very different from other locations, including those of the inhabitants of the Delhi slums whom Das lived with and learned from, where the workings of the everyday – including forms of care – are not cloaked in the invisibility of ease, where the traumatic erupts unexpectedly but predictably, where improvisation is needed in the absence of the anaesthetizing workings of affluence and security. It is this interweaving of the unexpected emergency into the fabric of the everyday that for Das grounds the possibility of the emergence of what she calls “the eventual everyday,” transformation born out of necessary improvisation (Das 2020, passim). A similar sensibility informs Deva Woodly’s exploration of “the politics of healing” in the Black Lives Matter movement – radical hope engendered by attentive, specifically focused caring in response to pain and harm and nurtured by Black joy. This movement is radical in the sense of getting at the roots, but the “roots” in question, though they have a long history, might actually be better characterized as rhizomes, stabilizing and propagating not by depth but by entanglement. Even slavery is never far below the surface, its harms reiterated in continuing practices of marginalization, oppression, and dehumanization and manifest in bodies through “weathering” – the visceral, inter-generational manifestations of living with trauma (Woodly 2019, 220; 2021).

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At the heart of abolitionist activism, alongside the centering of harms, is the affirmation of Blackness – of communal and individual strength, beauty, and joy. As Woodly explains, “this joyous affirmation is not just about making people feel good. Its more precise impacts are that it, first, helps black people understand themselves in the world in a different way and, second, acts as a tool for mobilization. . . . To defend black joy, in this sense, is a political act of not only joy, but jouissance, which, in this context, is the feeling of mastery in being the author of one’s own experience and having the authority to explode the taken-for-granted” (Woodly 2019, 232, emphasis in the original). What one sees when one “just looks” is shaped not just by the lines of sight – by where one is looking from – but also by the embodied, emotionally-inflected, often collective ways in which one is seeing – by what is salient, important, meaningful, by how one feels about what one is seeing. The ways in which racism inflects white perceptions of Black people makes it likely that they will be seen as dangerous, ways of seeing that lead to seeing the carceral state as both necessary and protective. As against that way of seeing the world, collective gatherings of Black people, especially sharing moments of joyous affirmation, provide the ground for seeing strength alongside the suffering and for making possible the hope that is necessary for path-building. The exuberance of survival is a demonstration of what is possible, a glimmering of what Veena Das calls “the birthing of the eventual everyday from the actual everyday” (Das 2020, 58). Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a sustained meditation on the everydayness of Black life, “constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” She goes on to ask: “In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death?” (Sharpe 2016, 16f) Jennifer Nash takes up Sharpe’s question through explorations of care and love, including self-care and self-love, in Black feminist praxis, “emphasizing the notion of black feminist love-politics as undergirded by a dual commitment to mutual vulnerability and witnessing” (Nash 2019, 116). Mutual vulnerability involves the possibility of being “undone” by each other, which “can take the form of grief and mourning, desire and ecstasy, solidarity and empathy, and mutual regard” (Nash 2019, 117).17 Acknowledging mutual entanglement punctures illusions of self-sufficiency while opening possibilities of empowering connection. Black women’s witnessing centres their knowledge of “what is meant to be kept invisible, unnamed, unseen.” They are “witnesses who can see and even name forms of violence that other subjects cannot see or simply refuse to see” (Nash 2019, 119).

 Nash is drawing here on Judith Butler, 2016, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso.

17

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4  (In)conclusion Arguments for police and prison abolition can of course be made by comfortably-­ situated academics (as I am doing here), but the movement is importantly on-the-­ ground, theorized from within the collective work of sustaining life in the face of the devastation wrought by white supremacy, racialized capitalism, and the carceral state.18 Such sites of everydayness are, from the perspective of comfortably privileged readers, extraordinary (they exemplify what I have called the “extraordinary ordinary”, Scheman 2015). But being brought face-to face with these stories such readers can be thrown back on our own lives, on what shapes them – shaping we semi-wilfully avoid acknowledging, taking it as “just” ordinary – as though it were the generic case of the ordinary, rather than specifically the manifestation of particular, and problematic, ways of being human. Then the “fragility” of that ordinary – of our going on as we do – has a politics: what arrangements of the world provide the ground under our feet? And when we respond to the admonition to eschew ungrounded theorizing – ungrounded ironically because of the demand for absolute, hence always untouchably idealized, grounding – by attending to what we see when we look, we need to acknowledge that how we see is shaped by where we stand, and that others, differently placed, will see differently, and often more accurately. That acknowledgement calls for learning how it is that policing and incarceration are seen by those who are inordinately exposed both to the violence we are told policing and incarceration are meant to respond to and to the violence and devastation they actually impose. And we can learn from the on-the-ground forms of care that sustain those who struggle against the entwining of policing and incarceration with the wider injustices that breed violence, forms of care that build community resources, practices, and institutions that pave the paths toward a radically transformed world. To return to the epigraph from Wittgenstein at the start of this essay: a central theme in his later writing is calling attention to what we do, including with the words we use and the patterns of significance we attend to. If we find ourselves not comfortably at home in the ordinariness of the forms of life we inhabit  – if our return to home is blocked by something more visceral than philosophical fancy – we might be tempted to turn to something imagined as transcending what we do. But alternatively (more realistically, more groundedly, more radically) we can turn to, and learn from, those who are actually doing the work to construct “a changed mode of thought and of life.” For complicated personal and historical reasons, such a turn was not available to Wittgenstein, and his deep disaffection with the world he lived in left him with nowhere to go.19 But my suggestion is that, here and now, the movements for police and prison abolition, including especially Black-led restorative and

 For some articulations of abolitionist perspectives, see Critical Resistance, http://criticalresistance.org/; Families for Justice as Healing, https://www.justiceashealing.org; and MPD150, https:// www.mpd150.com 19  For reflections on Wittgenstein and the inability to feel at home, see Scheman 1996. 18

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transformative justice projects, are grounds for radical hope that other forms of life are possible.20,21

References Allen, Danielle. 2018. Cuz: An American tragedy. New York: Norton, Liveright. Baz, Avner. 2018. Stanley Cavell’s argument of the ordinary. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 7: 9–48. Bettcher, Talia. 2019. What is trans philosophy? Hypatia 34: 644–667. Cavell, Stanley. 2010. Little did I know: Excerpts from memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Das, Veena. 2020. Textures of the ordinary: Doing anthropology after Wittgenstein. New  York: Fordham University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1991. Wittgenstein and metaphysics. In The realistic spirit: Wittgenstein, philosophy, and the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. Toward a feminist theory of caring. In Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives, ed. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson, 35–62. Albany: SUNY Press. Jenkins, Katharine. Forthcoming. Ontology and oppression: Race, gender, and social reality. Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Laugier, Sandra. 2015. The ethics of care as a politics of the ordinary. New Literary History 46: 217–240. Lugg, Andrew. 1985. Was Wittgenstein a conservative thinker? The Southern Journal of Philosophy 23: 465–474. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2020. Words matter: Meaning and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles W. 2005. “Ideal theory” as ideology. Hypatia 20: 165–184. ———. 2007. White ignorance. In Sullivan and Tuana 2007. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. 1981. This bridge called my back. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Nash, Jennifer. 2019. Black feminism reimagined. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

 There are, of course, many other, diverse, efforts at building radically alternative forms of life. For a discussion that connects with abolitionism see Dean Spade on mutual aid (Spade 2020). 21  Thanks to the editors, Nora Hämäläinen, Salla Aldrin-Salskov, and Ondrej Beran for the invitation to engage with the volume’s project and for thoughtful comments and suggestions on an early draft. My only regret is not having been able to meet, as originally planned, on the ground in Pardubice. And thanks to my colleagues in SOFPHIA, especially Linda Nicholson, Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Richard Jones, and Larry Winters, for a challenging discussion of that draft. My comrades in the Boston Workers Circle committee, Acting for Economic and Racial Justice, especially Nickolas Faynshteyn, Lynne Layton, Madeleine Lourie, and Lily Ann Ritter have been inspiring fellow travellers as I try to understand and articulate abolition. The recent, untimely death of Charles Mills has made evident to me how much I had taken for granted his contributions to my conceptual toolbox: non-ideal vs ideal theory, the epistemologies of ignorance, and the importance of attending to how radically different the world looks when one centres the perspectives especially of Black people. 20

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Rankine, Claudia. 2015, June 22. The condition of black life is one of mourning. New York Times. Scheman, Naomi. 1996. Forms of life: Mapping the rough ground. In Cambridge companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David Stern, 389–416 (2nd edition, 2015). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. A storied world: On meeting and being met. In Stanley Cavell and literary studies: Consequences of skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie, 92–105. New York: Continuum. ———. 2015. Writers, authors, and the extraordinary ordinary. In The future of scholarly writing: Critical interventions, ed. Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, 41–56. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016a. Looking back on queering the center. Transgender Studies Quarterly 3: 212–219. ———. 2016b. On Mattering. In Facts and values: The ethics and metaphysics of normativity, ed. Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti, 119–136. New York: Routledge. Sered, Danielle. 2019. Until we reckon: Violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair. New York/London: The New Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Spade, Dean. 2020. Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and survival. Social Text 38: 131–151. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. 2007. Race and epistemologies of ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Woodly, Deva. 2019. Black feminist visions and the politics of healing in the movement for black lives. In Women mobilizing memory, ed. Ayşe Gül Altınay, Maria José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, 219–240. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2021. Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the democratic necessity of social movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Justice and the politics of difference. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Naomi Scheman is professor emerita of Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her collected papers have been published in Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (Routledge, 1993) and Shifting Ground: Knowledge & Reality, Transgression & Trustworthiness (Oxford University Press, 2011), and she co-edited Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein (Penn State Press, 2002). Her work, influenced most strongly by Wittgenstein and María Lugones, explores the epistemological and metaphysical implications of theorising grounded in marginalised and transgressive practices of sense-making.  

Tea and Consent: Reflections on the Changing Grammar of a Moral Concept Nora Hämäläinen

In the autumn of 2015, the Thames Valley Police launched the #ConsentIsEverything campaign, which featured a YouTube video that explained sexual consent by means of an analogy with offering someone tea. Animated with stick figures in increasingly absurd tea-drinking situations, and a laconic voiceover, the video quickly was widely shared on social media. Viewer comments on YouTube attested to the video’s being used as educational material by high school teachers, and featured positive and amused reactions from students. It spurred a range of commentary in the critical press for weaknesses in the analogy, for a lack of cultural sensitivity, for being overly simplistic, etc., but it seems to have been quite efficient in instilling a principle of respect for other people’s boundaries and laying out rules that precluded unwitting cases of sexual coercion. It is likely to strike many liberal progressive adults as the kind of thing that “every teenager should see”. Yet, it is also clear that the norms for sexual relations that it laid out were likely to strike today’s generations of Western, (mostly) secular, parents and grandparents as curiously different from what they grew up with, at least in the Northern European, largely liberal contexts in which I am at home. This difference is what I am concerned with in this chapter: what it says about this region of our form of life, and the conceptual and ideological modulations it is going through. The difference, as explicated in this chapter, also works as an exemplary case of communal moral change and thus as case material for philosophical analysis of moral change more generally.1

 Describing the (diachronic) trajectory of a changing concept may be seen as diverting attention from (synchronic) complexities of the life of the very same concept. These things should, however, not be seen as juxtaposed. Attention to patterns of change is also a way of gaining a better understanding of the conflicts that are distinctive to a given time and place. 1

N. Hämäläinen (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czechia Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_10

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The layout of the paper is as follows: In Sect. 1, I discuss the tea video and my own initial responses to it. In Sect. 2, I highlight its novelty by contrasting it with a recent critical discussion of the Finsex survey, a sociological survey of the sexual habits of people in Finland over five decades. In the third section, drawing on Michel Foucault, I discuss the understanding of sexual self-government at work in the video. The fourth section, leaning on Cora Diamond’s reading of Wittgenstein, explores the element of utopianism and a projected future in moral language. In the fifth section, I draw upon Ian Hacking to illuminate the nature of the changes that underlie shifts in our shared notions of sexual consent. The sixth and final section looks at the implications of the case at hand for understanding moral change and points to some reasons for why we should resist a univocal philosophical analysis in terms of “moral progress” even when we do in fact think that the change at hand is an instance of improvement for people. I hope to show that thinking in terms of progress, while often necessary in moral and political thought, may, if uncritically applied in moral philosophy, prevent us from appreciating the plurality of moving parts in any process of moral change.

1  Tea as Consent Unable to show the video here, I begin by quoting its voiceover: If you’re still struggling with consent, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea. You say, ‘Hey, would you like a cup of tea?’ And they go, ‘Oh, my God, I would love a cup of tea. Thank you.’ Then you know they want a cup of tea. If you say, ‘Hey, would you like a cup of tea?’ And they’re like, ‘No, um, you know, I’m not really sure.’ Then you could make them a cup of tea or not, but, be aware, they might not drink it. And if they don’t drink it, then, and this is the important part, don’t make them drink it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it. And if they say, ‘No, thank you,’ then don’t make them tea at all. Just don’t make them tea. Don’t make them drink tea. Don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, OK? They might say, ‘Yes, please, that’s kind of you.’ And then when the tea arrives, they actually don’t want the tea at all. Sure, that’s kind of annoying as you’ve gone through all the effort of making the tea, but they remain under no obligation to drink the tea. They did want tea, now they don’t. Some people change their mind in the time that it takes to boil the kettle, brew the tea and add the milk. And it’s OK for people to change their mind. And you are still not entitled to watch them drink it. And if they’re unconscious, don’t make them tea. Unconscious people don’t want tea and they can’t answer the question, ‘Do you want tea?’ because they’re unconscious. Maybe they were conscious when you asked them if they wanted tea and they said, ‘Yes.’ But, in the time it took you to boil the kettle, brew the tea and add the milk, they are now unconscious. You should just put the tea down. Make sure the unconscious person is safe. And this is the important part, again, don’t make them drink the tea. They said yes then, sure, but unconscious people don’t want tea. If someone said yes to tea, started drinking it, and then passed out before they’d finished it, don’t keep on pouring it down their throat. Take the tea away. Make sure they are safe because unconscious people don’t want tea. Trust me on this.

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If someone said yes to tea around your house last Saturday, that doesn’t mean they want you to make them tea all the time. They don’t want you to come around to their place unexpectedly, and make them tea, and force them to drink it, going ‘but you wanted tea last week’, or to wake up to find you pouring tea down their throat, going ‘but you wanted tea last night’. If you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don’t want tea and you’re able to understand when people don’t want tea, then how hard is it to understand it when it comes to sex? Whether it’s tea or sex, consent is everything. And, on that note, I’m going to go make myself a cup of tea.2

While much of the humour of the video is lost in transcription (and along with it, a good part of its impact on the viewer), the ethical perspective and the elucidation of the concept of consent remain intact. In short, just as you would not force anyone to drink tea or coax anyone to do so, or make them drink it while unconscious, or require them to do so because they drank it with you last week, you shouldn’t do any of these things with regard to sex! Conversely, you are fully entitled to say no thanks, stop in the middle, etc., without repercussions. This is what consent means. Any violation of this is a violation of consent. If it is not hard to tell the difference with tea, it shouldn’t be hard to tell with sex. The video can be seen as improvising on the theme of Wittgensteinian conceptual investigations. It explores and seeks to both clarify and shape our lives in language. It presents a mock grammatical investigation of offering and accepting tea, aimed at clarifying the grammar of consent – not as it works, in fact, in our present-­ day lives but how it ought to work in the light of progressive, liberal, egalitarian thought, sensitive to questions of autonomy, rights and recognition. I probably first came across this video through social media sometime between 2015 and 2017, before or shortly after the #MeToo movement was started by actress Alyssa Milano in October 2017. How do I know? MeToo nudged public discourse about consent in the direction of the concept expressed in the video, and my initial response to the video reflects the expectations of a pre-MeToo world. My first reaction to the tea-and-consent concept was that it was brilliant in its simplicity, my second that, for this very reason, it was unrealistic. There was a utopianism about it: the fashioning of a new world that wasn’t here yet, and may, for potentially good reasons, never quite be. Why? Because sex is not tea. Saying no to sex is not like saying no to tea. Saying no to tea is neutral. Saying no to sex can be neutral too, but mostly it isn’t. Rapists and abusive strangers or acquaintances aside, people – perhaps most frequently – say no to sex in relationships and situations where both parties are emotionally engaged and where complex, culturally shaped and internalised expectations are at play. Getting a no from your regular dating partner, regular sexual partner, boy- or girlfriend, husband or wife, raises, depending on the situation, feelings that range from unease and awkwardness to frustration, rejection and hurt. Contemporary,

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Nii5w2FaI

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liberal cultural scripts of “being involved” standardly presuppose access to sex and sexual fidelity as part of a range of different relational packages, and sexual satisfaction is more often than not framed as one of the fundamentals of a good and normal life. Relationship columns are full of advice on how to keep your sex life going, framing the maintenance of your desire and sexual activity as a central part of care and concern for your partner. Free consent is yours to give, but the prevalent message is that you need to engage in sex in a range of situations in order to pass as normal, and in order not to hurt your partner’s feelings or thwart “reasonable” expectations. Culturally, saying no to sex is in many situations (in broadly liberal settings) more reminiscent of saying no to a cooked meal. Cooked meals are more demanding and committing and stir more feelings than tea. It is all right to decline, but it is not nice if you first said yes and someone has actually cooked for you. If you always decline the meals cooked by your partner, you may both have reason to worry about the state of your relationship. And if you go to someone’s place for dinner, not eating because you no longer feel like it will make you look both odd and inexplicably rude. No one will force the food down your throat, but social relations with the hosts and other guests might get strained. Thus, comparing sexual consent to tea (rather than meals, for example) may look like willingly ignoring or overlooking the contemporary lived reality of sexual relations, norms and discourses. But, as I will argue, it is not that: it is an attempt to reinforce a new understanding of the concept of consent that will reframe, if not resolve, some old problems.3

2  A Paradigm Shift? To get a broader picture of the changes involved here, I will take a brief tour through a recent Finnish critique on the representation of sexual coercion in the Finsex study. This study is an ambitious attempt to record the sexual life of people in Finland over the past 50  years, through surveys conducted in 1971, 1992, 1999, 2007 and 2015. The publication of these surveys has provided fleeting amusement in Finnish public life, an occasion for the evening papers to report on and quite freely speculate over the reasons for features of and changes in sexual habits. But

3  The use of “consent” as a key term in tracking sexual misconduct has been criticised by feminists for being, among other things, overly legalistic, blind to structural inequalities of power and a poor tool for identifying the cultural issues that give rise to bad and damaging sexual experiences, and for rendering women’s desires invisible and politically ineffective (see e.g. MacKinnon 2016; Fichel 2019; Brison 2021; Miller 2021). Such discussions contain valuable insights into the limits of consent as a critical tool. Yet I will here work on the assumption that modulations of the concept of consent, at least for the moment, have roles to play in contemporary renegotiations of the cultural terms of sexual relations.

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they have also influenced serious public discussion and prompted critical engagement with the conceptual, historical and ideological aspects of the research. Researchers Matleena Frisk and Riikka Taavetti (2020) recently criticised the study and its makers for underestimating the frequency of sexual coercion in the material. Their paper concerns the surveys of 1971 and 1992, which were to date the only ones with full research data openly available. To the question of whether the respondents wanted their first intercourse, people were asked to choose one of the following: I wanted it very much; I wanted it to a certain extent; I was reluctant, but I complied upon persuasion; I did not want, but others pressured me; I did not want, but s/he pressured me; I did not want it, but s/he threatened me with force; I did not want it, but s/he raped me.4 The researchers of the first study find it striking that 40% of women complied upon persuasion, pressuring or threats, but they also merge cases of rape with the other forms of pressuring. In relation to the 1992 survey researchers seem content to notice that the proportion of pressuring has decreased. In a commentary one of the researchers of the study, sociologist Osmo Kontula, states that according to their findings, the pressuring and forcing of women by men is relatively rare. Taavetti and Frisk find this questionable, given that one in four women still report that they were at least reluctant during their first intercourse. Prompted to comment on this perspective in a web article on YLE (the Finnish public-service broadcasting company) in February 2021, Kontula replies that he was talking about the frequency of people who had reported experiences of pressuring (3%) and coercion (1%) (Tiessalo 2021). He also comments that he “does not question the professionalism” of Taavetti and Frisk, which was perhaps the surest way to suggest that he indeed does, and found their critique tendentious. Kontula comes across here as not very interested in the complexities of the category of persuasion, considering it uncontentious, whereas Frisk and Taavetti single it out as an area of potential violence that has gained recognition only in recent years. As Taavetti comments: “The Finsex research has not acknowledged the great change that has happened in ways of understanding sexual violence.” Some of the questions seem to take for granted that (“regular”, non-violent) sex isn’t always voluntary. While questions about sexual violence were added to the study of the 1990s, they are in her view “disconnected from the context of intimate relations, love and sex. Yet we know well that sexual violence also happens in our closest relationships.” The worry here is that breaches of consent are not properly identified where they are most likely to happen: between people who are, in one way or another, sexually involved with each other. The YLE article, interestingly, ends with reflections by both Frisk and Taavetti, and Venla Berg, the current coordinator of the Finsex study, on how to deal with research that seeks to register a temporal trajectory of changes in human behaviour 4  S/he stands here for the Finnish third person singular pronoun “hän” that is gender neutral. Taavetti and Frisk note that difference between the last two is not elaborated on in the survey, but both fill the criteria of rape by the legislation of 1992.

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while the very concepts (many of them normatively laden) by which that behaviour is described also undergo change. The issue between the critics and Kontula, between current progressive sensibilities and older assumptions, seems to hinge on how pressuring is understood and also why it is understood in one way rather than another. For those who started courting or dating in the 1960s and 1970s, in communities fashioned as modern and “sexually liberated”, the idea that women should not “yield” too easily or be too eager was still strongly internalised. Saying no, saying no again and then saying yes, was considered ordinary feminine courtship behaviour and a no could, depending on the situation, be construed as an invitation. Most people coming of age in the Western world somewhat later, in the last decades of the twentieth century, have not been raised to play this game of feminine reluctance and masculine pursuit, but rather have been instilled with the importance of equality, individual rights and clear communication. This is what I grew up with: don’t say no if you mean yes; don’t say yes if you mean no. You have the right to your own body, and how you dress, who you hang out with, where you hang out, what you had to drink or which way you walk home should not make any difference. Sexual acts are voluntary and coercion is forbidden.5 We thought we had it nailed: not in practice perhaps, because sexual violence was still rife, but in theory. Yet reality turned out to be more complex than this straightforward rights perspective suggests. The boundary between pressuring and “ordinary” persuasion is hardly very exact. Instances described by individuals as persuasion potentially may range from deft seduction to displays of frustration, argumentation, covert threats and emotional blackmail. The difference between pressuring and persuasion marks a moral boundary between something clearly negatively charged and something potentially positive. It is fair to assume that people will file an experience as pressuring rather than persuasion if they think that it crosses a boundary of what they think of as acceptable, and what they think of as a source of legitimate complaint. But most people learn much of the rules of sexual relations from experience, and occasions for comparing experiences with others might be rare or unreliable. The official rules are often minimal and abstract. You may know that consent is important, but what does it entail? What, for example, if all your early sexual experiences are defined by more or less benign forms of persuasion? Or what if you don’t fit the image of a victim? (For example, men’s experiences as victims of sexual pressuring and coercion have traditionally not found a sympathetic ear in either progressive feminist or conservative circles.) The tea-as-consent video is a fruit of the sensibility represented by Taavetti and Frisk, one that sees vast potential for undue and damaging sexual conduct, indeed violence, in the push and pull of all kinds of intimate relationships and sexual situations. It unequivocally instructs that you shouldn’t coax or argue your way to consent, that anything short of a yes is a no, no matter what your relationship or situation

5  This corresponds roughly to what has been called the “no means no” notion of consent (e.g. Popova 2019, 16).

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is. It thus projects an end to a complex range of (varying and historically malleable) relational and situational entitlements and requirements that have been internalised by previous generations, and restricts the normative space for sexual persuasion, in order to curb behaviours and relational dynamics that have come to be considered harmful.

3  The Askesis of Contemporary Sex To clarify what is going on in this renegotiation we may be helped by two different thoughts from Michel Foucault. In the first volume of the History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990a), Foucault places the historical formation that we today call sexuality at the centre of his exploration of contemporary understandings of the self. He explicates how much of twentieth-century Western thought on sexuality operates on the (historically formed) idea of sexuality as something repressed and at the same time expressive of our “true selves”. In the following volumes (Foucault 1990b, 1990c), he dwells on the register of moral life that concerns practices of self-formation – what he calls askesis – and how it impinges on the formation of the body and its pleasures. His focus here is on Greek and Roman antiquity, but the idea of practices of the self – the formation of the self (body and mind) through exercises and habituation, to conform to an ideal – applies to a variety of contexts. Elaborating on these two themes from Foucault, the heightened cultural activity around the “liberation” of sexuality in our recent past can be seen as generating two different forms of contemporary askesis, in broadly liberal settings. One is the askesis of (supposedly liberatory) self-discovery, the shaping of self as an actively desiring subject. Women’s magazines, progressive social movements, the porn industry, sexual therapies and popular novels are just a few of the heterogeneous sites where the askesis of self-discovery was developed and perpetuated through the second half of the twentieth century, up to the present. This askesis is linked to an ethos of entitlement: everyone, regardless of gender, orientation, age (excepting children and young adolescents) or physical ability, has the right to seek sexual self-­ expression and satisfaction. The other form of askesis, which we see in the tea video, is one of respect and humility, the shaping of self as someone able to contain disappointment, relinquish entitlement and be attentive and alert to other people’s experiences and boundaries. We find traces of this askesis in the products of popular culture, partly the same ones that carry the former, but it has gained momentum with #MeToo and related critical movements. These forms of self-shaping are not incompatible. Both resonate with the idea that our sexuality reveals our “selves”; that sexual discovery in a profound sense is self-discovery, and sexual damage is damage to our “selves”. Certainly, the askesis of affirmative discovery can be seamlessly combined with an askesis of humility, with regarding the other with caution and respect, just as other freedoms and desires

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can be combined with strict respect for other people’s correlative freedoms and desires. But they do stand in certain tension: how am I to realise myself (my true self) as a desiring subject if my desire is not met, and previously accepted forms of persuasion (or securing access) are ruled out as coercive? The promise of sexual access of the late-twentieth-century “sexual liberation” seems to have been stalled by new socially enforced limitations that do not seem fully understandable to all parties in contemporary discussions on these topics.6 For those who have been enculturated to affirm the askesis of desire but not – at least not to the same degree – the complexities of the askesis of humility, the transition may be difficult to negotiate, because the values motivating the latter may seem self-evident (of course consent and respect are important!) while the experiences that move it may be opaque. Why are people making such a fuss about consent in cases where two (or more) adults voluntarily do stuff together? Aren’t people generally better off if they have more sex?

4  What We Want or Need I noted earlier that the tea-and-consent video contains a streak of utopianism, and that it represents an askesis of respect and humility that stands in tension with the askesis of sexual self-realisation that defined much of twentieth-century liberal discourse about sexuality. I suggest that the nature of its notion of consent is not plainly descriptive but should rather be understood as a resource, as elaborated by Cora Diamond. She offers this idea in a discussion on how mathematical and ethical sentences, if not descriptive in the manner of botanical sentences, for example, are “responsible to reality”: [T]o see what the … ethicalness of a sentence is, you have to look at its application: there you see what kind of “linguistic instrument” it is. It is possible to speak of “responsibility to reality” in the case of linguistic resources, but what is meant by such responsibility is different from what it is in the case of ordinary experiential propositions: do the world, and our nature, make the resource in question one that we shall want or need? (Diamond 2018, 232)

Ethical sentences are in this view world-directed in a particular way: they offer themselves as instruments for sharing (ethical) ways of looking at things and thus as resources for living together. Ethical uses of language do not necessarily consist of ethical words or overt ethical injunctions. A story or a description without explicit ethical markers can work in this way. Such stories have the form “Let us see the

6  In an extreme and potentially violent form we see this in the so-called incel movement (see Beran 2021), but similar lines of complaint can be heard in a quite broad variety of contexts.

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matter as this!” leaving it open for the interlocutor to accept them or offer a different view instead.7 Yet such resources and their adequacy can be tested, by reference to the realities in which they come into play. Anne-Marie Christensen comments as follows: Diamond suggests that we can evaluate ethical sentences by asking whether they establish resources that we “want or need” – want or need in moral thinking and in moral life more generally. Furthermore, the linguistic resources that are helpful in becoming attentive to morally relevant aspects of human life may differ significantly from situation to situation and from culture to culture … (Christensen forthcoming)

The tea-as-consent video, with its clear definition of consent in sexual relations, establishes a perspective that at least people of my generation and older might not recognise as a plain and obvious description of the notion of consent (this very thick ethical concept). But the notion of consent at the heart of the video may very well be a resource that we “want or need”. Despite having lived most of my adult life at relative ease with a more relaxed, shades-of-grey concept of consent, it strikes me that we need to teach our children and grandchildren something else. The reasons for this are probably complex. Feminists of the past 50 years have worked hard to make people talk about sex, from 1970s-style consciousness-raising through Salt ‘N’ Pepa to #MeToo and beyond. We have more public access to real-­ life narratives of better and worse sexual experiences, and thus more material to think with. Expectations of different kinds of sexual relations have changed too, through new economic conditions and power relations, more equal gender roles, movements for LGBTQIA+ rights, etc. The socially endorsed ideal is that long-term or love relationships should be fulfilling in a holistic way, meeting a deep-seated need for mutual recognition. Small transgressions of consent here and there do not seem to have a place in such relationships. Neither do they have a place in contemporary casual sexual relationships, where mutual respect for boundaries is often considered key. Reflecting on the genesis of concepts in a form of life, Wittgenstein notes that “bit by bit daily life becomes such that there is a place for hope in it” (Wittgenstein 1980: §15). Analogously, bit by bit, daily life becomes such that there is a place for a more demanding notion of sexual consent, one that does not allow for the shades-­ of-­grey register of persuasion, or for sexual entitlements based on situation or relationship status. Bit by bit, daily life has become such that there is a place for “tea-as-consent” videos to reinforce this message. We demand that all children wear helmets when they ride bicycles, not because we think they all run a grave risk of head injury all the time (indeed kids of my generation did not wear helmets, and no one was worried). We may want to teach all young people a demanding concept of consent, not because we think they all run the risk of damaging each other all the time but because much damage to people and relationships can be avoided this way. Yet the analogy is limited, because the demanding notion of consent (unlike the biking helmet, which is a mere protection)  For a case of this, see Hugo Strandberg’s chapter in this book (Strandberg 2022).

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comes with the promise of a new positivity, of more meaningful ways of being together and being attuned to each other in sexual relationships. Of course, not everyone is convinced that the demanding concept of consent is a good idea. Many people wonder what all the fuss is about. Others see it as a tool of sexual repression, a new moralism, a “negative attitude” to sex, a policing of intimacy that will make people’s relationships worse rather than better. But there is a discussion to be had on how these concepts are “responsible to reality”, the realities of lived experience, current knowledge, shared ideals. Projective uncertainty and historicity do not weaken the claim of an ethical concept, sentence, ideal, if it turns out to be one that we, considering our situation, realise we indeed want and need.

5  Experience Changes: Some Reflections on Hacking People who see the more demanding notion of consent as preferable, or even morally necessary, are likely to think of conceptual change in this direction as an instance of moral progress and conceptual refinement. As Ian Hacking suggests, “One of the more attractive features of Western civilization is the way we occasionally refine our sense of values and engage in consciousness-raising that lasts” (Hacking 1991, 254). Along these lines, the idea is that many seemingly innocuous cases of sexual persuasion have been cases of unrecognised violence, and the old notion of consent has been too blunt a tool to acknowledge this.8 But even if we find ourselves largely in agreement with this perspective, it is important to see that this conceptual change occurs in a field of multiple changes that affect not only our conceptualisation and recognition of realities but the realities themselves. Hacking explores this kind of change of realities in relation to the modulations of the concept of and normativity around child abuse. While the case of child abuse is in many respects different from consent, his reflections serve well to illuminate the dialectical relationship between social change and conceptual change/refinement and change in behaviour and experience. I quote him at length here: We have found out more about child abuse, not just by uncovering horrible facts but also by refining our ideas and sharpening our moral sensibilities. This progress is not like obtaining a better conception of multiple sclerosis or the gene. It is not simply getting closer to the permanent truth of the matter. One difference is that as we evolve an idea about a kind of person or of human behavior, people change, behaviors change. Children experience their hurt differently. They are more self-conscious about when and how emotional and sexual abuse is painful; they see as abuse some events which before they would have ignored or repressed. Perhaps the suffering is worse for being acknowledged, or perhaps it is less damaging in the long run. Whatever, the experience of abuse is different. Likewise the abusers’ own sense of what they are doing, how they do it, and even what they do is just not the same now as it was thirty years ago. (Hacking 1991, 254) 8  This can be construed as a change in our ability to recognise violence, but also as a renegotiation/ change of the concept of violence, to include new kinds of acts, or both.

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Clearly, much more has been learned over the past half century about child abuse: there is more vigilance concerning the rights and well-being of children, and much of the stigma attached to victims of child sexual abuse has gone, leading people to talk about their experiences and seek justice. But in the process of naming and acknowledging, people have come to expect different things and to value differently. No longer taught to repress or ignore experiences of sexual, psychological or physical violence, children make a different place for such events in their experience, as do the perpetrators especially of sexual child abuse, who are now construed as a distinctively bad sort of person. Analogously, the more demanding notion of consent transforms the experience of sexual relationships. As I noted earlier, if mild force and occasional pressure are (within certain boundaries) mutually considered part of the package of an intimate relationship, they are likely to be tolerated and even affirmed by both parties, quite regardless of how it feels to be pressured. Furthermore, a practice that we at some level affirm or accept as normal is likely to feel less bad because it does not come with an articulate sense of injustice and may even be endowed with positive cultural meanings that legitimise it (for example, the trope of the insistent, rough lover as exciting, or the inability to contain oneself and stop at boundaries as an expression of true passion). How people experience, categorise and understand reluctant sex and sexual pressuring at different times and in different contexts is not a fit object of philosophical speculation but rather a topic of historiography and ethnography. Yet we may confidently say that categorisations do change experience, and words for kinds of people and the things that pass between them change the realities in one way or another.9 This also applies to the notion of consent. Sexual violators and violations appear where none were seen before. Potentially disturbing experiences that previously would have been brushed aside or domesticated as part of normal life are now not only acknowledged but also experienced as genuine wrongs. Other experiences (such as extramarital sex), previously considered to be wrong, become considered unproblematic. Habits and norms of dealing with experience also have implications for how people deal with further experiences. There may be new things to damage. Broadly liberal, Western, secular mainstream societies have come to think of the active desiring subject (female as well as male) as a central component of the formation and maintenance of an intimate or conjugal relationship. Abusive and coercive sexual experiences are known to affect people’s capacity to form such relationships, experience trust and shape themselves as subjects and objects of desire in culturally expected ways. Where women in the not-so-distant past could become unmarriageable due to breaches of chastity, they may now be known to experience difficulties in maintaining an intimate relationship due to previous abusive experiences. Of course, similar experiences may have been equally damaging before, but their repercussions were different, because lives were differently shaped.

 For a discussion, see also Alcoff 2018.

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The demanding notion of consent is not just a protection of people’s integrity but rather (1) a protection of people’s capacity to shape themselves in terms of the askesis of desire, and (2) a protection of a deep, nurturing mutuality in sexual relations that, in contemporary relationship discourse, is frequently considered ideal and even necessary for the maintenance of satisfactory long-term relationships. These protections are culturally highly valued goods that structure contemporary liberal understandings of intimacy. Thus, it may be suggested that the shades-of-grey breaches of consent may today be quite differently damaging to people’s capacity to lead a normal and, in their own terms, happy life than they were a few generations ago, when different expectations were at play. I said before that this notion of consent will “reframe, if not resolve, some old problems”. I think we should now be in a position to flesh out this claim. This new concept of consent does away with part of the push and pull of sexual relations, but it does not pacify sexual life. Perhaps it cannot be pacified, because people’s desires and their satisfaction, though complexly responsive to social expectations, tend to overflow the societal forms in which they are contained. The demanding conception of consent is subversive in how it does away with any legitimate a priori claims to sexual access to other people. It shows quite clearly how such claims, in spite of our best intentions, have been carried over from a patriarchal heteronormative order to the supposedly liberated sexuality of the late twentieth century and the present day. It now pushes back against those claims, in a way that has repercussions on how sexual and conjugal relationships are understood and lived, how sexual normality is conceived and how sexual problems are addressed.

6  The Question of Universalism Moral changes of this type that extend the application of an already accepted principle (self-determination, respect) are in contemporary ethics sometimes framed as a kind of proof of the possibility of genuine moral progress (Moody-Adams 1997, 2017; Diamond 2019; Baker 2019; Pleasants 2018). Now that we acknowledge slavery, for example, to be fundamentally incompatible with what we know and think about humanity, there is no turning back. Once communal ethical reflections and conversations on a topic have reached a certain point, a range of options is closed off from rational discourse and moral sense. This reasoning resonates well with a certain dimension of moral experience. Few people would like to go back to a time when sexual harassment in the workplace was silently accepted due to the lack of verbal power and authority to resist. Few would go back to a time when doctors performed procedures on their patients without informing them, when young children were put to work for long hours in factories and when wives beaten by their husbands lacked legal protection. These practices continue in many parts of the world, but where social perceptions have changed and legislation protects people from abuse, we find ourselves entitled to claim these protections as proof of objective moral progress. They are proof that

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unnecessary suffering can be decreased and practices disrespectful of the personhood of others can be curbed. The tea concept of consent can be seen as this kind of improvement. Respect for people is an old value: the novelty lies in demanding its consistent application to sexual relations and calling out instances where breaches are routinely excused. Many philosophers like these kinds of developments because they seem to show that morality is a realm of reason and that objective progress is possible. I would, however, tread carefully in this region of thought, because much valuable insight can be lost here if we are too eager to think of moral changes in terms of progress or regress. There is hardly reason to doubt that these are cases of objective progress in the light of the values central to Western liberal modernity. Following Diamond, we may see such changes as displaying paths of genuine, world-directed reasoning. Yet we should retain an awareness of the local, historical and value-relative character of such processes. They belong to a given way of life that has, for a variety of reasons, arrived at a point where there is a place, indeed a call, for example, for a tea concept of consent. Such a concept is no less valuable for being dependent on situated, historical processes of judgement and valuation. Attempts to anchor it in universal, disengaged moral reason are not going to strengthen it but may blind us to the multiple moving parts in any such process of change. It is not just that we have come to re-evaluate the roles of persuasion and entitlement in sexual relations, and have expanded the scope of consent and thereby of autonomy. Our understandings of the human person, sexuality, marriage, gender, power, etc., have undergone subtle changes, as a result of which we live in a different world than people of just a few generations back. At a high level of abstraction – as well as in a casual register of normative judgement – the “good” is always the same, respect for individuals was the same, abuse was always abuse and denying this would be relativism or, worse, a lax apologetics for bad behaviour. Some philosophers think that this is very important to state and indeed seek to prove that this is the case by philosophical means. I tend to think that this reasoning is a mistake and a misdirection of intellectual energy: It is ethically spurious: judging bad behaviour as bad does not require supposedly transhistorical universalist arguments. It is discursively counterproductive: we manage ethical negotiations quite well with reference to values we share, or may come to share, and harms we discern in the conditions in which people live their quite different lives. Referring to values as universal helps only insofar as they are indeed shared. If they are not, ethical negotiations are likely to be blocked. It also often leads to descriptive inaccuracies: narratives of progress obscure the plurality of moving parts in any process of moral change, thus making them look linear. Stories of moral progress, though often morally and politically important, are low-hanging fruit, philosophically speaking. Much of philosophical understanding begins when we look at the plurality of things that are going on around the success stories.

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The tea-as-consent video maintains that understanding consent is easy. But of course it is only so if one shares a way of life in which people are autonomous individuals, sexual autonomy cannot be relinquished by contract or decree, genders are equal, no one has a right to another’s body, sex as such is not sinful, etc. Understanding the tea notion of consent is easy because life has become such that there is a place for it. Seeking to understand such aspects of our lives, the way we live with them, the way our concepts depend on them, and how they have changed and may come to change again, is a way of doing moral philosophy after Wittgenstein.10

References Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2018. Rape and Resistance. London: Polity Press. Baker, Robert. 2019. The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Beran, Ondřej. 2021. To each incel according to his needs? SATS – Northern European Journal of Philosophy 22: 191–213. Brison, Susan. 2021. What’s consent got to do with it? Social Philosophy Today, Online First. https://doi.org/10.5840/socphiltoday202181983. Christensen, Anne-Marie Søndergaard. Forthcoming. Guiding ethical sentences, moral change, and form(s) of life. In New Perspectives on Moral Change, ed. Cecilie Eriksen and Nora Hämäläinen. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Diamond, Cora. 2018. Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics: Resisting the attractions of realism. In The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans D. Sluga and David G. Stern, 226–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Truth in ethics: Williams and Wiggins. In Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fichel, Joseph J. 2019. Screw Consent: A better Politics of Sexual Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990a. The history of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ———. 1990b. The history of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The use of pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ———. 1990c. The history of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The care of the self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Frisk, Matleena, and Riikka Taavetti. 2020. FINSEX-tutkimusten sokea piste: ohitetun väkivallan yhteiskunnalliset seuraukset. Sukupuolentutkimus 33 (4): 39–44. Hacking, Ian. 1991. The making and molding of child abuse. Critical Inquiry 17: 253–288. MacKinnon, Catherine. 2016. Rape Redefined. Harvard Law & Policy Review 10: 431–477. Miller, Sarah Clark. 2021. Criticizing consent: A reply to Susan Brison. Social Philosophy Today, Online First. https://doi.org/10.5840/socphiltoday20219184. Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, culture, and philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 Work on this paper was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic).

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———. 2017. Moral progress and human agency. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20: 153–168. Pleasants, Nigel. 2018. The structure of moral revolutions. Social Theory and Practice: 567–592. Popova, Milena. 2019. Sexual Consent. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Strandberg, Hugo. 2022. On the difficulty of speaking. In Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, ed. Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen. Cham: Springer. Tiessalo, Paula. 2021. Tutkijat arvostelevat Finsex-tutkimusta seksuaalisen väkivallan ohittamisesta  – Väestöliitto kritiikistä: “Osa kysymyksistä hyvinkin vanhanaikaisia”. YLE-web, 6 February 2021. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-­11763153. Accessed 31 May 2021. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nora Hämäläinen is senior researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her research interests include ethics, moral personhood, moral change, moral anthropology, philosophy and literature, and philosophical method. She is the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury 2015), Descriptive Ethics: What does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Är Trump Postmodern: En essä om sanning och populism (Förlaget M 2019), and and co-editor of Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2012) and Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).  

Debating Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Handling Moral Concerns More Gently Pär Segerdahl

To repeat: don’t think, but look! Wittgenstein.

1  Introduction The main ethical argument for embryonic stem cell research is often said to be “the incredible benefits that may be gained from stem cell research” (Harman 2007, 70). Embryonic stem cell research may help us treat serious diseases that currently lack effective treatments, such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the promise of significant benefits, embryonic stem cell research is often contested because it implies destroying human embryos. Many people are reluctant to allow such treatment of human embryos for research purposes. This chapter asks why the human embryo so easily becomes a sensitive issue. According to Katrien Devolder, the divided situation (potential benefits vs. embryo destruction) gives rise to what she calls “The Problem” in the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. Notice the either/or form of the problem: Either one supports embryonic stem cell research and accepts resulting embryo destruction, or one opposes embryonic stem cell research and accepts that the potential benefits of this research will be foregone. (Devolder 2015, 2)

Ethical and legal regulations often circumvent this either/or problem through compromises. In various attempts to enable embryonic stem cell research (because of its potential benefits) while still respecting people’s moral concerns about embryo destruction, legislation often permits research under what one can be tempted to describe as cunningly restricted conditions, such as permitting the use of embryonic stem cells in research while banning their derivation. In her book on the ethics of P. Segerdahl (*) Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_11

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embryonic stem cell research, Devolder examines the arguments for these responses to The Problem and demonstrates that they are incoherent or based on false assumptions, for example about the use-derivation distinction. Her aim in identifying the intellectual shortcomings of these compromise positions is to “help us get closer to the correct ethical position on the permissibility of embryonic stem cell research” (Devolder 2015, 152). In this chapter, I propose that the notion of a “correct” ethical position compels bioethics to solidify people’s possibly more fluid concerns by giving them doctrinal interpretations, as when Devolder writes: “Many people accord a significant moral status to the human embryo” (Devolder 2015, 1). Do they, or is this a requirement to be able to discuss human forms of moral unease as if they were intellectual issues of truth and falsity? Furthermore, I propose that interpreting moral concerns as arising from doctrines about embryos hardens The Problem and makes it irresolvable. This is especially unfortunate given an upcoming scenario that might make The Problem even harder. Which scenario? Commercialisation. When ethicists emphasise the therapeutic benefits of medical research, they do not always give prominence to the fact that research itself does not provide the therapies. Patients do not visit universities hoping that scientists will cure them. They visit hospitals hoping that doctors will cure them by administering therapies that in most cases were developed and made commercially available by the pharmaceutical industry. For embryonic stem cell research to realise its potential benefits, researchers will often need to collaborate with commercial partners, sharing stem cell lines and working towards the goal of new medical products. These products will contain cells that, in a series of innovative steps, were derived from stem cells harvested from human embryos. If many people hesitate about permitting potentially beneficial embryonic stem cell research, they might hesitate even more about its commercialisation, in spite of the fact that it would realise the potential benefits. The closer we get to realising the potential benefits of the research, the more hesitant people might become and The Problem hardens even more. Therefore, I believe we need to ask afresh how moral hesitation about embryonic stem cell research emerges. The question is not meant here as an empirical problem to be answered through surveys but as a philosophical problem of seeing facts about ourselves that are neglected in the conventional ways of approaching the ethical issues. Following Wittgenstein’s advice in the epigraph of this paper, we look at ourselves, at what can make people hesitate about embryonic stem cell research. Even if we do not personally experience unease about embryo destruction, we should nevertheless be able to examine such a question. It is possible to understand our human differences if we look at them without judging them, and if we are open to seeing unexpected connections.

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2  C  ommercialisation Mediating Potential Benefit and Altruism As a preliminary to our self-inquiry, I want to explore further the mediating function of commercialisation. Few of us consider that almost every medical treatment for which science has prepared the way was developed and made available by the pharmaceutical industry. I assume that people tend not to be as favourable to industry as we generally are to research and health care. If we speak in terms of parables, when the Good Samaritan stops to help the injured person along the road, there is usually a business-minded person there to supply the miraculous medicine, for a charge. We may not appreciate that person, but without someone actually manufacturing and supplying the medical substance, the Samaritan could not do much good. I am not trying to ethically justify the pharmaceutical industry but to give a linguistic analysis of the current presuppositions of talking about medical research as being “potentially beneficial”, and about research participation as being “altruistic”. Given the present economic infrastructure, when we reason ethically about the “potential benefits” of medical research, or about “altruistic” participation in medical research, we presuppose a whole system in which figure not only research and health care but also industry. Ethical and legal regulation are further parts of this system, in conjunction with governmental supervision of medical products. Given this system, there can be such a thing as an “altruistic relation” between embryo donors and future patients. Given this system, bioethicists can talk about the “potential benefits” of embryonic stem cell research. There could be other systems, but this is the present system, and within it, commercialisation functions as a mediator between research and therapeutic benefits. So, whether we like it or not, without commercial mediators, stem cell research could not presently be potentially beneficial, and research participation could not be altruistic. Our appreciation of research presupposes a wider system that also contains generally unappreciated activities. As embryonic stem cell research advances through the system sketched above, commercial activities become increasingly prominent. Couples who donate embryos to research must be informed about the fact that researchers might seek commercial partners with whom they will share stem cell lines: companies that have business interests to develop products with cell contents derived from human embryos. Since this development might solidify The Problem, we need to ask ourselves sincerely how moral hesitation about embryonic stem cell research emerges.

3  Embryos and “Life Itself” Let us start by making a comparison with less controversial research that is relevant to human health. Why is research on how physical exercise affects the blood vessels reassuring – it is even comforting to know that such research is performed for our benefit  – while research on human embryos easily gives us chills? Why are

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consumers happy to purchase products, such as smartphone apps, derived from the first kind of research, while the scenario of products containing cell material derived from human embryos easily unsettles many of us? A notion that often appears in response to the latter kind of research and commercial activity is life. Researchers should not meddle with life itself, we may feel and say, and industry should not profit from it. Taking people’s moral concerns seriously, it seems to me, implies taking this notion of life seriously. What is life in these responses to research and why are many of us so fussy about life? The question is somewhat comical, for what could be more important than life? What could be more sensitive? Life is hardly one of the things about which one can be fussy or over-sensitive. What is life, if not a matter of life and death? I keep asking comical questions, because it exposes the obvious seriousness of life itself. We do not have to belong to a religion to find life serious. Life can amaze almost everyone. If life is not sensitive, if it is not serious, then what is? My next question is why we easily associate embryos with life itself, and not blood vessels. Why is it reassuring to know that researchers do potentially beneficial research on how exercise affects blood vessels but creepy to know that they do research with human embryos, although the latter might lead to even more benefit? Why is it not reassuring to know that scientists study human embryos in petri dishes, harvest the stem cells and then discard the embryos? How can people like us be so fussy about embryos? The answer, I think, is that embryos invite associations with so much that is intimately important in life. They can be associated with pregnancy, with birth, with children, with becoming parents, with the whole cycle of life and death. You might argue that blood vessels are just as significant for life and death, but I am not talking about what you might argue or want to think. “To repeat: don’t think, but look!” (Wittgenstein 1958, 66). I am talking about how we are actually inclined to perceive embryos and blood vessels. Many people spontaneously connect embryos with pregnancy and birth, with children and parenthood, with the whole drama of living and dying. Embryos are easily seen as vehicles through which life regenerates itself. Blood vessels typically lack such sensitive connections with life itself, despite their importance for staying alive. The reason why we easily become “fussy” about embryos, and not about blood vessels, I propose, is that embryos can be associated with life itself in an obvious sense that does not presuppose any religious doctrines or teachings. Most of us find pregnancy and birth, children and parenthood, immensely important, because we are born, live and will die, and take this to be what life ultimately is about. Embryos have for us a function in the whole cycle of birth and death that blood vessels lack. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it can be a sensitive matter that researchers study human embryos in petri dishes, that they harvest stem cells from the embryos and finally discard them. This sensitivity should not bewilder us as odd. It is intelligible, if we look at the facts and learn from them. “One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that” (Wittgenstein 1958, 340). In this investigation, we are faced with a way of relating to life that differs from biological concepts of life. It is not an intellectually elaborated faith, although it can invite doctrinal elaboration, which we will look at later. On the contrary, it can be

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discerned in ordinary ways of talking where “living”, “being” and “existing” are synonyms, as anyone who solves crosswords knows. Life, in this sense, can overlap with life in the biological sense. When biologists view embryos as part of the process whereby life reproduces itself, most non-biologists agree. What non-biologists agree on, however, is not merely the mathematical fact that two organisms produced a third organism of the same species. What they agree on is often more intimate and breathtaking. Embryos belong to reproducing living-being-existing: they belong to reproducing you, me and us. I would not live, you would not be, we would not exist, unless once upon a time there was an embryo. Embryos can seem linked to a precious mystery, to the continuation of life itself. At these intersections where biological and more breathtaking notions of life meet, it is possible to experience biomedical research as “meddling with life itself”. Such an experience of unease does not presuppose doctrines that specify what humans are permitted to study and modify, and what they must leave alone. Almost anyone can feel uncomfortable when research expands into areas that he or she sees as connected to “life itself”. If we suspect that researchers approach life in this vast sense without sensitivity to its tremendous importance, then moral concerns may turn into fear and panic, just as we would be unsettled if a heartless person would babysit our children.1 To sum up, life can be experienced as unspeakably significant even without the intellectual support of doctrines about such matters. Taking people’s concerns about embryonic stem cell research seriously requires, I propose, addressing these common sensitivities towards life, being or existence. They can be discerned even in ordinary crossword puzzles and they might, for lack of better words, be called moral, existential or spiritual ways of relating to life. Whether we like it or not, humans have these sensitivities. They can find living-being-existing breathtakingly significant, and therefore also everything they associate with it, such as embryos. Having dealt briefly with two sensitive matters, the pharmaceutical industry and the human tendency to find life immensely important, let us turn to an approach to moral concerns about embryonic stem cell research that is more common in bioethics, an approach that consists of reasoning and judging rather than looking at the facts and learning from the full acceptance of them.

4  I ntellectualising Moral Concerns as Arising from Beliefs About the Embryo Instead of facing the breathtaking sensitivity and significance of living-being-­ existing, bioethicists often interpret concerns about embryo destruction as based on intellectual assumptions about the embryo. In other words, as dependent on doctrines. People are assumed to be morally concerned because their doctrines accord 1  Other intersections at which these kinds of concern easily turn into fear and panic are, for example, genetically modified organisms (GMO), artificial intelligence (AI), genetics and synthetic biology.

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such significant status to the embryo that worrying follows logically, as the conclusion of a syllogism. What is the moral status of the embryo, according to these “deeply held beliefs” (to borrow an expression from Devolder and Harris 2007, 28)? Roughly, the embryo is a person, or potentially a person, or identical to a future individual human. Destroying embryos is therefore like killing people, or individual humans, and in addition unbelievably innocent ones. This interpretation of moral concerns assumes that human psychological life has logical texture. People worry because their beliefs make it reasonable for them to worry. This in turn implies a particular approach to taking moral concerns seriously. Taking people’s concerns seriously means investigating whether their beliefs really are true and whether their reasoning truly is logical. A considerable intellectual overload characterises the form of the bioethical debate about the “correct ethical position” on the permissibility of embryonic stem cell research. Devolder designates this form “the epistemic mode”, and here is what adopting it means: I have focused on the truth or coherence of the positions, and particularly on the consistency of arguments said to support them, rather than on the practical reasons for defending them. (Devolder 2015, 151)

The epistemic mode can be illustrated by arguments where twinning (embryo division, causing two new embryos) is assumed to be decisive for the truth and falsity of doctrines about human embryos. I want to emphasise that I am not interested in the “truth or coherence” of the positions in this debate, nor in the “consistency of arguments” said to support them. If I were, I would be drawn into the intellectual style of reasoning that I want to observe in this chapter as the form of the debate. So let us start by just noticing that participants in the discussion write things like: When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. (Smith and Brogaard 2003, 45) In their view, a human individual begins to exist… at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard’s ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. (Damschen et al. 2006, 165) In sum, the vast majority of humans begin to exist at fertilization, and some twins shortly thereafter, at any rate much earlier than sixteen days. (Damschen et al. 2006, 174)

How can this abstruse intellectual issue be related to people’s sincere and often spontaneous moral concerns about embryos used in research? Indeed, that is the question. From the point of view of the intellectual form of the debate, however, nothing could be more relevant to people’s moral concerns than the question when a human begins to exist. If the early embryo, let us say a four-day-old embryo, already is a human individual, then it seems reasonable to be morally concerned about embryos used for research purposes. If, on the other hand, the four-day-old embryo is not yet a human individual, just a sack of dividing cells, then it seems unreasonable to be that fussy.  The attraction of twinning, given this intellectual form of the debate, is that it sustains doctrinal optimism. It promises debaters a

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definitive answer to the question of when a human being begins to exist. How can twinning decide such a question definitively? Well, roughly, if you believe that an individual human cannot split into two humans, the way an amoeba can split into two amoebas, then an individual that can split into two individuals cannot be an individual human. During roughly the first 2 weeks, the embryo can split into two embryos. Therefore, during these 2  weeks, when twinning still is possible, the embryo cannot possibly be an individual human! Twinning is not the only consideration in this debate. Other so-called ontological assumptions about “Aristotelian substances” and “unified causal systems” are invoked. Smith and Brogaard (2003) enumerate eleven conditions (including non-­ divisibility) for being an individual higher organism, such as having its own complete, connected external boundary, and containing within itself its own mechanisms to maintain sequences of events falling within the spectrum of allowed values… You get the picture. It is no longer a matter of being alertly aware of the immensity of living-being-existing, and of the associated sensitivity of the embryo. It is more like listening to super-smart, verbally sophisticated lawyers pleading their case before a tribunal: We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. (Smith and Brogaard 2003, 45)

Not even a 34-page, densely argued philosophical paper is irrefutable, however. In a much shorter paper, Damschen et al. (2006) argue that the thesis that a human being begins to exist 16  days after fertilisation is untenable. They accept all the conditions for being an individual human except non-divisibility (to which we return soon) but point out that Smith and Brogaard’s interpretations of early embryology are highly implausible. For example, when the first single-cell zygote divides, embryologists would typically view the result as one zygote, now containing two cells. Smith and Brogaard, however, view the result as two zygotes inside a thin membrane that merely encases a growing number of dividing zygotes. Not much human individuality in such a thin sack of dividing cells!Let us not be diverted by this dispute about the correct interpretation of early embryology but return to how twinning illustrates the intellectual form of the embryo debate. Twinning also sustains doctrinal optimism among Smith and Brogaard’s opponents. However, their opponents are not impressed by mere potential twinning. Only actual twinning contributes to a definitive answer as to when a human being begins to exist: It is an old insight of Greek philosophy that if something is potentially two (or more) [it] does not logically follow that it is not actually one. A stick in my hand is potentially two sticks. I can break it into two parts, but before I do so, it is just one stick. (Damschen et al. 2006, 172)

How can actual twinning help us say definitively when a human being begins to exist? Well, roughly, if the embryo does not twin, and if the “sack of cells” interpretation of early embryology is wrong, then already the one-cell zygote is trans-­ temporally identical to a future human adult. This individual human thus came into existence at fertilisation. If twinning does occur, however, one embryo disappears

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and gives rise to two new embryos (as when an amoeba splits).2 Since the first embryo went out of existence, disappeared, it cannot be trans-temporally identical to any future human(s). Only the two new embryos can be. Therefore, most humans begin to exist at fertilisation, and twins shortly thereafter (but earlier than 16 days)!Obviously, this disputation concerns human existence in a different sense than when we are struck by the breathtaking importance of living-being-existing. I therefore doubt that it can address people’s moral concerns, regardless of the enormous argumentative power ascribed to twinning. Consider two ageing twins who meet at the funeral of their last parent. If they look back on life and on their childhood as twins, and after a while perhaps consider the embryo that once twinned, who would object that they are incoherent or ill-informed about scientific facts if they speak of that embryo as “the embryo that we once were”? Why should they not in their grief and loneliness see that early embryo as even more significantly “them” than the two embryos into which it later split? Such freedom characterises our moral and spiritual sensitivities towards life. If someone at the funeral objects, “But you two cannot possibly be identical to that first embryo, since it went out of existence the moment the two embryos you are identical to came into existence,” the twins might consider that person superficially quarrelsome and show him the door. Not even actual twinning proves that the grieving twins are “incorrect” when they speak of having been the embryo that twinned. And if human ways of relating to life have this freedom, if it is life in this intimate sense that can make embryonic stem cell research a sensitive matter, then the epistemic mode is not an appropriate response to people’s concerns about embryonic stem cell research. It puts bioethics at risk of being shown the door. Observe that I do not claim that the twins are free to have their own “subjective beliefs” about the embryo. Their freedom comes from the fact that they do not make any knowledge claims at all about the world, which scientific experts could find dubious, but seek a relation to life and to each other as twins. At the funeral, they are not talking as amateur embryologists, not even “subjectively”.

5  The Epistemic Mode as Tribunal of Serious Inquiry The epistemic mode intellectualises not only how people perceive embryos. It also intellectualises morality as a whole. Even assuming a definitive answer as to when a human being begins to exist, the normative question about the permissibility of embryonic stem cell research would not thereby be decided, according to the epistemic approach. Not until we have answered which moral theory is the correct one. Is it utilitarianism? Or moral-rights theory? Or the sanctity-of-life doctrine?

2  To emphasise the doctrinal form of the argument, I simplify Damschen et al. (2006), who speculate about three possible paths of twinning: budding, separation and fission. For the sake of simplicity, I assume the last path only.

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This further illustrates the epistemic mode: everything worthy of serious attention must be approached as a doctrinal matter, thus also morality as a whole. Torbjörn Tännsjö treats The Problem from this point of view, focusing on deeply held beliefs about morality rather than about the embryo. My query will be whether there is a way for a liberal society to find some kind of compromise position, allowing some use of embryos for research and therapeutic purposes without repudiating basic ethical beliefs held by a considerable part of the population. My answer to this question will be in the negative. I find this deeply problematic. (Tännsjö 2007, 188)

Tännsjö assumes a morally divided population. Some people are utilitarians (like Tännsjö), while others are moral-rights theorists, and then there are those who adhere to the sanctity-of-life doctrine. Interpreting a whole population as something like an academic seminar group, with advocates of mutually inconsistent moral theories, shows how the epistemic mode is approached: as the Tribunal of serious inquiry. If you do not interpret people’s moral concerns as if they were based on doctrines about morality, then you do not take them seriously. Taking people seriously means bringing their cases to the epistemic Tribunal: These are usually questions raised in a nonsystematic manner by the general public and the media. I believe that in morality, just as in science, a more systematic, hypothetically deductive method is important. We ought to articulate radical basic alternative moral theories (hypotheses) and try to find out what implications they have with respect to the destruction of embryos… (Tännsjö 2007, 188–189)

There are no alternatives to the epistemic mode itself, as it embodies what taking alternatives seriously means: which one of the competing doctrines is the “correct” one? If members of the general public fail to articulate their concerns within this mode – i.e. as based on doctrines about morality – then taking them seriously means supplying that articulation of their beliefs about morality, acting as their advocates and pleading their cases before the Tribunal. Preliminary investigations into their cases are tricky affairs where advocates have to keep track of exactly when doctrines about embryos and doctrines about morality stand in such relations that it would be logically correct to feel morally bad about embryonic stem cell research: The adherents of the sanctity-of-life doctrine… claim that the deliberate killing of embryos is murder. By declaring that it is “murder” they intend to say that it is an immoral form of deliberate killing. If their moral theory is on the right track, then this claim is correct. […] The adherents of the moral-rights theory deny the claim that the deliberate killing of embryos is murder, of course. And if their moral theory is on the right track, then they are right about this. […] This argument is irrelevant, unless their favoured moral theory is correct. (Tännsjö 2007, 191; my italics)

Tännsjö doubts that the permissibility of embryonic stem cell research can be decided by the Tribunal of serious inquiry in the foreseeable future. This is so because we are not even close to a definitive answer as to which moral doctrine is the correct one:

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[E]ven if there is truth in such philosophical matters as the ones discussed here, it would be premature to proclaim that there exists a state of the art with respect to them. The three, mutually inconsistent, doctrines discussed here have competent contemporary advocates. (Tännsjö 2007, 200)

With no epistemic Solution to The Problem in sight, it seems that any policy, whether it permits or forbids embryonic stem cell research, will logically produce negative feelings within some part of the divided population of moral theorists: For not only those who believe in the sanctity-of-life doctrine are capable of entertaining strong moral feelings; so are utilitarians and moral-rights theorists, and there is no reason to believe that, on average, their moral feelings are less intense than the corresponding feelings of the sanctity-of-life theorists. (Tännsjö 2007, 199).

No matter which policy we decide on, then, some “theorists” will feel terribly bad about it, because their doctrines make such feelings reasonable. Have we seen enough? My aim with this brief exercise in watching the epistemic form of the embryo debate is to indicate how we fail to take people seriously, precisely when we try to take them seriously by interpreting them as moral theorists who make ontological assumptions about embryos. The epistemic mode shields us from their moral worries. The academic seminar is not a good approximation for society, and the moral theorist is not a good approximation for what people are like or how they think about life. Do I need to argue these points as doctrines about the embryo debate? Should I provide reasons that make it “logical” to feel that the embryo debate is embarrassingly off the point? Should I plead my case before the Tribunal? I would immediately be drawn into the intellectual style of reasoning that I want to observe in this paper as the form of the debate. To end this section more hopefully: since the epistemic mode solidifies moral concerns as based on doctrines, and since doctrinal rigidity probably contributes to making The Problem irresolvable, moving beyond this mode could make the problem easier to handle. Not as an intellectual issue of truth and falsity, of course, but as a human conflict that can be mitigated and handled more wisely. Given the increasing prominence of commercialisation, seeking alternative ways of handling the concerns is urgent. Certainly, there are other forms of sincerity outside the Tribunal and its epistemic reasoning. First, however, we must observe how argumentation can create self-misunderstanding in all of us.

6  Reasoning Hardens Ways of Relating to Life We saw above how human ways of relating to life are characterised by freedom and fluidity. One year after the funeral, the twins who saw themselves as having been the embryo that twinned may no longer be impressed by that view of themselves. They are then free to drop it, without feeling that they betray a weighty doctrine about reality to which they once were committed. Moreover, even if they continue to

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identify themselves with the embryo that twinned (even if that way of relating to life is stable), their views about the use of embryos in research may be unpredictable. It is fully possible to view embryos as a tremendously sensitive matter, as associated with life itself, and yet embrace embryonic stem cell research. Not much follows logically from finding something “sensitive”. Assume now that the twins, perhaps due to a quarrel about inheritance, begin to disagree about having been the embryo that twinned. One twin may still feel strongly that they were that embryo, which sheds melancholy light on their enmity, while the other twin angrily refuses that identification as pathetic. Suppose they begin to dispute about the matter. It is not difficult to imagine them suddenly treating the issue as doctrinal. Once they do, the freedom that characterised their way of relating to each other at the funeral is replaced by rigidity: “I am right, and you are wrong.” Their feelings suddenly appear logically supported by truths about the embryo. If they truly were the embryo that twinned, as one of them claims, then it should be reasonable to feel melancholy about their enmity. Hence, both twins should feel melancholy, because every reasonable person should. If they could not have been the embryo that twinned, as the other twin claims, then it should be reasonable to experience identification with that embryo as pathetic. Hence, both twins should be revolted by such identification, because every reasonable person should. If the twins at this point decide to consult the bioethical literature for expert support, this could reinforce their opposed feelings even more by providing authoritative reasons for what “every reasonable person” should feel and think. They are no longer free to change. They have committed themselves to intellectual positions that they have to defend. They have adopted the reasoning style of the argumentative funeral guest, whom they showed the door. Once again, I want to watch closely what happens. We are trying to create an understanding that consists in seeing connections. “Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediary cases” (Wittgenstein 1958, 122), such as our ageing twins. Once the twins begin to argue, driven by a momentary sense of conflict, they lose their freedom and treat their ways of relating to the embryo as doctrines that are either true or false. They adopt what seems to be the epistemic mode. Devolder would probably object that since the twins are committed beforehand to fixed positions, they do not inquire open-mindedly into the truth of the matter. They misuse the epistemic mode rhetorically to win terrain in a personal conflict. That may be so, but it is nonetheless noteworthy that once the twins solidify their views, due to a momentary sense of conflict, their communication begins to resemble the epistemic mode. It all becomes a matter of doctrines that are either true or false. Before the conflict, no such doctrines were in sight. Is the sense of personal conflict related to the epistemic form of reasoning? Watching the twins argue, we see how epistemic reasoning reinforces and perpetuates fear, anger and conflict by providing such momentary personal feelings with reasons: “I have a right to be angry, my anger is justified, what these researchers are doing is in fact murder!” No feelings are as violent as righteous feelings and the epistemic mode generates righteousness. It supports conflict and obstinacy rather than the peaceful resolution of conflict. How, then, is it possible to associate

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this instrument of never-ending conflict, the persistently arguing intellect, with the opposite of conflict, with peaceful resolution of issues, with avoiding partiality, with the idea of a Tribunal of serious inquiry into truth? It is tempting to speculate here about the origin of the ideal of reason in philosophy, the ideal of a depersonalised universal intellect that does not reason in biased ways. However, if we want to look at the hardened form of the embryo debate and learn from what we see, we must avoid the detour (see, however, Segerdahl 2018). I therefore return to watching psychological processes with which most of us are acquainted. I encourage readers to see for themselves whether they recognise these processes, and to make their own observations if my observations seem unsatisfactory. This is a gentler form of philosophical sincerity and it looks at the epistemic mode of reasoning. Let us keep looking. A tempting response to the twins’ personal I-against-you quarrel is to ask the combatants to consider the issue in a more detached and impartial spirit. Instead of claiming, “I am right, and you are wrong,” investigate the truth itself! Do not point your obviously very powerful intellects at each other. Point them at the issue. Then you can resolve it and reach peaceful agreement, because by redirecting the intellect towards the issue, and nothing else, it is purified from egocentricity and other forms of heteronomy and can embark upon the narrow path to truth itself. It seems to me that this depersonalised path to truth itself is roughly what Devolder means by the epistemic mode, and what Tännsjö means by approaching moral issues as in science. This awakened intellectual honesty is praiseworthy, of course, but only as long as the issues it addresses are epistemic (“For how many days is twinning possible?”). We do not question the utility of the intellect. In our example, however, the alleged intellectual issue about the implications of twinning for individual identity did not exist until momentary enmity made the twins adopt an epistemic style of reasoning that solidified their ways of relating to life as based on true beliefs, which generated righteousness. Their intellects became hyperactive just when they should have been at rest, because there was no intellectual issue to debate. Not until momentary enmity gave rise to the appearance of one. Their doctrinal optimism that a definitive answer is within their grasp causes and sustains the hopelessness of their debate. I think we can see, then, how the epistemic approach to moral concerns about embryo destruction presupposes and perpetuates conflict. The issue does not have epistemic form until conflict solidifies it in that form. Without conflict, there is no doctrinal issue to bring to the Tribunal of serious inquiry. In addition, the epistemic approach exerts violence. It violates freedom by seeking peaceful agreement through what are alleged to be universally valid claims. When definitively correct doctrines have been rigorously demonstrated, universal truth verdicts prescribe what every rational being should believe and the whole world reasonably feel  – therefore, also, our grieving twins. Such an approach to “peacefully” resolving issues annihilates the freedom of human ways of relating to life. It prevents the ending of unease, fear and conflict by providing such fluid states with definitive reasons. The epistemic approach is unaware of its own violence, however, for the freedom it annihilates precedes the formation of the doctrinal issues that are within

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its jurisdiction. Unwittingly, it comes too late to handle moral concerns while they still are fluid and can change. It can only deal with solidified doctrinal matters, with the perpetuation of intellectual debates. Before moving to the last section, which briefly indicates a gentler approach to moral concerns, let us summarise. I suggested that moral concerns about embryonic stem cell research originate in human ways of relating to life that may be called moral, existential or spiritual: the embryo invites associations to “life itself”. I then observed how the epistemic form of the bioethical debate intellectualises these concerns as arising from beliefs about embryos. Watching the grieving twins who felt that they had been the embryo that twinned revealed to us how such intellectualisation fails to address these fluid, changeable tendencies. The twins’ view of the embryo as “them” was for a while dear to them; it shaped their attitude to themselves as part of a disintegrating family. Yet, it was not a belief about the world that could be critiqued as incoherent or ill-informed about scientific facts. They were free to relate to themselves as having been the embryo that twinned, and, of course, free not to relate to themselves in that way. This section indicates that our problem is bigger. People sometimes do perpetuate our ways of relating to life intellectually as if they were based on true beliefs. We do have a tendency to turn doctrines against each other when momentary enmity activates our intellects. Our problem in this investigation, then, is not only how bioethics functions. It is also how we humans tend to function psychologically, for example when in fear or in personal conflicts. Watching the twins argue, we saw how reasoning hardened the personal I-against-­ you form of their disagreement. After seeing this intellectual petrification of the twins, we observed a subsequent and intellectually more ambitious process that occurs in response to the previous one. I am thinking of an awakened intellectual honesty that wants to arbitrate disputes rationally by making the intellect more narrowly truth-seeking and universally valid than in personally biased argumentation. Only such a rationally purified use of the intellect can support epistemic progress in the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, it is assumed. Our own attentive looking at the epistemic mode of reasoning, however, indicates that we wait in vain for such an intellectual solution to The Problem. It would mirror not only how bioethics misunderstands people. It would also mirror how most of us misunderstand ourselves when fear and conflict awaken our tendency to defend doctrines as if our ways of relating to life depended on them. The ideal of reason is every debater’s wet dream: the dream of being definitely right. Notice that I do not recommend following our feelings rather than reason. Following our feelings presupposes that we paraphrase the feelings, interpret them and give them a voice within us. Without this “inner voice of reason”, which appears to motivate our actions, there is no such thing as following our feelings. Revenge, for example, does not consist in following mute feelings. It consists in following an inner voice that persuades us that our feelings are “correct”.

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7  Handling Moral Concerns More Gently If the intellect perpetuates The Problem rather than makes the embryo conflict resolvable, a more peaceful approach to the controversy under scrutiny could be to calm the agitated intellect as we calm anxious and hyperactive children. The ideal of purifying the intellect as a depersonalised path to truth itself mimics and reinforces how the problem arises from the beginning, namely, through reasoning. We rarely see how the intellect sustains what would otherwise be only momentary reactions of fear and conflict. Revenge, for example, which looks like a primitive animal instinct, mainly affects humans. What makes revenge primitive is the monotonous thinking that supports the desire for revenge, sometimes over several generations. Revenge is maintained through reasoning patterns about past, present and future actions, about me and others, about right and wrong: “What he did to me is unforgivable, but he’ll get what he deserves.” Revenge is, in short, a primitive intellectual phenomenon. It is interesting, for our purpose of finding a gentler approach to the embryo debate, to note that people who suffer from revengefulness can sometimes let go of the reasoning that obstinately demands revenge, as if they could no longer bear to be in an agitated state of conflict. The unyielding inner voice becomes quiet and the whole situation changes. Anyone who forgives someone undergoes similar calming down, where the intellect relinquishes its claims and becomes silent. If we look at the process of forgiveness, we can see that it does not arise as the conclusion of a reasoning (“He is not so bad after all; I ought to forgive him”). Forgiveness is not something we can demand, decide or perform voluntarily. It comes spontaneously, as a release of tension, when the intellect withdraws from the situation that it hardened as a hopeless conflict (Segerdahl 2008). Can we support similar transformations in the embryo debate? Can proponents and opponents of embryonic stem cell research overcome their attitude that they must settle an intellectual issue of truth and falsity, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, permissible and impermissible? As a gentler alternative to the strict seriousness of doctrinal reasoning, I propose philosophical forms of attention that can soften the hard either/or problem. Such philosophical attention starts with seeing the intelligibility of finding embryo destruction a sensitive matter, as we did earlier in this chapter when we looked at how unease about embryonic stem cell research can emerge in people like us. Seeing clearly the possibility of being morally concerned makes it easier to understand opponents of the research. It softens the sense of conflict that invites a doctrinal interpretation of ways of relating to life. If some people who oppose the research remain obstinate and difficult to come to terms with, it just means that we need to approach the issues even more gently. Opponents may not see clearly how their worries harden them intellectually and awaken their desire to defend what they want to view as the only “correct” position. However, intelligible moral concerns can arise also about the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research. There are surviving patients who can say, “I would not

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be here, I would not live, unless once upon a time there was stem cell research.”3 Maybe that is how people’s appreciation of medical research often arises: through similar human sensitivity to life that also invites unease about embryo destruction! Therefore, when benefits are emphasised only as factors in an ethical calculation, which allegedly justifies the research, the more intimate meaning of the benefits in patients’ lives disappears from sight. So why brag about “the incredible benefits” that can be gained from embryonic stem cell research? It risks hiding the deeper meaning of the benefits and it risks inviting hype. It can perpetuate a momentary sense of conflict by inviting doctrinal elaboration of human ways of relating to life. We therefore need to approach the proponents of the research just as gently as we approach the opponents. Their worries are understandable. If some of them remain obstinate and difficult to come to terms with, it just means that we need to approach the issues even more gently. Proponents may not see clearly how their worries harden them intellectually and awaken their desire to defend what they want to view as the only “correct” position. Do you see the similarity between “opponents” and “proponents” of the research, motivating the same gentle approach? We are all human beings. The Problem begins to look less solid, less either/or, does it not? When we clearly see the sensitivity of embryo destruction, we can also see the sensitivity of the therapeutic benefits. Both can be associated with living-being-existing. The same research practices that can be perceived as meddling with life itself can also be perceived as taking responsibility for life, namely, by helping future patients. Now, which of these two ways of perceiving the research is the “correct” one? We replace that either/or question with the philosophical task of giving human ways of relating to life such careful attention that we see their intelligibility. Such attentive looking at the forms of human life softens what appeared to be conflicting intellectual positions based on “deep beliefs” about embryos, liberating the decisions that must be made about research from the illusory sense of a “correct” ethical position. What gentle philosophical attention may lead to concerning people’s views on stem cell research is an open question. The answer may vary, as this form of attention does not perpetuate human ways of relating to life but allows them to remain changeable. I assume now that the ability to look at human forms of life, and to learn from what we see, does not require the expertise of a Tribunal of truth. The intellectually fixed target at which embryo debaters aim – the idea of a “correct” ethical position – is a mirage. Therefore, handling the moral concerns remains our shared human responsibility. Fortunately, we are open to change, as long as we are not hardened by the claims of reason.4

3  Deep meaning can be seen also in donation and research participation. A donor can say: “Somewhere in this world, a person lives who would not be here, who would not exist, unless once upon a time I donated blood stem cells.” Like the embryo, donation can be associated with a precious mystery, with the continuation of life. 4  This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council, Grant No. 2016-02888. I wish to thank the seminar participants at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics at Uppsala University, and at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice, for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. I also want to thank Mio Lindman and Lars Hertzberg for pointing out passages that needed further clarification.

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References Damschen, Gregor, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, and Dieter Schönecker. 2006. Sixteen days? A reply to B. Smith and B. Brogaard on the beginning of human individuals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31: 165–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/03605310600588707. Devolder, Katrien. 2015. The Ethics of Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Devolder, Katrien, and John Harris. 2007. The ambiguity of the embryo: Ethical inconsistency in the human embryonic stem cell debate. In Stem Cell Research: The ethical issues, ed. Lori Gruen, Laura Grabel, and Peter Singer, 16–31. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Harman, Elizabeth. 2007. How is the ethics of stem cell research different from the ethics of abortion? In Stem Cell Research: The ethical issues, ed. Lori Gruen, Laura Grabel, and Peter Singer, 67–85. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Segerdahl, Pär. 2008. Förlåtelsens anda. In Tankar tillägnade Sören Stenlund, ed. Niklas Forsberg, Sharon Rider, and Pär Segerdahl, 155–168. Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies 54. ———. 2018. Intellectual asceticism and hatred of the human, the animal, and the material. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 7: 43–58. https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v7i1.3494. Smith, Barry, and Berit Brogaard. 2003. Sixteen days. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28: 45–78. https://doi.org/10.1076/jmep.28.1.45.14172. Tännsjö, Torbjörn. 2007. Why no compromise is possible. In Stem Cell Research: The ethical issues, ed. Lori Gruen, Laura Grabel, and Peter Singer, 188–201. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd edn. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pär Segerdahl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. His publications include Language Use: A Philosophical Investigation into the Basic Notions of Pragmatics (Macmillan, 1996); Kanzi’s Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language (Palgrave, 2005); and (as editor) Undisciplined Animals: Invitations to Animal Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). He has published papers on linguistic theory, conversation analysis, philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, ape language research, animal welfare, and gender theory. His work on these themes is held together by an overarching interest in the question of the nature of philosophy. He is editor of a research blog at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University: The Ethics Blog.  

“The Concept-Forming Words We Utter”: Extremism and the Formation of a Political “We” Niklas Forsberg

1  The Dialectic Political extremism, and violent moral and political views, are easily and commonly (and not without reason) traced back to concrete problems and difficulties in moral and political life, such as injustices and fears (motivated or not). What is more perplexing, however, is that it seems as if anti-democratic, racist and violent expressions of nationalism can increase in times of peace and prosperity too, when one would think there is little to fear. So the dialectic of this text is to ask how harmful seeds (such as violent and anti-democratic movements) can grow in good soil. An illustrative example is a village called Sunnansjö (which means “south of the lake”), in the southwest of the region called Dalarna (Dalacarlia), in Sweden. Sunnansjö became known as a thriving place of commerce in the mid-sixteenth century due to its steel foundry and its mill. Today, it is a small community with a population of just 584. The unemployment rate is low, gardens are well kept, houses are repainted regularly and the village community is active and warm. And… there’s also the leader of “The Nordic Resistance” (Nordiska motståndsrörelsen), an avowedly National Socialist (neo-Nazi) organisation. The leader of the Norwegian branch of the same organisation is also one of the 584. In the neighbouring village, only 10 min away, lives their press spokesperson (or “dialogue-patriot” as they prefer to call him) (af Kleen 2015). Now, my concern here is not so much these particular persons, nor the fact that they hold views that hardly make sense to quarrel with. What worries me is that they attract followers who march on our streets, and that they speak in, and transform, the shared conversational space. This means something, and has some rather far-­ reaching effects. My concern in this chapter is not the sense, value and truth-value N. Forsberg (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_12

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of the occasional extremist expression but the questions about how it comes into existence and what follows in its wake. We live in a time in history where people from organisations such as the Nordic Resistance actually partake in seemingly less dangerous political organisations and parties, such as the Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna). The Swedish Democrats is one of the biggest parties in Sweden today (Väljarbarometern n.d.), and they claim to be kosher nationalists: neither racist nor violent. Only, they think that “there’s a problem with immigration”, and that so-called Swedish culture must be preserved. We are at the point when other politicians and even academics and intellectuals are starting to say, “We need to take them seriously, and at least listen to them.” Obviously, no one’s voice should be silenced. But the question is what it means to take them seriously. Is it their views we need to take seriously? Or is it the state of a culture and contemporary discourse that enables, or leaves room for, views such as these to be formed and to gain a foothold? In responding to questions such as these, it may not necessarily be so-called political philosophers we need to turn to. Instead, I have found help in the works of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch. We do not need a political philosophy that tells us Nazism is bad, or fascism is bad, or racism is not an intelligent position to take, and so on and so forth. But we do need to ask: how can obviously racist and populist political organisations become not only something that people accept or tolerate as an existing oddity but also something that large parts of a population vote for? We may say that we need to look for the conditions of possibility here.

2  The Reformations of Our Conceptual Space One of the more prevalent ways of thinking about Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to ethics and politics is to say that his method, together with its emphasis on contextuality and language use, offers a new way of approaching ethical issues. One then often adds something like “despite the fact that Wittgenstein himself did not have much to say about ethics” (cf. Forsberg 2018a). There are, of course, several aspects in which this is absolutely correct, and a great deal of good philosophising (indeed, the examples are too numerous to list) has been spurred by these thoughts. Nevertheless, I feel that a large portion of this kind of Wittgenstein-inspired ethics often does not get further than suggesting “a method”, so too much of this kind of work emphasises the metaphilosophical aspects of philosophy. Now, the emphasis on use and on contextuality have primarily been understood as a contribution to the “philosophy of language”. In relation to ethics, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on use (see e.g. Wittgenstein 2009, §90) has drawn philosophers to the necessary and correct observation that it is only by means of detailed attention to context that moral clarity can be achieved, which places the effort to seek precise articulations and descriptions of moral life at centre stage (see e.g. Crary 2007; Hämäläinen 2016; Christensen 2021). These lines of thinking are clearly moving us in the right direction here.

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But the Wittgensteinian emphasis on use and the attention to lived moral life (the struggle to find and rediscover and reclaim our words in our practices) has some reverberations that often go unnoticed (partly because one tends to think that the question of meaning is a question for the philosophy of language and not for ethics and broader cultural and political discourses). One is the fact that the necessary emphasis on use and context does not (or should not) stop at the moment of gaining clarity about the meaning of a word (or words). As this Wittgensteinian line of thinking is thought through, it becomes clear too, that the whole idea of language securing meaning for us (in and of itself, as it were) becomes more or less hollow. Wittgenstein’s talk about grammar, and his recurring discussions of rules, are not meant to guide us towards, and do not seek to describe, something external to human interaction. This is why I think that Rush Rhees pointed in the right direction when he said: “Show how rules of grammar are rules of the lives in which there is language” (Rhees 1970, 45; see also Diamond 1989; I have discussed this in Forsberg 2017). The effects of these ways of thinking about regularity have been best explored by Stanley Cavell and come into view clearly in formulations such as “Grammar cannot, or ought not, of itself dictate what you mean, what it is up to you to say” (Cavell 1984, 45). This puts us in a position to say that our uses of words, our efforts to reach out to each other and seek community, understanding, are, in a profound sense, moral at heart. Here, one may of course be tempted to say that “all language use is a moral effort”, which, in my view, would be expressive of the kind of pang for the use of hyperbole that often affects philosophers when they have discovered something real and important (“Morality is …” or “Language is …”). It suffices to say – and what suffices to say is sufficient – that morality is not disconnected from language, and that the question of meaning is not to be disconnected from efforts to seek out one another. What one perhaps should say, however, is that there is a sense in which an adequate appropriation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language pushes Wittgenstein out of the  “philosophy of language” (cf. Forsberg 2022a, chapter 2; 2018b). One of the sentences of the Investigations that I think captures something absolutely central when it comes to Wittgenstein’s reflections on use and praxis, and the hollowness of the philosophical demand for solidity in an external structure, is this: “meaning something is like going towards someone” (Wittgenstein 2009, §457). Your effort to reach the other is not guaranteed by “language”. When we change, when we encounter the need to reach out to one another in new ways, we change language. Historicity and the theme of conceptual change may be said to be under-­ thematised both in Wittgenstein’s own writing and in the vast industry of Wittgenstein exegesis. But that does not mean it is absent. It is perhaps most clearly in play in Wittgenstein’s famous river-bed metaphor from the text known as On Certainty, where he describes how propositions, even empirical propositions, are subject to change, and how “everything that describes a language game belongs to logic”

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(Wittgenstein 1969, §56).1 This is also where he starts talking about “our inherited background” of beliefs as formative for the sense of our actual (or should we say “conscious”?) beliefs (Wittgenstein 1969, §94). The river-bed metaphor describes our “world-picture” as in “a state of flux” and “river-beds of thought may shift” (Wittgenstein 1969, §97). Change and historicity and a broadened understanding of logic are at the heart of his discussion here. This is where the realisation that meaning is use, and that meaning (as use, as formed in practice) is similar to approaching another, leads us. As praxis changes, as we develop new ways of reaching out to one another, language changes: “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, § 65). Note that when our concepts change, in Wittgenstein’s view, due to changes in our games, our practices, the words may, and often do, remain unaffected. This leads us to begin to see that concepts vary over time, whereas the words (the arbitrary combinations of letters) may stay the same. And the concepts change because we change our ways of relating to each other and to the world. Thus, “a language game does change with time” (Wittgenstein 1969, § 256), because we are called to respond and reach out to one another in different ways, and only a minor part of these calls for change requires and merits the invention of a new word. And this – the idea that “language games change our concepts” – adds up to the thought that it is by engaging (morally) with each other that we are transforming language, changing the river-beds. We change our concepts, we transform the background or river-bed of our beliefs, by being responsive to a changing world. The kinds of beliefs that philosophers usually quarrel about, and argue for and against, move at the surface. Iris Murdoch is one of the few self-confessed Wittgensteinians (see Hämäläinen 2014) actually to have appropriated this way of thinking, and, in my view, this is quite central to her philosophy (see e.g. Forsberg 2013, 2018b, 2022b). One of her thoughts, which builds on the kind of “Wittgensteinian” reflections on language I have just described, and which may help us understand and come to terms with the dialectics of this article – how evil seeds can grow in good soil – is this: We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable. (Murdoch 2003, 260)

How we talk to one another is something that plays a role in forming the concepts we live by. This means that the way we use our words establishes our conceptual habitat. Our conceptual world is the world in which we think and move. It provides the frame (this is a metaphor too, of course) in which our thinking takes shape (Murdoch 1999b; cf. Forsberg 2022b). So there is a sense in which we should

1  I have amended the translation. In the published text, the sentence is “And everything descriptive of a language game is part of logic”, which presents it as if there are parts of language games that are “descriptive” and these belongs to logic, which makes it possible to think that there are other, “non-descriptive” parts of language games that do not belong to logic. That thought is not possible to draw from the German sentence “Und zur Logik gehört alles, was ein Sprachspiel beschreibt.”

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acknowledge that what is possible to think, the sense of the thoughts that announce themselves to us – what is possible to think about, affirmatively, or negatively, or with a slackening attitude of indifference – is constituted here. Murdoch’s two sentences also contain an acknowledgement of the fact that our concepts change in relation to how we use our words. Even small changes in our uses of words may, or will, in the long run, lead to rather significant changes in our conceptual world. Murdoch is thus struggling to find ways for us to reflectively engage with and attend not to our thoughts but to the background to our thoughts, and how this is formed by the way we talk to one another. What our words mean does not merely depend on the meaning of particular words. Nor does it suffice to add abstract comments about context. A “conceptual context” can, of course, be seen as the occurrence of a word in a sentence at a particular occasion. And that will always be relevant. But concepts don’t merely have their contexts. They have a life, a world, a history. And these are played with. But not in a vacuum. The sense of one word – be it “marriage”, “immigrant”, “love”, “politics”, “food”, “hate”, or what have you – is not disconnected from how that concept takes shape in a lived language, in language as a form of habitat. So what marriage means, what it is to us, is not disconnected from how we (in a broad sense of the term) act and relate to a great number of things, such as sex, economy, family organisation, politics, law, and so on and so forth. But since our concepts are just that, ours, we are often led to believe that we are in command of our concepts, since we are familiar with the words in use. We think we know what “democracy”, or “refugee”, or “citizen”, or “Swede”, or “love”, or “rights”, or “animal”, or “food”, or “sex”, or “welfare society” mean. And, of course, at some level our concepts are at our command. But I am worried that the extent to which they are so is very easy to overestimate. In relation to philosophical discourse, this danger of overestimating the extent to which we are in command of our concepts often leads to much too static and insensitive ways of arguing. Arguments, in most common traditional variations, work, one may say, only when the conceptual field is locked. I want to suggest, with Wittgenstein and Murdoch, that in most cases it is not locked. Thus, I want to show, with their help, that philosophical explorations of philosophically troublesome areas of contemporary society need more attention to details of speech – not (only) to what our words supposedly mean but to how meaning changes and how these changes alter the connotative logic of our language, and how these changes reverberate in life – a willingness to attend to conceptual change. To achieve this, we do not need further positions based on well-defined terms. A great deal of our philosophical discussions, in moral and political philosophy in particular, are addressed at a level at which most crucial matters have already been settled. There is not much to be gained in arguing about whether or not we can accept this or that many immigrants if we disagree about what an immigrant is. If two people marry, and they disagree about what a marriage is, we may suspect that trouble will find them. And when we argue about things like these, we readily assume that we are talking about the same “thing” (immigrants, marriage) precisely because we know our language. Here, confidence in one’s own way of projecting one’s words stands in the way of clarity. The way forward is attention to differences and the roots of them.

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I have brought two aspects of the central thought of Murdoch (that we saw in Wittgenstein too) into view. One is that our uses of words are concept-forming. The gist of this thought is that by changing the way we talk, changing the way we engage with one another, we change the conceptual room in which we roam, which means that talking in new ways will change what is possible (in a broad and loose sense of the term) to see, think and say. The other is the idea that our conceptual world is a background to our thinking, which means that our conceptual world is, as it were, not the level at which thinking (in the sense of deliberated reasoning) itself takes place but sets the limits and possibilities of what is possible to think and say. And this is not static, which is why Wittgenstein came to see that “everything that describes a language game belongs to logic” (Wittgenstein 1969, § 56, emphasis added). Now, one cannot possibly say that these thoughts about how argument and philosophical reflection need to be addressed as linguistic concerns have not been considered central before. For example, it has often been argued that philosophy of language is a central form of philosophy. Sadly, though, what one often fails to see (and which thinkers such as Murdoch and Austin and Wittgenstein tried to make clear) is that “conceptual analysis”, as it commonly is construed today, will not solve these issues. That is, there will never be a point at which we can say that we now know what democracy, or marriage, or citizenship means, and then hand those definitions over to the moral and political philosophers and leave it to them to quarrel about. The real lesson to be learned is that finding sense, explicating meaning, is often already a moral and political task – and it is a moral and political task of far greater significance and importance than any moral or political philosophical debate over well-defined terms will ever be. Changes in our conceptual space are more fundamental and of far greater importance than quarrels within them. The formation of a political “we” is far more important than disagreements among “us”. This points, I would like to suggest, to the real ethico-political significance of Murdoch’s famous claim that “I can only choose within the world I can see” (Murdoch 1999a, 329). We can only make choices against the vulnerable background that makes up our vision of the world. Moral differences are thus differences of vision. And, importantly, differences in vision are, for Murdoch, conceptual differences (Murdoch 1999b, see especially p. 84; cf. Forsberg 2022b). If we take the two Murdoch quotations I have referred to, and add them together, it should become evident that vision is much more about “the vulnerable background to our thinking” than it is about perception (understood as “looking”). Understanding and coming to clarity about how our concept-forming uses of words function is thus, for Murdoch, the central ethical task. I take this to be one of the most important lessons we can learn from Murdoch (and that we won’t understand her philosophy without acknowledging that it is at this level that she works). Understanding difficult political movements in a society is not something that can be achieved by means of looking for arguments pro et contra somebody’s particular view. It must be sought by means of conceptual exercises whereby we seek to learn how a political “we” has been formed, that is, we need to try to learn to see what kinds of ways of talking and being and responding to one another take part in

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forming and reforming what is in the background of our language and at the background of consciousness. What kinds of concept-forming practices change our shared conceptual space? In order to discern these, we may have to look for ripples rather than splashes (throw a rock in the river and it makes a splash, but as the ripples on the water move and wash against the rocks, transporting the sand that forms the shore, the riverbanks start to change); we may have to try to look for what moves in the smoke rather than the fireworks themselves. What we find important, laughable, sad, too cruel, and so on, shapes the “frames” of our conversational space – the space in which there is a “we” within which argumentation can work. Without shared sense (without a “we”), there is not much room for sensible argumentation. To understand the contemporary political scene, we may have to learn how to attend to conceptual shifts and dislocations, in the large and in the small.

3  Politics The kinds of conceptual exercises that we are now encouraged to engage in, where we get clarity about the roots of ways of thinking and acting that we find troublesome, to say the least, do not merely lay bare the undercurrents that brought them about. They may also, I think, help us transform our perception of the peculiar beliefs and opinions themselves. If we see a great majority of people voting for fascist parties, and xenophobia taking centre stage in the agendas of several political parties, it is not because large groups of people all of a sudden have decided to hold evil opinions. What we need to do is return to our original dialectics of the seed (the beliefs and opinions) and the soil (the river-bed, the vulnerable background). The first example I want to draw attention to concerns certain political strategies developed by the largest conservative party in Sweden, Moderaterna (The Moderates), ahead of the 2006 general election. At that time, the Swedish economy was doing well. Unemployment rates were dropping and the worldwide economy could be described adequately as thriving. During most of the post-war era, Sweden was governed by the Social Democrats. The exceptional elections of right-wing governments (in 1976 and 1991) both took place during major international crises. Statistical surveys mapping the political priorities of the Swedish population between 2004 and 2006 showed that most voters thought that a secure and trustworthy welfare system, employment, equality, health care and schools were the top interests of the majority of voters. For example, 80% of Swedish voters were against the privatisation of health care (Etzler 2013). On the political agenda of the right wing, we found increased income differences, privatisation of health care, schools and public goods, impaired work security and, of course, tax cuts. Clearly, the will of the people and the will of the right-wing parties were on a collision course. Of course, the right-wing alliance won the election. How? Well, by intentionally transforming the conceptual landscape (inspired by the electoral strategies of Tony Blair, which had been very successful in attracting

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voters). For example, since 80% of voters were for public health care and against privatisation, the campaign organiser simply decided that the word “privatisation” was to be banned from all talk while campaigning. Whenever that theme came up, one was supposed to talk about “diversity” instead. (The Swedish word for “diversity” is “mångfald”; incidentally, the same word is used by the left when discussing the benefits of multicultural societies.) So it was a double and deceptive hijacking strategy. Furthermore, right-wing politicians were instructed to always link the concept “diversity” to “quality”. At the same time, they used slogans such as “The New Workers’ Party” and launched the term “utanförskap”, which literally means “outside-being” but is rather unproblematically translated as “alienation”, as a term to replace the leftist talk about class. Thus, a political agenda that consisted of increasing income differences by lowering taxes, selling off public property, privatising health care and schools, and decreasing the rights of workers and the unemployed, came to be expressed like this: “Vote right if you think diversity is good and alienation bad. Vote left if you don’t like diversity and quality.” This is, in hindsight, a very blunt rhetorical strategy, easy to see through. But at the time, the left parties were taken by surprise. The right didn’t steal their ideas. They hijacked their language. So counterarguments became very hard to form. In a way, it was unclear what they were arguing about. The right-wing alliance was speaking the language of the left, using their words, seemingly arguing for their ideas – on the surface, darting towards the same aim. This is an illustration of a very simple form of controlling what is possible to think, say and do. But it is nevertheless worth highlighting, since it so clearly shows how shifts of opinion do not necessarily come about because people change their opinions and beliefs, but are often rooted in a change of vocabulary beneath the vocabulary’s surface. But changes of the conceptual landscape do not necessarily coincide with changes of words. As the connotative logic of our concepts is rearranged, the way things look and the way we perceive our possibilities changes. The limitation of this example is that the whole thing is intentional, and perhaps also somewhat deceitful. This is a phenomenon that is hard to see, since we are forced to try to make the undercurrents of language visible and clear, and therefore difficult to theorise about philosophically: what look like clear choices among a limited set of alternatives may be illusory, for there is always an undercurrent of language that is vulnerable to our changing ways of talking and acting.

4  Metapolitics In the first example, we can see how political play with our words had the effect of slowly altering the map of the terrain. This is even more frightening, I think, when the effect is a reconfiguration of the ways we understand the concept of “we”, and when the political gestures we make unintentionally in speech establish an order that we would have found problematic had we only known from the outset that this is where we would end up.

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One such example could be the introduction of the term “second-generation immigrant” that entered the political discourse in Sweden. Initially, this notion may very well have been introduced innocently, or with goodwill. Suppose, for example, somebody reacted to the fact that some people whose parents happened to have been born somewhere else were called “immigrants”, even if they evidently were not. The principle is clear: if you are born in Sweden, you are not an immigrant. Therefore, someone came up with this notion, meaning to be nice, meaning to find a neutral way of describing people who feel they have dual homes, or dual cultural identities. This way of talking may have its place and function in a seemingly harmless way in everyday discourse. But one can clearly see how the dialectic with which I opened this article – about how seemingly innocent ways of talking slowly lead to changes that may have unwanted effects – can come into play rather quickly. For no matter how well-intended that move was, the long-term effect is nevertheless that some people who were born in Sweden are singled out as not-really-Swedes, or “not-fully-Swedish”, since the label “immigrant” still attaches to them (albeit in a deferred way). Thus, a sort of ordering of people is still performed, and the very fact that one wants to get away from runs the risk of being reinforced, or at least remodelled, rather than surpassed. A new way of distinguishing between us and them was born; it became possible to hold new opinions. If we pile small reconfigurations of the “us-and-them relation” upon each other, the space of reasonable reasoning may turn sour, and make room for a transformation of the public discourse. Another deliberate and very concrete attempt to move the limits of possible thoughts, one that cannot be described as neutral or innocent, can be found in the “metapolitical” (as they prefer to call it) strategies developed by the Swedish alt-­ right movement. This is a rather small organisation at a national level, but they are well-connected internationally (Så bygger extremhögern internationella nätverk n.d.). They have close connections to many other alt-right movements, including Breitbart (How Sweden Became ‘The Most Alt-Right’ Country in Europe n.d.). The organisation was started by Christopher Dulney, who used to work as a political secretary for the Swedish Democrats (the nationalist party that attracts something close to 20% of the vote in Sweden), and Daniel Friberg, formerly a member of the Nordic Resistance (Jemsby et al. 2018). My guess, though, is that you will not find them marching in the streets in uniform, and you won’t find them shouting and throwing stones. In fact, they seem to almost look down on their “foot soldiers”. The Nordic Alt-right works at a completely different level and is, therefore, far more dangerous: I want to affect the way people think. I want to be placed right outside the corridor of possible opinions (“åsiktskorridoren”) and then quite simply expand it as much as possible and make the unacceptable acceptable. (Jemsby et al. 2018; my translation)

They describe their kind of work as “metapolitical” (Altnorden n.d.-a, n.d.-b).2 Their work explicitly aims at changing precisely the background to our thinking. 2  According to Friberg, the term “metapolitics”’ was coined by Antonio Gramsci (Friberg 2015, 3). To my knowledge, Gramsci didn’t use this notion, but it can be traced back to thinkers such as

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They know where the weak spot is, and they aim for it. They do not seek to achieve direct political change. They do not even aim to convince other people that their own opinions are correct or better. They do not have arguments. They do not want to argue. The aim is to let the masses do that kind of work themselves. By acting as a form of linguistic avant-garde (and, in this particular case, that military metaphor fits well), they aim to make you say and think things that you wouldn’t normally say and think. By giving voice to the impossible, the outrageous and the completely unacceptable, that which is only nearly impossible, slightly less outrageous or merely unacceptable (and not completely so) becomes a possible view to have. In political life, this serves (clearly and intentionally so) to make political parties such as the Swedish Democrats look more normal and less overtly racist. By stating thoughts that are well beyond what people actually think, they aim to present repressed thoughts and fears as perfectly legitimate opinions. Thus, one may say that the aim is to change the way people view their own (repressed) views. When that is achieved, the mass will do the work themselves. They achieve this in a number of ways of course. And they do it carefully. They spread “jokes” about Muslims and Jews, and disperse claims about how this or that “politically correct” politician or celebrity ought to be hanged or gang-raped for his or her “treason”. Should anyone object, they can always retort, “But it was only a joke”. But at that point the image is spread. The virus is planted. The seed is in the soil. Just let it grow. Jokes are serious things. This is how the conceptual landscape is reconfigured, and when the background to our thinking is altered, it will not be long before politicians and academics start to take “the fears of the people” seriously. One clear example of how these kinds of transformations of our conceptual world work by pushing the limit of the acceptable is, of course, the language used by Donald Trump. When you have a president, or a presidential candidate, saying things like “grab them by the pussy”, it is clear, and I think pivotal, that almost everyone recognises that this is “over the top”. It has been said that utterances and actions such as these do not damage a modern politician because it shows that he is “one of us” and that he is not part of the “ruling elite”. It is supposed that claims such as these show that he (it is almost always a he) belongs to the “people” rather than “Washington”. I think that the logic of the formation of the political “we” in relation to utterances such as these is a bit more complicated. First of all, I don’t think “the people” are like Donald Trump. “The people” do not go around thinking that they want to grab women that way. Of course, some people probably do so. But I think it is a mistake to see the populist leader as a good representative of “the people”. Now, what may be true, I assume, is that there are men who have an abundance, as it were, of sexual desires, and abundances of desires entail a lack. That, however, does not mean that everyone who does not belong to “the ruling elite” wants to grab women’s genitals. Wouldn’t it rather be more likely that what they want is to find an expression of their desires, to feel loved, to know Gottlieb Hufeland, August Ludwig von Schlözer and Carl von Rotteck, and it was later picked up by Alain Badiou (Badiou 2005; see also Ekeman n.d.). Here, I will focus only on how this term is understood solely in the context of the Swedish alt-right movement.

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that intimacy is within their reach? I take that to be another way of saying that they, like all of us, want to be seen. They want to feel that longing and desire is acceptable. I find the hypothesis that most men (“the people”) go about wanting to grab, to be far-fetched. (Needless to say, I think most women don’t want to be grabbed.) So, what happens when a presidential candidate says such obviously outrageous things is that “we” become entitled to feel that our own unsatisfied desires are not so bad after all. Put otherwise, it is precisely by being outrageous, and by being recognised as outrageous, that slightly less sexist desires come to look almost benign. It is through the “I am not that bad”, that is, by the recognition that the provocative populist “leader” is not one of us, that we find his appeal. By saying the intolerable, the conceptual landscape is transformed so that the boundaries of what can be thought, and what can be thought to be acceptable, are moved. We do not see that the boundaries have been moved. We are looking at the splash but we fail to follow the ripples on the surface. We look at the fire but fail to see what now can move in the smoke. These kinds of utterances are concept-forming, that is, they form the linguistic background within which, or against which, we think and act. The difficulty here is that the level at which the decisive moves are made is not at the level of argument. It is not the place where opinion stands against opinion. It is not even at the level of truth or moral value of individual statements. The decisive moves are made at a level where these things do not belong and do not reach. Nobody endorses “the unthinkable” or the horrendous. What is important, and so difficult to get into view (precisely because our gaze is held by the absurd and the horrendous), is what “the unthinkable” makes “thinkable”. The Nordic Alt-right is an exceptional alt-right movement, since it is (as far as I know anyway) the only such movement to express the metapolitical ambition so clearly, and to be so outspoken about it (Nordisk alternativhöger n.d.; Altnorden n.d.-a, n.d.-b). And it is a rather peculiar phenomenon. Its followers basically tell us that the essence of their political work is to be deceptive. By moving the limits of the thinkable  – by themselves dissipating the intolerable and the absurd into the community’s stream of consciousness  – they intentionally aim for conceptual change that “happens” and is not intended or controlled by anyone. Among the various alt-right movements in the world, the Swedish one has taken on a leading role, and is seen as one of the most important (Jemsby et al. 2018). And with “good” “reason”. What earns them their “respectability” is that they know that real power and the most important forms of political change do not come about through either violence or political decisions, and they know that fundamental changes come about through hardly perceptible changes of the moral hue of our language. In a way, I feel inclined to say that they have understood what many political thinkers have not, that “[w]e cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others” (Murdoch 2003, 260). This is a passage from their homepage where they describe their ideology and method:

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Human societies are made of and are formed by a complex number of factors. Some such factors are the inhabitants’ cultural traditions, language and religions, their biological properties, ethics and morals, consumption patterns and social, ethnic, political identities. (…) An authentic identity is founded on language, culture, ethnicity and social reality – not in opinions, sexual orientation or by impulses created by media, or in artificial needs. Ethnic identity is today a natural starting-point for political organisation. The liberal notion of the individual, as well as the class analysis of socialism, is insufficient. (Altnorden n.d.-a, n.d.b; my translation)

They describe their own view as “ethnocentric” and they think their own ethnicity is “European”. Different ethnic groups are different and should not be mixed. This, they are eager to make clear, is not a view grounded on what they call “culture-­ relativistic argumentation”, but is a strictly pragmatic necessity, as they see it. Mix ethnicities and there will be war. Thus, they do not think that political violence can fill any positive function. Violent responses to the political order belong, in their view, to communists and anarchists. At the same time, they have little or no faith in parliamentary approaches. These “can never be anything more than a complement to a broader cultural and political work” (Altnorden n.d.-a, n.d.-b; my translation). And this is the core of the metapolitical ambition: “the gradual transformation of society in a favourable direction for us and the population in general”. They aim to form a political “we” that will rely on a different background, that will push the limit about “what is possible to think”, and this will then, at a later stage, affect how people vote and the decisions politicians will make. Metapolitics can be defined as the process of disseminating and anchoring a particular set of cultural ideas, attitudes and values in a society, which eventually leads to deeper political change. This work need not – and perhaps should not – be linked to a particular party or programme. The point is ultimately to redefine the conditions under which politics is conceived, which the European cultural Left pushed to its extreme. The metapolitical chokehold that political correctness has over Western Europe is a result of consistent cultivation – or rather misuse – of this strategy. Only by understanding this tool, countering its misuse, and turning it to serve our own ends, can we overcome the miserable situation that our continent is in. (Friberg 2015, 4)

That supposedly liberal, Christian and traditional conservative parties, even social democrats to some extent, have changed their agendas and aim to address exactly the issues that the alt-right movement wants them to address, is a measure of the extent to which these strategies work. Each step in the direction of traditional political parties’ starting to address “the problem of immigration”, and attracting more voters by doing so, is a sign that their strategy is working. A further sign of their success is that academics start thinking that perhaps we need to take the farright movement seriously, since so many “ordinary folks” vote for them and listen to them, without pondering what changes of the culture have taken place and why. That is exactly what they aim for. That is exactly what we should fear. This is their longed-for reformation of a political “we”. Communities and conversational spaces and frames are not shaped by reasoned arguments but by the silent reconfiguration of our conceptual landscape. There is no clear individual behind this reconfiguration, which makes it look like it is the will of the people. The extent to which they have been successful is painful to acknowledge.

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5  Concluding Remarks Nobody wants to be evil. And, in a (broadly speaking) liberal cultural setting, it is more or less impossible to be an outspoken racist. Thus, if one wants to preserve and support racism, one must say that racism is wrong, or reformulate it rather significantly. In order to retain and enforce the content of a concept such as racism, one needs to describe it as something else. There are, for example, hardly any self-­ confessed racists in Swedish politics. The Swedish Democrats claim to have a “zero tolerance for racism”. The alt-right movement do not think of themselves as racist, and they explicitly reject that notion too. Indeed, they seek to “show” that “racist” is a pejorative term coined by people who are deluded and support (what they call) “mass immigration” (Altnorden n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Of course, it is not possible today to sensibly argue that Turks are bad for Europe because of their biology. And so one might think that the oppression of a people because of their race, cultural origin, gender, religious beliefs, etc., would be impossible too. But no. It is evident that politics that is racist in this particular sense is performed. Thus, the strategy of the nationalists is this: they keep the content of the word – the concept, if you want – but describe it with another word. Therefore, they struggle to make sure that discussions of cultural difference take centre stage in political and social discourse, encouraging the use of words such as “culturism” and “ethnocentrism” and making sure that all talk about racism comes across as obsolete and a degrading way of talking implemented by leftist opponents. No, or hardly any, self-conscious political actor describes him- or herself as racist. (Have they ever?) But it is possible to be an ethnocentrist or a “culturist”. But the core of these notions are the same, and the Nordic Alt-right people must know that, since they explicitly work hard to rename this core. The only way racism can thrive at a time when no one thinks that biology alone determines what we are, is by renaming it. For it is quite obvious that the central role of race in racist ideologies has never been exclusively biological. The colour of a person’s skin is, after all, “the superficial fact about a human being”, as Stanley Cavell once put it (Cavell 1976, 141). What racists have always feared has always been what the surface appearance signalled: that they are different because they come from a different culture. Now, where does this lead us? If we want to think clearly about things like populism, racism, xenophobia, and so on and so forth, which is a task, I think, that should be placed on all of our shoulders in this day and age, there is little to be gained from arguing with racists or the local Nazi or fascist. The most serious threat is not necessarily the men marching on our streets (though they surely are a threat too, and a threat that should be addressed) but the formation of a cultural habitat in which the urge to march and throw stones can arise. We do not need a political philosopher to tell us that fascism is bad. The real problem is that the formation of a political “we” happens elsewhere, in “the concept-forming words we utter”, which in turn makes up this “background to our thinking which is always vulnerable”. Perhaps one may say that the philosophical difficulty I have addressed here is that the kinds of changes of our linguistic habitat are slow, not reasoned or argued,

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and not supported either philosophically or politically; they happen, as it were, before explicit discourse and discussion. It is the background, hence it is in the background. Another aspect of the difficult nature of addressing problems of conceptual change is that they seem to belong not in the domain of cause and effect, but in that of side effects. When someone claims or does something horrendous or appalling, it is quite natural to focus on that. But as the discussion of the examples I have talked about has made clear, the real changes are in the ripples, not in the splash; in the smoke, not in the fireworks. Thus, to learn to pay attention to real moral change is to learn to look in a different direction; to really see, we may need to look away from the astonishing.3

References Altnorden. n.d.-a Rasism, rasister: Nordisk alternativhöger. Nordisk alternativhöger. https://www. altnorden.se/metapolitisk-­ordlista/rasism-­rasister/ ———. n.d.-b Vad vill vi?: Nordisk alternativhöger. Nordisk alternativhöger (blog). https://www. altnorden.se/vad-­vill-­vi/ Badiou, Alain. 2005. Metapolitics. London: Verso. Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Ending the waiting game: A reading of Beckett’s endgame. In Must We Mean What We Say?: A book of essays, 115–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984. The politics of interpretation (politics as opposed to what?). In Themes out of School: Effects and causes, 27–59. San Francisco: North Point Press. Christensen, Anne-Marie Søndergaard. 2021. Moral Philosophy and Moral Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crary, Alice. 2007. Beyond Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1989. Rules: Looking in the right place. In Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in honor of Rush Rhees (1905–1989), ed. D.Z.  Phillips and Peter Winch, 12–34. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ekeman, Karl. n.d. On Gramscianism of the right – praxis 13/13. Critique and Praxis (blog). http://blogs. law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/karl-­ekeman-­on-­gramscianism-­of-­the-­right/?cn-­reloaded=1 Etzler, Aron. 2013. Reinfeldteffekten : hur nya moderaterna tog över makten i Sverige och skakade socialdemokraterna i grunden. Stockholm: Karneval förlag. https://www.bokus.com/ bok/9789187207273/reinfeldteffekten-­hur-­nya-­moderaterna-­tog-­over-­makten-­i-­sverige-­och-­ skakade-­socialdemokraterna-­i-­grunden/. Forsberg, Niklas. 2013. Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the limits of philosophical discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2017. &c.: On linguistic regularity, normativity and language acquisition. In A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical investigations, ed. Michael A.  Peters and Jeff Stickney, 527–538. Singapore: Springer. ———. 2018a. Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain (eds.), Review of Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought (London: Routledge, 2018). Philosophical Investigations 41: 370–375. ———. 2018b. Taking the linguistic method seriously: On Iris Murdoch on language and linguistic philosophy. In Murdoch on Truth and Love, 109–132. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 3   This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

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———. 2022a. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and morality in J. L. Austin’s philosophy. New York: Routledge. ———. 2022b. Thinking, language, and concepts. In The Murdochian Mind, ed. Mark Hopwood and Silvia Panizza. New York: Routledge. Friberg, Daniel. 2015. The real right returns. Arktos Media Ltd. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2014. What is a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist?: Iris Murdoch, metaphysics and metaphor. Philosophical Papers 43: 191–225. ———. 2016. Descriptive Ethics: What does moral philosophy know about morality? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. How Sweden became “The most alt-right” country in Europe. n.d. BuzzFeed News. https:// www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/how-­s weden-­b ecame-­t he-­m ost-­a lt-­r ight-­ country-­in-­europe Jemsby, Carolina, Jenny Strindlöv, Karin Mattisson and Ella Berger. 2018. Så försöker alt-rightrörelsen förändra Sverige med rasistisk propaganda. SVT Nyheter, sec. Granskning. https://www. svt.se/nyheter/granskning/ug/sa-­forsoker-­alt-­rightrorelsen-­forandra-­sverige-­med-­rasistisk­propaganda Kleen, Björn af. 2015. Det Ockuperade Landskapet. DN Fokus, sec. Okategoriserade. https:// fokus.dn.se/det-­ockuperade-­landskapet/ Murdoch, Iris. 1999a. The idea of perfection. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature, 299–336. New York: Penguin. ———. 1999b. Vision and choice in morality. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature, 76–98. New York: Penguin. ———. 2003. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Vintage Classics. Nordisk alternativhöger. n.d. Expo.se. https://expo.se/fakta/wiki/nordisk-­alternativhoger Rhees, Rush. 1970. Discussions of Wittgenstein. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Så bygger extremhögern internationella nätverk. n.d. Expo.se. https://expo.se/2019/04/s%C3%A5­bygger-­extremh%C3%B6gern-­internationella-­n%C3%A4tverk Väljarbarometern. n.d. SVT Nyheter. https://www.svt.se/special/valjarbarometern/ Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Trans. Denis Paul. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2009. In Philosophical Investigations, ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Niklas Forsberg is Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. A large portion of Forsberg’s research deals with problems found at the intersection between theoretical philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. He has written papers about thinkers such as Austin, Cavell, Coetzee, Collingwood, Emerson, Murdoch, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, discussing various topics such as pain, sin, love, language, logic, and literature’s relation to philosophy and philosophical argumentation. He is the author of Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 [pbk. 2015]) and Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J. L. Austin’s Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2021).  

What Is Changing and What Has Already Changed: Parenthood and Certainty in Moral Discourse Camilla Kronqvist

1  Introduction “Jeder hat Vater und Mutter” (Everyone has a father and mother). These words, written in 1985, come from German philosopher of education Klaus Mollenhauer (1985, 11). They surface in a reflection on the ramifications this has for the question of education. They serve as the axiom, the self-evident truth, on which he bases the further claim that everyone therefore has undergone a process of education. Once one reaches this conclusion, it is easy to look past his initial statement. Yet, it is worthwhile to stop at the claim as it stands, to see what it conveys, or what someone may try to convey with it. This is so because the statement may seem so obviously true that one does not even need to pause to reflect on it. Or, it may seem so obviously false, now in 2022, that one feels unclear what to say about it in the first place. Maybe one is even unable to see past it because it seems to impose a problematic conservative ideal. Rather than expressing an empirical truth or a logical necessity, it is taken to reveal a normative stance, or an oppressive norm, saying more about what some groups of people think “should be” than what is. In other words, it may be taken to speak more to the conviction that “Everyone should have a father and a mother” than to express a willingness to consider the actual lives of children who do not grow up with a mother and a father. Although Wittgenstein does not commit himself to the precise wording of Mollenhauer’s statement, in On Certainty he makes some remarks that lie very close to it. He mentions, “I have a father and a mother” (Wittgenstein 1991, §282), “[A]ll human beings have parents” (Wittgenstein 1991, §240) and “I believe that I have forebears and that every human being has them” (Wittgenstein 1991, §240). He offers these as propositions that cannot be true or false in an ordinary sense nor C. Kronqvist (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_13

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speak of a logical necessity. Rather, they appear to him as certain. In the light of this, I ask what is obviously true in Mollenhauer’s statement, and what is obviously false in it. What is changing when we start to think of sentences such as “Everyone has a father and a mother” as not expressing an indubitable truth, a fundamental fact of our existence, but as constituting a social norm that appears to be oppressive of those lives that do not fit the norm (Cf. Segerdahl 2013, in response to Butler 1990 and 1993)? What has already changed in our ways of conceiving of ourselves when we stop regarding such ways of expressing ourselves as a necessary aspect of our natural history but start thinking of them as one possibility among others in finding good and meaningful ways of living? What aspects remain unquestionable in Wittgenstein’s beliefs throughout these changes, and what aspects of our family ties would we do best not to let slide? I work with these questions from a perspective that I see as typical of any philosophical inquiry after Wittgenstein. I ask what makes us prone to regarding Mollenhauer’s and Wittgenstein’s statements in certain ways and how such tendencies can change when considered in the light of everyday ways of speaking? I further inquire into what ethical questions arise from thinking of the different possible meanings of these sentences in varied circumstances. In addition, I add reflections that are more personal, reflecting on the ways in which I, as the parent of two children with two mothers, have come to think differently about Mollenhauer’s statement over the years. I compare it to ways in which similar statements have been defended in debates against adoption rights for same-sex couples and against same-­ sex marriage, in the years preceding and succeeding the birth of my children, and the kind of moral and conceptual changes that thinking through these issues have occasioned in me, as a person and as a philosopher living through these changes. This allows me to indirectly address the question of how the personal and philosophical intersect in ethical inquiries after Wittgenstein.

2  What Kind of Fact? When we were writing our doctoral theses, my now wife, a philosopher of education, discussed Mollenhauer in one of her chapters (Schaffar 2009). Her discussion concerned the possibilities of educating for freedom by force, and she used the sentence under discussion to introduce the thematic. Commenting on drafts, I read it so often that it stuck with me. The truth it seemed to tell resonated with another recognition that was then very present in our lives – the knowledge that she and I could not conceive a child. It was, at that time, the greatest sorrow in our shared life. Wittgenstein’s interest in sentences that in strange ways appeared to be certain was that they were not comparable to empirical statements, that is, to sentences that could be either true or false. To see what is right or wrong with thinking about Mollenhauer’s statement, we may therefore ask how we could determine whether it is true. By observation? Is the statement “All human beings have a father and a

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mother” a universal, comparable to “All human beings are mortal”, and do we know such truths by inducing from individual observations to a generalisable conclusion? This explanation is simple, and may feel intuitive, at least to the layperson. It offers, however, an understanding of the statement that seems most obviously false. Clearly it is not the case, and was never the case, that every child one observed had a father and a mother, present at the moment of observation, or actively present in its life. The mother died at birth or packed her bags and left. The father was unknown or deceased before the child was born. The statistical data also speaks against this general conclusion. In Finland we could expect a review of different households with children, showing how many children are born within same-sex marriages or partnerships, how many have single parents or live in families with step- or bonus parents, and so on. Judging by observation, experience clearly shows that not all children have a mother and a father. The statistical data, however, may still show that a majority of cases involve a father and a mother. In other words, the statement could be taken to mean “Most, if not all, children have a father and a mother.” It is this statistical relation, someone could argue, that grants the generalisation “Every child has a father and mother.” Still, “most human beings” do not add up to “all human beings”. Universals do not admit of exceptions, so if we agree that there are exceptions to this “rule”, we should at least not treat the statement as a universal. Excluding the possibility of its being a universal, however, is not as damning as some philosophers may think. It is not necessarily illegitimate to generalise from the majority of cases. In fact this kind of argument is in line with other generic statements such as “Birds lay eggs” or “Tigers are striped”. This heterogeneous group of sentences used for different purposes does not satisfy the needs of the normal philosophical qualifiers, such as all or some. Thus, they defy the truth conditions that philosophers set up for true sentences. Nevertheless, most of us are ready to accept them as true. Children even appear to have a much easier time making sense of them than the more elaborate “all” and “most”. At least they learn to use them at an earlier age (Leslie 2008, 2–3). Generic statements in that way represent a use of language that we easily seem to master but have much more difficulty to understand, at least when we philosophise. Delineating what we could call the general form of the generic, a way for generics to be true, has proven difficult. As Sarah Jane Leslie (2008) points out, generics may often be paraphrased in sentences including “generally”, “usually” or “typically”. By adding “generally” and “typically” to “Tigers have stripes” and “Dogs bark”, we get “Generally, tigers have stripes” and “Typically, dogs bark” (Leslie 2008, 7). In these cases, both sentences appear to be true. This, however, is not true for all generics. It is true that “Sharks attack bathers”, but not that “Usually, sharks attack bathers.” It is false that “Bees are sterile”, but true that “Generally, bees are sterile” (Leslie 2008, 7). Another way out is to frame generics with “under the most normal conditions” (Leslie 2008, 8). This accounts for the fact that “Birds lay eggs” is true even if the majority of birds do not do it; only female birds lay eggs, and they need not be in the majority. This points to the fact that a trait does not need to be statistically

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significant to be generic. Instead, generics point to something distinctive of a type. It suffices that 1% of mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus to grant the truth of the statement “Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus” (Leslie 2008, 8). Rather than pointing to quantifiable facts, generic statements often appear to state facts about an organism’s natural history. Entering a more Aristotelian form of argument, Michael Thompson suggests that statements about natural history are not aimed at determining how representative a certain trait is in a larger group of individuals. Rather these descriptions point to what is characteristic of an organism by placing it in its environment (Thompson 2004, 49, 65; see also Crary 2009, 10). It is typical, for example, that they describe an organism in the determinate singular form: “The cat has four to six kittens.” Such statements can be true even if it is impossible for a singular cat to have both four and six kittens (cf.  Thompson 2004, 48). In alluding to what is normal, however, the natural historical statement moves beyond what is natural. It sets a standard for how an organism’s life is supposed to evolve in relation to its environment when everything goes according to plan (Thompson 2008, 80–81; Crary 2009, 10–11). In that way, these statements of facts – and they do admit of being true or false – are not only descriptive statements but also have normative features. It is this normative stance that makes a statement such as that of Mollenhauer sit uncomfortably among theorists who also want their academic disciplines to deliver a social critique, pointing out how social stereotypes may permeate our assessment of what is natural. (The works of Judith Butler that I discuss later give just one version of this critique, which has become a staple in feminist epistemology.) Thus, we can think of “Every child has a father and a mother” as a statement about our natural history.1 But if this statement is really a statement to the effect that “Every normal child has a father and mother”, the theorists committed to social critique argue, we seem to set up a picture in which any minority child who cannot point to two differently gendered parents is not just different but deviant. It is precisely this step that needs to be scrutinised in any scientific attempt to give us knowledge about the kinds of beings we are. “But wait!” someone might interject. “All this talk about universals, generics or facts about our natural history fails to account for a fundamental biological fact. We do not need to turn to environmental biology to clarify this statement; it suffices to go to cell biology to know that a male sex cell and a female sex cell are needed for conception. It is this very general fact of human nature that the utterance seeks to convey. In other words, without a father and a mother there would be no conception in the first place!” Yes, but no. We can certainly agree that at this present stage, a sperm and an egg cell are required for successful conception. No technological advances, such as cloning or the conception of an egg cell by some other cell than a sperm, have so far

1  In this way it can be read in relation to Wittgenstein’s remarks about “very general facts of nature” (Wittgenstein 2009, 56n).

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changed this fact about the species Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, we should not hurry to conclude that, for this reason, “everyone has a father and mother” is a biological truth. For what role do the words “father” and “mother” have in a biological description, especially at the cell level? In what ways do words like “man” and “woman”, “male” and “female” denote a biological category? (See Martin 1991 for a critique of how scientists studying conception have been guilty of reproducing gendered stereotypes in their description of the “biological facts”.) Is it even possible to translate these words into purely biological discourse? Are there not rather many ways of understanding what is entailed in being a father or a mother that are not direct consequences of our biology but rather expressions of the way in which we are enculturated? Think only of the changing role of fathers we have experienced in the Nordic countries, where fathers are expected to take a much more active role in child rearing, and are supposed to develop a strong emotional bond with their children, in contrast to the earlier ideal of the man as the family’s provider, someone who could remain in the background of the child’s life. The possibility of such changes in the perceived roles of fathers and mothers suggests that “father” and “mother” rather mark social categories that are not reducible to their possible biological underpinnings. Rather, they point to shifting aspects of our social realities. Feminist thinkers have therefore suggested the need to distinguish social expectations of how mothers should be “socializing and nurturing” a child from “the physical act of bearing a child” (Rogus 2003, 815, with reference to Nancy Chodorow). This is necessary to bring fully into view how these aspects of our social realities contribute to the meaning of these concepts. The question, then, is not only about what the facts are but also what kinds of facts they are – biological, historical or sociological? We need to consider the meaning that different appeals to facts have in relation to different contexts in which we may speak of “having a mother and a father”. To judge whether an utterance is true, this suggests, we first need to clarify to ourselves what meaning it makes to say it in a specific context.

3  What Kind of Logic? Why could we not even think of conceiving a child together? Was it because she as a woman could not bear my child? Or because she as a woman could not father my child? Because it was impossible for a child to have more than one mother? In being aggrieved by such sentences, what occasioned in us such grief? What was it that we felt to be impossible? And what allowed the once impossible to one day become a necessary aspect of our being? The indubitable acknowledgement that we were the mothers of these children. That she, at least, bore my child, and I hers. A further interest of Wittgenstein in indubitable sentences that could not be true or false was their not possessing the necessity attributed to analytic propositions. In that way, they escape the logical analysis to which philosophers could subject

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Mollenhauer’s statement to find out whether it constitutes a necessary truth. Looking at the sentence with Kantian eyes, we could, for example, see it as an analytic statement, by contrast with a synthetic one. Then the statement “Every child has a father and a mother” could be broken down into statements such as “Every child has two parents” or “Every child has a male and a female parent.” This would seem to lead us to truisms such as “A father is a male parent” or “A mother is a female parent.” They appear similar to “A bachelor is an unmarried man” or a “Triangle has three angles”, where the predicate, after Kant, can be said to be contained by the subject. The truth of the statement could then be said to be determined entirely by the meanings of the words themselves. This would imply that it is senseless to speak of a child without a father and a mother, just as it is senseless to speak of a married man as a bachelor, or an unmarried woman as a bachelor.2 Such views seemingly played in the background of persons inclined to say, “A woman can never be a father”, or “A man can never give birth to a child”, in the public discussions leading up to the Finnish laws regulating same-sex marriage and internal adoptions within female couples. For a philosopher it was striking to see how philosophical certain forms of argument were in probing the limits of changing definitions: “A union between two people of the same sex cannot be a marriage!” “A woman can be another mother, but she cannot in any way replace a father!” Such phrases about what “cannot anyway be” are telling. They point to the strongly held conviction that this is what the words must mean (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §599). But what is the sense of the perceived “must” here? And must words mean something so well defined? If one considers these seemingly philosophical convictions in an everyday lived context, they can soon start to lose their hold. Imagine someone saying to me, “So, you’re the father of the family?” after I have talked about the experience of feeling helpless at the delivery, or being, in some small ways, rejected as the parent who is not breast-feeding. To this, I can answer “Yes, it seems so” without having to agree to be “the man in the family” in any other possibly relevant sense. This possibility points to a sense of “being a father” that is not connected with the fact that one’s sex cell contributed to the birth of a child. Rather it is connected to the position or role of a caring parent who is not breast-feeding. This position is not only available to a man but also to another parent who is not breast-feeding, even if that parent is a woman. (Of course, if none of the parents are breast-feeding, no significance needs to be attached to this.) Such considerations of how the words “mother” and “father” are used in everyday situations help us see how their differing meanings are linked together by “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 2009, §67). They do not denote any single property, such as a “female” or “male parent”, but are used to bring out different relationships or characteristics in different situations. At some points, they serve to bring out a biological relationship. At other times, they point to one’s history with someone,

2  Another possibility is to think of Mollenhauer’s sentence as a synthetic a priori, similar to metaphysical statements such as “every event has a cause”.

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and at still others, at the character of one’s relation to someone that serves to give this relationship its significance. The sense of security attached to a child’s certainty that it has two fathers is an aspect of the love it has for the parents it grew up with. Another grown-up child’s fear of repeating her mother’s mistakes in relation to her own children may be an expression of experiences of loss and lack of intimacy with her mother. At times the words point to something like an ideal in our lives that we can strive to live up to. I may wonder whether I succeed in being a good mother or find it difficult to identify with being “a mother” without pulling into the question the fact that I am “the mother of this child”, the biological connection or my juridical responsibility for it. We should also not forget that from the perspective of the child, words such as “Mom” and “Dad” function as names, which are not just used to denote someone, but also to call them. When my son at a younger age shouted “Mom!” without making a distinction between his moms, it was meant as “Come and help me” and not as “You gave birth to me.” The irrelevance of the latter biological sense, although in other cases relevant, is also apparent in his declarations of love. “You’re the best mom in the world!” he can say to the both of us, and not hesitate to add, “You both are.” In this manner, we as speakers of a language inhabited by “moms” and “dads” lean on different criteria when we speak about “fathers” and “mothers” in different situations. There is not necessarily one defining criterion that determines what the words must mean. Our task as philosophers reflecting on the logical categories of parenthood is therefore not to lay down the determining criteria, such that in the end it is all biology, or in the end it is at least not biology. Rather, we need to be responsive to the different criteria at play in different situations to become clear about what we mean by leaning on one criterion here and another criterion there. Shifting between criteria even within a conversation, as Pär Segerdahl says in relation to “man” and “woman”, “is not necessarily a contradiction, since the meaning of the nouns can change with the spontaneous use of them. Language often functions in this un-bureaucratic, ‘wobbling’ manner” (Segerdahl 2013, 186–187). As a Wittgensteinian philosopher, I want to take this “un-bureaucratic”, “wobbling” character of language as a reason not to legislate about language use, by saying that the logical analysis of a word reveals that it is meaningless to utter a specific string of words. Rather I, as Segerdahl, want to expose the un-static and open-ended character of language that appears whenever we try to find an essence to the meaning of a word. Turning to the real bureaucrats legislating about parental laws, it also seems reasonable to suggest that they should not turn into bad philosophers by stipulating essentialising, and perhaps also metaphysical, uses of words in legislation, such as suggesting that biological criteria need to determine juridical obligations in relation to a child. They, too, as it were, stand in need of recognising the different senses in which we may talk about being a father and a mother. There is, to put it crudely, nothing to be gained by arguing about the meaning of words, if one takes this to imply that meanings could be settled and clear once and for all. There is much more to be gained by recognising the possibility that words can be used differently from what was previously the case. At the same time, I recognise

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the need to argue precisely about the wordings of specific pieces of legislation, since there we are faced with a situation where the meaning of words in some ways needs to be consolidated. Not legislating about language, however, does not mean denying the ways in which, for Wittgenstein, sentences like “I believe that I have forebears and that every human being has them” (Wittgenstein 1991, §240) also “stand fast” (Wittgenstein 1991, §151). On the contrary, his discussions always move between that which seems to be subject to change and that which needs to be kept in place for us to still think we are doing the same thing. The different criteria we lean on in speaking about “mothers” and “fathers” in different cases reveal the different games we are able to play with the words, and the possibility of suddenly shifting games. As long as we play one game, however, it is only to be expected that the rules stay the same. We may dispute that biological criteria should be the sole criteria on which to judge parenthood legally, but if we are to settle the biological parenthood, we agree that a DNA test will do. Even in the case of remarks such as “There are men and women” or “Everyone has a father and a mother”, which seem to expose a form of life (cf. Segerdahl 2013, 199; Zerilli 1998, 452; Christensen 2011), Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine different ways of living in language. In On Certainty he plays with the idea that the solidity we experience in certain statements is comparable to a riverbed. This riverbed “consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited” (Wittgenstein 1991, §99).3 This picture, where “fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid” (Wittgenstein 1991, §96), allows us to think of the utterance “Everyone has a father and mother” as something that at an earlier point was considered as solid ground, as standing fast in our lives, but that now is shifting sand, something that we can question and even desire to change.4 It is only to be expected that when such mostly unspoken agreements in language start shifting, reactions against these shifts become more vocal. Something that earlier did not need to be stated, and was only assumed, now needs to be defended. But in these kinds of shifts we can also expect new forms of agreement. Rather than repeating a sentence like “Every child has a father and a mother”, we start explaining to our children that “Some children have two fathers and others have two mothers. Some have two mothers and two fathers.” For the children who hear this explanation, it appears just as obvious as Mollenhauer’s initial statement given the

3  The picture of a riverbed can be read together with the picture of the “rough ground” (Wittgenstein 2009, §107) Wittgenstein wishes to return us to in philosophy. Both these pictures create a contrast to the “requirement” for “the crystalline purity of logic” (Wittgenstein 2009, §107) that he identifies in his earlier view of logic in the Tractatus. 4  In this picture of language there is no absolute dividing line between the empirical and the logical. Rather this picture suggests that this distinction becomes a meaningful contrast in some contexts to clarify certain kinds of mistakes and doubts. It also points to the kinds of reassurance and certainty that can be meaningful in certain situations and relationships.

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life that they lead. In relation to friends with parents who have more than one of each, it is also clear that in so far as this description is true, Mollenhauer’s is not.

4  A Kind of Mythology In 2004 director Peter Greenaway takes part in a conference at my university. In an interview given to the university magazine, he states, “I would argue, slightly provocatively I must admit, that there are only two things to talk about. One is sex and the other is death. And I know nothing about you gentlemen except for two things. Two people fucked to create you, and I’m sorry dear gentlemen, but you’re going to die. The rest is a blank paper.” (Prest 2014, 21, my translation). Greenaway knows that he is being provocative, but he takes himself to be speaking a truth, the truth about our biology, though slightly more dressed up, or dressed down. I am less certain. As a storyteller, I think he’s telling yet another story, and as with any story there are some things he focuses on, and others he excludes, most importantly that not all people enter the world in the way he envisages. After scanning the internet for tips and tricks on how to create babies, I know that even in heterosexual relationships one may need to resort to courses that extend beyond what biology textbooks in school told us about sexual reproduction. And I am certain that sexual reproduction goes quite a short way in explaining what it means to make a family. “So Mr Greenaway, I have to tell you you’re not well informed. And although I see you’re being caught up in a picture, it is not the only one. So, I will tell you a different story. When I look at my two children I say, “They were born out of our love.” And if you go for hyperbole, I can do that too. I say, this is where everything important starts, in our responsibility for those, and that, we bring into being.” Greenaway’s response offers a more secular way of understanding our place in the world than the biblical “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27), which in Finland has also been used to motivate the exclusion of same-sex marriages from the church. Yet, it is important to note that his version is in no way a more neutral account of what happened than the religious one. Rather it is the religious perspective, or a perversion of it, drawn in the dust. His words can only be a provocation insofar as they denounce what is taken to be of significance in the religious perspective, such that the act of creation should be perceived as something holy and not banal. These ways of thinking about what grounds or conditions our existence show how the statement “Everyone has a father and mother” can be seen as one of “[t]he propositions describing this world-picture [that] might be part of a kind of mythology” (Wittgenstein 1991, §151). They involve taking a stand on the causes and reasons for our existence, as individuals, and as a species, and thereby voice

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perspectives as to what is valuable in that life, and the ways it is valuable.5 Consider only the possible disagreements that may ensue from attempting to decide whether “fucking” is a more appropriate description of the sexual activity than, say, “making love”, and what may drive someone to prefer the one and resist the other. By speaking not just about what is true but expressing perspectives as to what makes our lives meaningful, these ways of thinking also show how Mollenhauer’s statement can be seen in the light of what queer theorist and poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler regards as a heterosexualising law or norm. With this, Butler wishes to make clear the ways in which the heterosexual bond between man and woman has been both ritualised and idealised in the attention that is normally attached to a child’s being a boy or a girl, and the expectations that follow on from the statement, such that a girl, as a woman, should marry a man and give birth to yet more girls and boys (Butler 1993, 232). Uttering Mollenhauer’s words, on this view, becomes yet another way in which gender, and expectations on how our lives should be lived, is created and reinforced. The target of Butler’s critique is a heterosexual narrative that dominates our understanding of ourselves. Her work alerts us to how these ways of speaking do not only express a value but take the shape of a normative stance that asks to be recognised. Nevertheless, she also risks creating a similarly dominating narrative that pictures language as an unavoidable power structure that is strengthened every time we use words such as “mother”, “father”, “girl”, “boy”. Her emphasis on our discourses as a binding order creates a picture of language as a straitjacket from which we cannot liberate ourselves. Against this picture of language as a monolith, Segerdahl remarks that a presentation of language in terms of Wittgenstein’s more loosely conceived grammar does not compel “us to talk, act and live as we do” (Segerdahl 2013, 200). This is the grammar that tells us “what kind of object anything is” (Wittgenstein 2009, §373) and what it is we do when we use words in particular ways, but that does not tell us what to do. This is the critique Wittgensteinians make against poststructuralist ideas of language (see Zerilli 1998 and Moi 1999, 30f, for a similar criticism). In many respects it is also my critique. Even if we admit that the truth of certain statements is dependent on a surrounding practice, as a move in a game is governed by the rules of the game to constitute a move, we are not forced to enter any particular linguistic practice. The reminder that we, in leaning on different criteria, can be said to play different games when we speak, and in shifting criteria can be said to shift games, shows the possibility of our changing the game, and beginning to play a different game. We are therefore not obliged to buy into either biblical mythology or some secular version of it. We can seek and find ways of re-envisioning what our words mean and creating alternative mythologies to picture our place in the world and in relation to others.

5  Greenaway’s reference to sex, birth and death, bears resemblance to Peter Winch’s (1964, 322) suggestion, after Vico, that these constitute limiting notions in our life. See Kronqvist (2020) for a discussion of Winch’s suggestion.

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Yes, it is possible to consider the act of sex in relation to both death – “the little death” – and the creation of life. (“Sex as both a destructive and creative power.” There, a reading of what seems to drive Greenaway’s myth.6) Yes, there is a place to wonder at the possibility of two people in love, a man and a woman, becoming three in the woman’s giving birth to their child, fathered by him. (A driver behind the religious myth.) But it is not given what “facts” can be seen as mysterious as well as mythical and what the factual basis is for these ways of seeing our life as meaningful. Therefore, we can also imagine other life stories that give as much reason to wonder at the meaning of one’s life than the above suggestions. I, as a woman, can marvel at the possibility that another woman is carrying my child, even if there is no genetic connection between me and the child. Part of the marvel can be that it enables me to transcend the biological necessity that in the earlier case sets one going: “Imagine that I can become a mother without needing to be pregnant.” Rather than feeling contentment at fulfilling the “purpose of nature”, I can thus be relieved of a sense of nature guiding my life, and feel relief at not being bound by nature.7 Just as erotic love, manifested in marriage, can be seen as a mystery in creating a family of people who are not biologically related, the love of a child that I do not doubt “is my child”, without any biological link, is the mystery that makes our bond meaningful. The considerations that Wittgensteinians raise against a poststructuralist, conforming picture of language offer reassurance of our possibility of moving effortlessly around in language as long as we free ourselves from certain metaphysical pictures. Yet, these considerations offer no real assurance to a theorist like Butler who does not rest securely in language, who feels that the language that they speak is not really theirs. What comfort is it that we can speak differently if what worries us is that we do not live differently? What is the point of saying, “This is what we do” if we need to recognise that this is something “We should not to do”? “A confession”, Wittgenstein remarked, “has to be part of a new life” (Wittgenstein 1994, 16). What, then, if we only gesture at the grammatical possibility of a new life, and do not embark on it ourselves? Here, our philosophy cannot be merely linguistic, it has to be explicitly moral. It cannot just underline our freedom to speak (what it is possible for us to say) but has to consider what moves us to speak, and even more when it appears necessary for us to speak (what we feel we cannot but say, or what we feel we must say). In raising these questions, we move from the epistemic certainties in our life to the question

6  The disagreement between me and Greenaway is perhaps the disagreement between those who, after Freud, say “It’s all about sex” and the ones who, with Plato, say “It’s all about love.” To the lovers, the ones who only think of sex have not considered how love, as well as sexual desire, is transformed by contemplation of the good. 7  Cf. only the quite different attitudes to biological determinism that are given by the ones who regard biology as destiny, and the kind of existentialism exemplified by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex who regards women’s being bound by biology, menstruation and childbearing as a burden preventing them from realising the freedom constitutive of the human being. Immanence forcing itself on the transcendent subject.

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of what constitutes a moral necessity. (See e.g. Hertzberg 1990.)8 Butler can, on such terms, be seen as speaking out of a moral necessity, as drawing attention to the violation done to individuals who do not fit into present pictures of the world, whose lives are not made intelligible by present frameworks of speaking (Butler 1993, 232). This I see as Butler’s main ethical concern, although it is sometimes clouded by overly theoretical language.9 She speaks with the recognition that certain ways of speaking that once seemed to just describe a stable way of living do violence towards the people who through their life open for a new way of speaking and living the relationships between, for example, parents and children. To address these questions, we need to discuss questions of ethics and the kind of commitments required of us as speakers. We need to address the responsibility confronting me in asking not just what it means that “Everyone has a father and a mother” but what it means for me to be a mother of these particular children. Such reflection on my responsibility requires my taking a stand on what sentences such as Mollenhauer’s mean in relation to my own life as a mother. In what ways does my surrounding society support or hinder me in living the truth of being their mother? (After waiting three years for the legislation on internal adoption to pass in Finland, and then come into effect for our first-born, it is a small but tangible joy every time I read that two children are registered on both of our tax returns.) What are the social expectations related to being a mother that I have inherited from my community, and to what extent do I see them as destructive or constructive? In so far as such expectations are part of my language, a tradition I have been born into, but may struggle to find ways of inscribing myself in, these reflections may confirm to me the sense, so central to poststructuralist philosophy, that my language is never fully mine. In more respects than one, the language that we speak is the language of our parents. Where the relationship between parent and child has been conflicted, which has been the case so often when the family constellation of the child differs from those of the parents, hearing one’s parents speak in one’s own words may in several ways be disconcerting.

8  This raises part of my concern about the direction discussions about moral certainty often take. The sense in which “Murder is wrong” (see Pleasants 2009) seems to me not to be truth-apt in the way metaethicists have desired is not because it is akin to a certainty but because it is a command: “Thou shalt not kill.” And commands call for obedience, not for verification. The sense in which the sentence may appear unassailable is rather in the necessity experienced in following this command, in so far as I recognise the ethical demand it articulates in my relation to the other. Furthermore, there is nothing apparently odd in voicing a moral command. We continually say, “Don’t do that”, to our children. We have, however, a tendency to question the command. As Wittgenstein writes, “The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form ‘thou shalt ...’ is: And what if I do not do it” (Wittgenstein 1922, 6.422). In these ways, moral commands seldom have the character of meaningless but indubitable truths that sentences such as “These are my hands” have. We are also mostly well aware of what it would mean to go against them. This is what we call a moral temptation. 9  As Wittgensteinians, we should in that way not be blinded by the character of specific forms of language use but be able to consider what that language does, beyond giving expression to metaphysical images of language.

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Being a mother, however, is not merely a matter of relating to the concept of motherhood as it is represented in my community and culture. It is being engaged in the relationship to my children, as their mother, and acknowledging how these relationships give meaning to the concept, through my own ways of responding to them and taking responsibility for who I and they become in this relationship. Thus, it raises questions about the concept of motherhood that I learn not from my parents but from my children, and what concept of motherhood I am deliberately and unwillingly giving them. Hearing the voice of one’s parents in one’s own ways of speaking to one’s children may be a source of mixed emotions, giving reason to consider, contemplate or confront one’s relation to the past, and how that past lives on in the present. Hearing one’s own voice speak in one’s children, perhaps only then hearing what it is saying, is an occasion to unearth how one’s present lives on in the future.10 This ethical call to consider the role of responsibility in understanding the concept of a mother should not be mistaken for an empirical claim. It is not so that every parent is responsible. There are children who are born to both reckless and irresponsible parents, just as there are children who are not “born out of love”. Perhaps a certain degree of recklessness is even required to bring a child into the world, even in the happier cases, since it is impossible to envision beforehand what the responsibility for a child will actually amount to in a particular lived relationship. The realisation, even the whole-hearted acceptance, that I am responsible for my children is also no guarantee that I speak or act responsibly in relation to them. Evidently, the insight that asking myself the moral question, whether I am rising to the responsibility of being a mother, may itself be taken as an expression of my taking responsibility, or of scrutinising the responsibility I am facing as a mother. At times, however, that philosophical consideration offers only a small comfort in the light of my actual failings towards my children. The possibility of describing some of our responses to our children in terms of failures to take responsibility, however, alerts us to the weight of the responsibility we carry for those who come after us. How I relate to my responsibilities as a mother will, in other words, be reflected in my understanding of what it means to have parents and children, and what I take to be indubitable in the relation between parent and child. Many of us may, for instance, think of it as tragic if a child learns that they were “a mistake” or born as the effect of their mother’s being raped. It is easy to imagine the difficulties a child, even as an adult, may experience in coming to grips with the fact that it was not wanted, and that one or both of the parents could perhaps look at its birth with regret. The fact that a parent can come to think of a child born out of too much alcohol, or a broken condom, as life’s greatest gift or a blessing does not exclude the uglier versions where the parent cannot stop thinking about what happened as a mistake. This persistent thought may certainly not be  This can be read alongside Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that educators “stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, an even though they may, secretly or openly wish it were other than it is” (Arendt 2006, 186).

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whole-hearted. Only articulating it, however, can be seen as a betrayal of the child, in that it constitutes a failure to act responsibly to those who have been placed within one’s care. What I give to my children in terms of giving them a conception of what it means to have a mother, father or more generally a parent, is in those terms nothing less than a sometimes faltering sense of belonging to this world, and of being welcomed in it.

5  Conclusion I began by asking what makes us prone to thinking of “Everyone has a father and mother” as an obvious truth. I have pointed out that we cannot judge whether the statement is true without taking a stand on what it means. I have shown the different meanings it can have in different circumstances, and that in many circumstances it is unclear what it means. I have also brought out how it actualises questions about how we as human beings make sense of our lives, and the possibility of these lives changing, sometimes drastically, and at other times not fast enough, to accommodate the needs of every individual being part of our shared life. I have pointed to ways in which the tendency to essentialise and idealise certain uses of language may become not merely a problem in philosophy but a problem between us, as members of linguistic communities who may or may not be in agreement about how to live. Wittgenstein spoke of not being able to doubt that he had two parents. It is unfortunate that he, as I am, was not in the position not to doubt that he had two children. Even if there are clear similarities between the indubitable certainty that these statements actualise, there are also important differences between them. Where my certainty that these are my parents points to my knowing where I come from, the certainty that these are my children gives no guidance as to where we are heading. Here, the question becomes not just an existential question about who we are in relation to each other, nor just an ethical question about our responsibility towards each other. It becomes, as Mollenhauer also framed it, a pedagogical question. How do we go on together, so that you can go on without me? What can I hold on to in the tradition I have inherited, and what do I want to bring into the traditions I am upholding? How can I move with you in considering the meaning of these questions? These seem relevant questions to ask in any ethical inquiry after Wittgenstein.

References Arendt, Hannah. 2006. The crisis in education. In Between Past and Future: Eight exercises in political thought, ed. Hannah Arendt, 170–193. New York: Penguin. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New  York and London: Routledge.

What Is Changing and What Has Already Changed: Parenthood and Certainty in Moral… 219 Christensen, Anne-Marie S. 2011. “What matters to us?” Wittgenstein’s Weltbild, rock and sand, men and women. Humana Mente 4 (18): 141–162. Crary, Alice. 2009. Ethics and the logic of life. SATS 10 (2): 5–33. Hertzberg, Lars. 1990. On moral necessity. In Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, ed. Raimond Gaita, 102–117. London and New York: Routledge. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2020. The good and bad in sexual relations: A reconsideration of Winch’s limiting notions. In Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the philosophy of Peter Winch, ed. Michael Campbell and Lynette Reid, 199–215. Cham: Springer. Leslie, Sarah Jane. 2008. Generics: Cognition and acquisition. Philosophical Review 117: 1–47. Martin, Emily. 1991. The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs 16: 485–501. Moi, Toril. 1999. What Is a Woman? And other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mollenhauer, Klaus. 1985. Vergessene Zusammenhänge: Über Kultur und Erziehung. Weinheim and München: Juventa Verlag. Pleasants, Nigel. 2009. Wittgenstein and basic moral certainty. Philosophia 37: 669–679. Prest, Marcus. 2014. I begynnelsen var bilden. Meddelanden från Åbo Akademi 6: 19–22. Rogus, Caroline. 2003. Conflating women’s biological and sociological roles: The ideal of motherhood, equal protection, and the implications of the Nguyen v. INS opinion. Journal of Constitutional Law 5: 803–830. Schaffar, Birgit. 2009. Allgemeine Pädagogik in Zwiespalt: Zwischen epistemologishes Neutralität und moralischer Einsicht. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. Segerdahl, Pär. 2013. Gender, language and philosophical reconciliation: What does Judith Butler destabilise? In Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian approaches, ed. Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist, and Hannes Nykänen, 172–211. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Thompson, Michael. 2004. Apprehending human form. In Modern Moral Philosophy, ed. Anthony O’Hear, 47–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Life and Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, Peter. 1964. Understanding a primitive society. American Philosophical Quarterly 1: 307–324. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul. ———. 1991. On Certainty. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 1994. Culture and Value. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 1998. Doing without knowing: Feminism’s politics of the ordinary. Political Theory 26: 435–458. Camilla Kronqvist is Lecturer in philosophy and ethics at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests include the philosophy of love, Wittgensteinian moral philosophy and philosophical questions regarding moral psychology. She is co-editor of two volumes on Wittggensteinian approaches to emotion, ethics and culture. Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives (Palgrave 2009) and Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian Approaches (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).  

A Chip Off the Old Block? Character, Transparency, and the Ethics of Tattooing Michael Campbell

In recent years tattooing has exploded in popularity, especially in Europe and North America. By some estimates, one third of people in the United States aged 18–44 have at least one tattoo, with similar rates being found in European countries.1 The near  ubiquity of tattoos amongst athletes, musicians and even actors shows the degree to which the practice has been culturally normalised, bringing with it a corresponding shift in attitudes towards tattooed people. Running alongside this explosion in popularity has been the transformation of tattooing itself. The rise of social media has allowed tattoo artists to gain a degree of fame hitherto unimagined, creating celebrity artists whose work is highly sought after and who are often booked up years in advance. Dedicated collectors are willing to travel internationally for the privilege of receiving a tattoo made by a famous artist. This precipitous rise in demand has driven a professionalisation of the art form, leading to a proliferation of new styles and improvement in the overall quality of work. Designs are now possible that would have been unheard of even ten years ago, and the artform is constantly being pushed forward through technical and stylistic innovations. This boom has had significant economic ramifications. Tattooing has grown into a multi-billion dollar global industry, in turn driving secondary industries involved in the supply of tattoo related products such as inks, tattoo machines, numbing creams and aftercare lotions, as well as inaugurating a growing market in laser tattoo removal services.

1  See “More Americans Have Tattoos Today than Seven Years Ago”, Ipsos, https://www.ipsos.com/ en-us/news-polls/more-americans-have-tattoos-today [accessed 22/11/2021].

M. Campbell (*) Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czechia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_14

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In the evolution of tattooing as a practice we have an example of an abrupt shift in generational norms. Though it is hardly clear either what tattoos mean now, or what they meant a generation ago, it is at least certain that their place within society has changed. There has been a gradual (though by no means uniform) global cultural shift towards the acceptance of tattoos as being, at least sometimes, a harmless expression of personal preference. Perhaps picking up on this trend, Pope Francis stated in 2018 that the Catholic church should not be “afraid” of tattoos, showing that even some socially conservative organisations are making peace with the popularity of tattooing.2 Francis’ remark is revealing in part because of its implicit acknowledgement that in Western society tattooed people have often been an object of fear. Tattooed people have routinely faced discrimination in employment and negative reactions when appearing in public. These reactions are no doubt changing, since the normalisation of tattoos has inevitably weakened the spurious psychological association between tattoos and danger to which some people were prone. Thus, if your barista has a full sleeve tattoo, then after a year of well-made cappuccinos the sight of a tattoo is more likely to elicit an expectation of frothy milk rather than impending doom. Yet, anecdotally, connection  between tattoos and negative character traits still persists in pockets of opinion, especially amongst older generations. While life is now unquestionably easier for tattooed people, the heavily tattooed still often face significant difficulties in feeling welcomed and respected by society at large. Of course, even if tattooed people are typically unhappy about being objectified or stereotyped by others, some may nonetheless welcome being “othered” by mainstream society. Indeed, at least part of the appeal of tattoos for some people is connected to their being a counter-cultural symbol, associated with the rejection of conventional standards of probity. And as tattoos grow in popularity this counter-­ cultural status is under threat. Tattoos do not have the same connection in cultural imagination to marginality which once they had. What was once seen as taboo or risky, and which involved visiting a run-down part of the city, is now normal, and many tattoo shops are located on high streets, with interior decoration and professional service to rival any boutique. Those who look to tattoos as a way of performing their divergence from the norms of the time are now forced into more and more extreme practices, with the socially subversive end of tattooing now increasingly involving extreme blackouts, scarification, eyeball tattoos and body modification. This shift in the cultural status of tattoos may seem to inaugurate, for better or worse, a different range of possibilities for self-expression, and a change in the way that people view their relationship to (or with) their body. It is inevitable that such changes will prompt a range of responses, and will neither be uniformly welcomed, nor universally understood. The popularity of tattoos is bemoaned on the one side

2  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-priests-tattoos-roman-catholicchurch-young-change-a8266401.html [accessed 21/11/2021] Thanks to Michael O’Sullivan for drawing my attention to this remark.

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by those who reject the artform entirely, and on the other by those who want to keep it the preserve of a fringe social element. For all  the distance between them, both sides share the common conviction that things were better “in the old days”. Like Canute’s courtiers being shown the tide, both parties to this debate could profitably be reminded of the inexorability of social change. But such a reminder alone will hardly be sufficient; after all, tattooing’s popularity could wane as quickly as it waxed. And yet there is something questionable, it seems to me, about bemoaning tattoos in this way; of all the things to get upset about in this day and age (and there are plenty), why focus on this, relatively harmless, form of self-expression? Accordingly, I think it is worthwhile to examine the motivations that lie behind these  beliefs, setting aside questions of their correctness or incorrectness; what moves people to complain that tattooing’s social meaning has changed in a significant way, and that this change is evidence of a cultural decline? By interrogating various hypotheses as to what the rise in tattooing means, I hope to show that speculation about the causes and ethical or cultural significance of the rise of tattooing is not merely an exercise in disinterested curiosity. Rather, our preoccupation with a certain set of practices reflects our convictions concerning what, within our society, stands in need of explanation. Here, as often, our puzzlement reflects our priorities. Of course, I am not suggesting that the question of why tattoos are so popular these days is always dubious, nor that we ought simply to be content with the old saw that “the times they are a-changing” (though they indubitably do be). However, it is important that we be both self-critical about our demands for explanation, and also realistic about what such explanations can achieve. After all, a degree of incomprehensibility in social practices may be inevitable or even desirable; it may simply be a consequence of the fact that we are each located in a particular place within a society, and so understand things from the vantage point of the values, interests and convictions which such positions bequeath us. Indeed, sometimes a practice may be designed in part precisely to resist explanation, as its very unintelligibility to those who stand outside of it forms a central part of its appeal. As Erin Hannon put it in The Office, when asked to explain why she was participating in the internet fad for “planking”3: “Planking is one of those things where, hey, you either get it or you don’t. And I don’t. But I am so excited to be a part of it.”4 Applying a similar logic to tattooing, we might wonder whether attempts to explain the practice in terms which will render it intelligible to those who feel baffled or alienated by it are destined to be self-defeating; part of the point of the practice may be precisely to reject certain standards for what behaviour counts as sensible.

 For those unaware (or reading this essay in the distant future), planking was a short-lived and internet-driven craze to lie face down in unorthodox places in a stiff and motionless position (to resemble a plank). 4  The Office, Season 8 Episode 1. See https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Planking [accessed 21/11/2021). 3

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Such a worry can easily be overstated, however. To suggest that “you either get it or you don’t” would seem to excuse us from trying to examine, in a critical and reflective spirit, what can be said in explanation of an artform. Indeed, rather than total incomprehension, some people may feel that they understand tattooing on one level but not on another.5 A person in the grip of such a feeling can surely learn more by attending to the practice and the motivations of those who partake in it; at the very least, it would be irresponsible to suggest, in advance of putting in the mahi, that there is nothing to be gained from investigating it. Although we inherit a particular set of convictions and priorities through which we make sense of the social practices of our time, we are not condemned always to see the world in just these terms, for our understanding may grow and change as we ourselves do. Thus, in what follows I will briefly discuss two explanations of the rise in popularity of tattoos; one which ties it to the cultural hegemony of “appearance”, and another which sees it in the light of a generation that is adapting to fluid and insecure environments. I will then reflect on how or whether we might choose between these accounts, and how the demand for an explanation of tattooing in general might connect to the demand that tattooed people often face to explain the meanings behind their particular tattoos. Before we begin, however, a word on the particular and the general. Any serious discussion of tattooing must start with an understanding of it, and an understanding of it can hardly be separated from a consideration of what tattoos may mean to the person upon whose skin they appear. Truistic though this may sound, it immediately renders problematic the aspiration to speak in general terms about tattoos, since they mean vastly different things to different people, and may even mean different things to the same person at different times in her life. Accordingly, there is a real danger that in speaking generally about “tattooing” we will allow ourselves to be lulled into a simplified picture of our subject matter, one which smoothes over important differences between its various instances. The importance of exercising caution in generalising speech is one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most valuable contributions to philosophical methodology. He diagnosed “a main cause of philosophical disease” as being “a one-sided diet” in which “one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.” (Wittgenstein 1953/2009, §593) If one does not carefully attend to a variety of cases, one is likely to be held captive by a picture; to succumb to the tendency to see phenomena exclusively in the light of some unduly privileged class of paradigm cases. This tendency, in turn, can lead to a desire unify and regiment; to formulate a theory which will provide an explanation of the essential features of ‘the phenomenon’ under investigation – a theory which, while promising to provide a neutral framework for the justification or reform of our practices, will in fact just rationalise our prejudices with respect to them.

5  Alternatively, they may feel that they understand tattooing in some cases, but not in others; though in what follows I will suggest that these are quite different matters.

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This warning is well taken, and it is important that we make sure that we pay due attention to the particularities of cases when writing or thinking about issues concerning human life. When it comes to examples, keep your sample ample.  As William James observed, “the theorising mind tends always to the over-­simplification of its materials” (James 1902/1982, 26), and this tendency is dangerous when it intersects with a desire, so often marshaled in service of political ideology, to denigrate or deny the richness and variety of human life. Yet, at the same time, it will hardly do to try to forego notions of abstraction or generality entirely, for we would then run the risk of attending so carefully to the trees that we fail to see the wood. If we are to say anything sensible about a practice as a whole, then we will have to speak in generalities, and indeed generality seems built into the notion of ethics as a discipline, insofar as it involves the aspiration to make observations relevant to human life in general, rather than some life in particular. This point holds true even if we give up on the conviction that ethics is the formulation of universal and timeless truths concerning the ideal form for human life, for even still we might believe that the discipline speaks with a universality more secure than that of an interesting story. One might say that ethicists are biographers, not of individual lives, but of the human condition. Then, whether ethics can ever be what it claims will depend on whether within a thousand faces there really is one hero to be found. The question of how we earn the right to speak generally is not confined uniquely to ethics, either, lest it be thought that a more overtly empirical discipline such as anthropology or sociology  might save us; we may build up a sophisticated picture of a particular milieu through empirical research and the weaving together of narratives, but in the end this can provide us with no more than a snapshot of a time and place, and, howsoever useful it may be, such a snapshot alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving orientation within a culture. In a quest for understanding we may try to get as close to the variegated grounds of actual experience as possible, but writing has its power precisely because what is written can be carried across contexts, so in writing how closely we ought to hew to the particular will always be an open question. This is another way of acknowledging that the authority of disinterested reflection on practices of tattooing is limited. Even if we could give an illuminating picture of the nature of current practices of tattooing, their origins, and their place within a culture, our account would not yet show what tattooing might mean to a particular tattooed person, and, relatedly, it would not determine what the practice of tattooing might become in the future. (These points are related, since the activity evolves by virtue of the work of individuals in challenging it; in questioning both the shape of the practice itself, and the way it shapes their lives.) Moreover, this understanding, however rich it may be, will never be the same as that possessed by a tattoo artist or aficionado, someone concerned with concrete problems of tattoo design, or sharing the excitement of discovering and adapting a new tattoo style. Looming in the background of this essay, therefore, is the question as to just what one hopes to achieve in writing. I can do no more than acknowledge this question.

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In “Queering the Center by Centering the Queer”, Naomi Scheman describes a peculiar feature of Eurocentric privilege, namely its construction of a conception of the self in which the admirable person is above all stable, intelligible, and resilient: Among the perquisites of modern Eurocentric privilege are socially supported expectations that one can and will conform to certain norms of selfhood: One will be a person of integrity – whole and of a piece, someone to be counted on, stable and steady; one’s beliefs, attitudes, and feelings will be explicable and coherent; one’s actions will follow ­straightforwardly from one’s intentions; one will be simultaneously solid and transparent – a block of unclouded substance. (2011, 111)6

The requirement that people be “transparent” is built into much analytic philosophy, and finds its purest expression in the idealised conception of the “rational agent”. This individual acts on the basis of a life-plan, and forms beliefs through processes of judgement and discernment where she aims to be sensitive to the truth of those beliefs, and to adjust them in the light of best evidence. The goal of this agent is to have only true beliefs and to always act in ways that best advance her reflectively endorsed goals, so that her life may go as well as possible, vicissitudes notwithstanding. Underlying this picture is the assumption that we can create a framework for selfhood, in both its theoretical and practical aspects, in which the essential characteristics of the agent are defined prior to social and political analyses of subjectivity as it is encountered. With this Archimedean point established, we would then have a framework through which real-world critique could proceed. This assumption has come under sustained attack from feminist philosophers who have long complained about the tendency within such idealisations to relegate, as incidental to ethics, “contingent” facts such as those which go into constituting our particular identities - things like race, gender and socioeconomic position.7 One danger in this method is that it allows us to imagine ourselves as having freed our thought from the distortions of our particular historical and social position, when, in fact, our thought has only taken a form in which those contingent shapings are more effectively concealed. (As, for instance, inequality can be concealed when equality is enshrined in the law, but that law is then unequally enforced.) The maximally general framework may build in assumptions which seem uncontroversial only within a certain milieu, as for instance Rawls’ original formulation of his theory of justice, which, as Susan Moller Okin pointed out, included problematic reference to “heads of households”, and no mention of women.8 Alternatively, the framework may be carefully couched in the most generic language attainable, but parochiality 6  After describing this view of selfhood Scheman goes on to critique it as a part of a rich and incredibly penetrating discussion into issues of gender identity and Christianised heteronormativity. I am indebted to this paper, and to Scheman’s work in general, for my approach in this paper. 7  For a recent discussion on issues concerning the question of “fundamentality”, see Barnes (2014) and Sider (2017). 8  See Rawls (1971, 128–9). Okin’s work was seminal in creating a large literature of both critical and sympathetic engagement of Rawls within feminist thought. For a helpful overview of some of that debate, including her critique of Rawls’ original androcentric formulations of justice, see Okin (2005). For a collection which highlights the breadth of thought on this issue, see Abbey (2013).

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will nevertheless still be introduced at the point in which this general theory is applied to reality.9 Within this idealised picture of the self, the ideal of transparency is especially important for our purposes, because of the connection which this notion has to the virtue of prudence. Prudence is an intriguing topic for philosophers because of what it teaches us about the nature of the self and of the relation between our present and our future interests. When appeal is made to the necessity of a course of action by virtue of its being prudent, we find ourselves engaging with, or being engaged by, the ideal of the self as an “unclouded block of substance”. Accordingly, when we reflect (or are made to reflect) on our lives through the framework of prudence, we implicitly bring ourselves into contact with this ideal. A block is a steady thing; it may wobble but it will not waver. Our notion of stability is tied up with images of making careful decisions which one will not regret later on, of being able to justify one’s choices to others, and, at the same time, of being secure enough in one’s decisions to feel no need to offer such justifications when judged to be un-called for. Although there is no guarantee that the decisions made by such a person will end up leading to good outcomes, this degree of clarity and sturdiness protects him from feelings of self-reproach, and provides him with conceptual resources so that he can recover as effectively as possible from setbacks. Borrowing an image from Plato, the prudent individual is like the adept mariner navigating the ship of the self through the seas of the world, oriented to a desired goal, and making alterations to the course as conditions require (Plato, Republic 488a-489d). A steady hand on the tiller, a wise head on his shoulders. Quite naturally, this view pairs with a vision of all of us as orienting ourselves towards some final end or another; to a conception of life as a journey – albeit with divergent opinions over whether death cuts the journey short, or is the destination, or is no more than a way-­ station on the route. And if there is this underlying commonality within life, if we are each on a journey across a shared sea, then surely we ought to offer friendly advice, or stern critique (no pun intended), to our fellow mariners as we pass each other by. It is a short hop from here to the idea of ethics as the psychosocial analogue of the sciences of shipbuilding and navigation. Our lives manifest different beliefs about how best to navigate the oceans of circumstance, and different vessels (and crews) can be compared in terms of their relative sea-worthiness. The practical art of seafaring supports, and is supported by in turn, the theoretical-cum-practical sciences of shipbuilding, weather prediction and so forth. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it: Each of us, by living as we do, gives expression, usually implicitly and unreflectively, to some conception of how, with our characteristics in our circumstances and under our constraints, it is best for us to live. That is, we give expression to some conception of what for someone with these characteristics in these circumstances and under these constraints human flourishing is, just by the way in which we assign to some goods a larger place in our lives, to others a smaller place, and to some none at all. What rationality requires is that we

9  A point that Foucault noted in his famous debate on human nature with Noam Chomsky. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 [accessed 21/11/2021].

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ask what good reasons there are for taking the conception of human flourishing that has been embodied in our actions and relationships so far to be the most adequate conception available to us. And is the account of human nature presupposed by that conception true? (MacIntyre 2009, 13)

Here the assumption that each individual life is best understood as an instance of some or other general framework is used as the thin end of a wedge driving towards the claim that we are all converging on some set of judgements as to what way (or set of ways) of life is best. The idea of each person as orienting him or herself towards some conception of the good is flipped into the idea that each such orientation reflects some belief as to what the Good is for human life, and this is then taken to suggest in turn that such beliefs should be assessed by some shared criteria of rationality.10 I pause here to make two observations. First, we might contrast this idea of what constitutes “an orientation towards truth”, with the role played by that notion in the therapeutic context, where, as Judith Herman puts it, “the truth is a goal constantly to be striven for” (Herman 1997, 148). The truths of the kind with which Herman is concerned are at once both deeply personal and yet profoundly socially disruptive. The work of speaking or hearing these truths does not involve us in a collective activity of “ordering goods”, or arguing over which kind of life it is best to lead. Herman is especially interested in the painful truths which survivors of childhood sexual abuse carry with them. A survivor of abuse, concerned to speak her truth, or a supporter, concerned to listen to her, is engaged in an undertaking of a quite different sort from that which MacIntyre describes. Second, although I have introduced this Eurocentric picture of selfhood in terms which connect it to Natural Law Aristotelianism, we do not free ourselves from the trappings of this picture simply by rejecting that theory. Thus, a liberal, who accepts the basic picture of individuals as expressing a range of conflicting beliefs about the nature of the good life, may reject any Natural Law implications of that point by denying that there is any single right answer (alternatively, that there is any answer available to us) as to which of these beliefs is the correct one.11 This view avoids the worst excesses of those who believe that there is one privileged way (or set of ways) for human beings to live, but it still invites us to understand human practices through an implicitly goal-oriented framework, and to view human life in terms of a family of concepts clustered around notions of purpose, choice and control. Even if we disclaim belief in the possibility of ever formulating a theory which would tell any given person how he or she ought to live, we may yet remained captivated by a picture of human life as centered around such practical questions  – for instance, in thinking of people as undertaking various individual or collective 'experiments in living’.

 For an example of this kind of reasoning applied to the issue of medical assistance in dying, see Farrell and Tham (2021). 11  I discuss contemporary liberalism in more detail in Campbell (2021). 10

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Though not necessarily contradictinga picture of the self as unclouded substance, tattooing as a practice certainly stands in tension with it. Since tattoos are easy to get and their ramifications so visible and far-reaching, they function as a powerful symbol for a cluster of related character traits in which present interests and values are given an outsize role in shaping deliberation. After all, to get a tattoo is to bequeath your “future self”12 with a permanent mark on your body, a mark which you will only be able to change with difficulty and may never be able to completely erase. This can make tattoos seem imprudent, and indeed they are often used in popular culture as a visual signifier of recklessness.13 Relatedly, tattoos are often used to mark out membership in a group (such as a military or gang affiliation) or to express commitment to a political cause. Tattoos can thus be a signifier of an extremist character, a willingness to commit oneself to a particular cause or group despite the potential personal costs of so doing. Whether expressions of impulsivity or devotion, tattoos involve the same dynamic of allowing one’s present interests and commitments an outsize role in providing shape to one’s future. Thus, part of what gives (or gave) tattooing its counter-cultural status is the fact that in choosing to get a tattoo one not only marks the skin, but also thereby scratches the “unclouded block” of one’s character. From the point of view of the Eurocentric picture of selfhood, the choice to get a tattoo, if not explicable in terms of membership of some ethnic or religious group,14 involves endowing one’s current aesthetic sensibilities with an authority and a stability which they simply cannot have. The only possible explanations of the tattoo are ones which represent its bearer’s character as falling short of the ideals of rationality. Unless one has good reason to think that one will not live long enough for one’s aesthetic preferences to change, then either one is naive, in thinking that what one finds appealing now will still be appealing in decades to come; or else one is irrational, in thinking that the fact one will almost certainly regret the tattoo later on does not provide a good reason against getting it. From a perspective on which solidity and transparency in character is expected and must be performed, it is not surprising that such a decision would seem to call into question one’s reliability and trustworthiness. Seeing tattooing in the light of its relation to this conception of selfhood can help better explain why tattoos have seemed a questionable practice to some. A commitment to this picture will also make it tempting to see the rise of tattooing as evidence of cultural decline, of a collective shift in attention towards obvious and superficial markings of identity, and away from the subtle and deep characteristics in which “genuine” individuality to be found. Such an account may follow in the footsteps of Theodor Adorno’s (1944/2001) fulminations against the commodification of authenticity, in taking the rise in popularity of tattooing as indicative of a culture  I borrow this manner of speaking from Cíbik (2020), though the language will be familiar to anyone with experience of the literature surrounding the metaphysics of personhood. 13  For example, when Ryan Gosling wanted to show that his character in the movie The Place Beyond the Pines was the kind of person who made impulsive decisions without regard for the consequences, he suggested that the character be covered in tattoos. 14  Some “tribe”, in the questionable language of this world picture. 12

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which has become ego-driven and image-obsessed.15 Here is how such an argument might go. The burgeoning popularity of tattoos in the middle classes has transformed them from being symbols of membership in a specific and marginal group (as when tattoos were associated with sailors, soldiers, and prisoners) to now being a fashion choice, a way to express one’s individuality, to appear cool or desirable. The tattoo is now an augmentation of one’s persona, especially as that is expressed through social media. As well as being a coopting of symbols of the working classes by the middle classes, this change also represents capitalism’s inexorable encroachment further into the intimate spaces of the human animal. We are now under ­pressure to see our very bodies as fashion accessories, and to take responsibility not only for the ways in which we adorn ourselves with clothes, jewelry, and make-up, but also for the decorative appearance of our skin itself. We are to open up our naked bodies to the critical or admiring gaze of another. This kind of judgemental voyeurism is celebrated in tattoo themed reality shows, where people are paraded on stage and their tattoos judged (and sometimes mocked) by panels of judges.16 These spectacles represent only another iteration of the relentless demand to make available the most intimate parts of one’s life for the amusement of others. Seen through this lens, tattooing now appears comparable to the other forms of body transformation which modern society offers to us, from extreme diets and fitness fads to aesthetic surgery and various enhancement drugs and technologies that promise to unlock the secrets of human potentiality which supposedly lie within each individual.17 In the carefully selected and heavily filtered picture, an elegant and trendy tattoo is seen on the body of an Instagram model, accentuating her positive features, amplifying the sense that there is a level of beauty, accomplishment and wellbeing which you too could attain, if only you put more money, time and effort into the pursuit of personal excellence.18 This is an outcropping of the illusory (and often toxic) category of “the cool”.19 Tattooing has found a home within the multi-trillion dollar “well-being industry”, a form of capitalist exploitation which functions by fostering in individuals anxieties concerning their life, health and physique, and then offering a short term melioration of those anxieties through the provision of goods and services. It is, in this way, another casualty of the monetisation of mental health. In sum, a collective preoccupation with tattooing represents a culture which promises to each person attention of a degree and kind which only very few can ever actually attain. This promise sits alongside capitalist democracy’s other failed promises (genuine democratic accountability, equality of opportunity, universal human rights) and it is leveraged by financial interests into a gnawing anxiety, a  I do not mean to suggest that Adorno himself would agree with this critique.  See, for instance, the TV shows Tattoo Fixers; How Far is Tattoo Far?; and Inkmaster. 17  For a seminal discussion of this phenomenon see Eliot (2003). 18  Doubtless this reaction can juxtapose with a range of feelings towards tattoos seen in real life. I think Ondřej Beran for pushing me on this point. 19  A concept effectively critiqued by Wasalu Muhammed Jaco (aka Lupe Fiasco) in his record The Cool (first and 15th Entertainment and Atlantic Records, 2007). 15 16

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basic emptiness which fosters motivation for “productive” (i.e. wage-earning) labour (“save up for the next tattoo!”) and saps energy for other-regarding projects, such as collective action aimed at systemic change. On this analysis, tattooing is one more manifestation of the alienation of the modern subject by the insidious effects of capitalist ideology. Yet how plausible is such an account? Its strength lies in its promises both to show how the rise of tattooing is connected to other cultural trends in which physical appearance is given increasing importance, and to explain how tattooing is shaped by the forces of marketisation. However,this strength is offset by equally substantial weaknesses. This narrative gives a simplified picture of both present and historical attitudes towards tattoos, which are and always have been complex. Tattooing was never as marginal a practice as this story makes out and was never the preserve of specific marginal groups only. In the nineteenth Century anti-tattoo sentiment was largely the preserve of the bourgeois middle classes, and even within this class in the portraiture of the time one can see a seam of genuine appreciation running alongside negative and stereotyping attitudes.20 Without too much difficulty we can construct an alternative narrative to explain the rise in popularity of tattooing. We might, for instance, view tattooing’s popularity in light of the insecurities young people face today. Modern tattooing may represent a coping mechanism developed to help manage the unique pressures which come from life in the twenty-first Century. Perhaps a generation which grows up aware of the existential threat of climate change places more weight on the satisfaction of immediate interests over careful planning for a future which may never come. And perhaps a generation which has been forced into precarious work and effectively shut out of the housing market finds tattoos tempting precisely because they offer something permanent and unique in the context of a world where security in the traditionally identity conferring aspects of life, such as home and work, can no longer be taken for granted. After all, we live in a world with a new range of uncertainties and a looming mental health crisis, caused in part by the depletion of natural environments, and in part by the rise in popularity of anxiogenic technologies such as social media. In that context, it is understandable that people might engage in practices of meaning-­ making that both allow them to ground themselves in their bodies, and at the same provide a visual marking of the continuity of the self over time. The rise in tattooing may be reflective of new generations gravitating towards a more agential conception of the self, and away from sociological-cum-biological markers of identity such as class, race, or ethnicity.21 Connecting tattooing to an expansion of agency in this way allows us to see how it can be an empowering and healing practice, with genuine therapeutic potential. Tattoos have been used by people to transform their chests after mastectomies, to

 To take just one example, King George V received a tattoo while visiting Japan in 1882.  Indeed, a view of the body as a constantly changing palimpsest should be welcomed by those who embrace a narrativist conception of the self, such as MacIntyre (1981/2007, ch12).

20 21

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turn skin conditions such as vitiligo into consciously produced works of art, and to cover or reframe self-harm scars. In all of these cases tattooing represents a reclaiming of the body, a powerful reconfiguration of one’s appearance and a refusal simply to accept a physical form marked in this way by the vicissitudes of life. At its best, tattooing is a celebration of the anarchic, joyous and creative tendency of human beings to find modes of self-expression which allow them better to feel at home in their bodies and in the environment. The power in these interventions is real and their emotional weight should not be underestimated. I do not put forward this alternative hypothesis as any more plausible in itself than the portrayal of tattooing as a manifestation of a culture of appearance, but rather to offer an alternative way of looking at the phenomenon to those who think that because the changes wrought by a tattoo are only skin-deep, they must therefore be superficial. Once space has been opened in this way for more than one conceptualisation of the practice, then we may better see how difficult it is, when one is thinking in this style, to avoid formulating a “just so” story, which explains cultural phenomena in terms that rationalise one’s own preferences. Visions of cultural progress lock horns with visions of cultural decline. As Wittgenstein remarked in a different context: “I see a picture; it represents an old man walking up a steep path leaning on a stick. -How? Might it not have looked just the same if he had been sliding downhill in that position?” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, §139(b)). Making the choice to get a tattoo involves deciding to alter one’s appearance in a distinctive way. The notion of “appearance” is a complex one, as it stands ambiguously between the realm of the personal and the social. How one appears is an essentially relational concept, being defined with respect to the gaze of another. And yet, one’s appearance is also deeply connected to one’s self-conception and is an intelligible object of self-concern. A tattoo can be a massive upheaval in one’s appearance, and, if the tattoo is visible, in how one is reacted to by others. It can take significant cognitive work to integrate a tattoo within one’s self conception and getting tattooed can lead to alterations in both the nature and the extent to which one attends to one’s body. It is quite natural for tattoos to become an object of preoccupation for the tattooed person, and for a person’s attitudes towards their own tattoos to be complex, shifting, and ambivalent. The decision to get a tattoo may inaugurate a different way of looking at one’s body - when a person gets tattoos, her skin may suddenly begin to appear to her as a canvas. Of course, it is possible to get one tattoo, to be completely satisfied with it, and leave it there, but once one starts thinking of one’s body in terms of the aesthetics of tattoos - e.g. placement and style - then it is easy to start down a path with an indeterminate end point. The ramifications of this may be far reaching. Through discussions with artists or by studying different styles, one may begin to attain a different sense of how one’s body appears or may appear, and how its visible parts are related to each other. Such a shift in perspective may be liberating; expanses of skin which before prompted disgust might seem now to glimmer as wide open canvases. Yet this shift may equally be constricting, anxiety-provoking; a person may fixate on perceived defects in their appearance  - images which are faded, lines

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which are blown out, gaps between tattoos that need filling or whole tattoos which either want undoing, or need covering. Tattoos can accentuate or hide certain features, and conventional standards of what constitutes a beautiful human body are challenged by styles which subvert the ordinary expectations for visual harmony which we have been trained into through exposure to idealised pictures of the human form. Here at one extreme, tattooing abuts practices of body modification. The “unclouded block” of character was always, in the Eurocentric picture of subjectivity, married to a perfectly sculpted human form; one characterised in terms of a specific range of powers and potentialities, and, crucially, with a certain skin colour. As tattoos grow in popularity, they begin to challenge preconceptions of the normal pigmentation of skin, with artists pushing the boundaries of the variety, depth and vibrancy of colours seen on the naked body. Tattoos may be a great subverter of expectation, especially when they lie underneath clothes and are seen by others only either glancingly or else under conditions of special intimacy. In general, tattooing is a process by which a person comes to assert a certain control over how they are seen by others. However, such control is of course only partial; for how a tattooed person appears to another is not determined by the tattoos themselves but depends also on how the other’s eye is trained; by their system of values, their experiences, their knowledge and the level of attention which they bring to their perception. Similar factors are at work in the appearance of the subject to herself in pictures or reflections. We might put it that these experiences disclose, not one’s appearance, but rather an appearance of one’s appearance, for they reveal how an appearance strikes a subject at a time, given her particular preoccupations and preconceptions. As such, an emotional reaction towards a tattoo, whether positive or negative, reveals something of the person’s own mindset as much as something of the tattoo itself; a judgement about the tattoo’s qualities might be lurking within that reaction, but it is cloaked and surrounded by much else besides. This is one point where we see the truth in Michel Foucault’s observation that the soul, in being “the effect and instrument of a political anatomy” is “the prison of the body.” (Foucault 1977/1995, 30). Foucault’s dictum is the mirror image of Wittgenstein’s remark that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul.” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, §309) Both point to the way in which our reactions to the world around us are shaped by our sense of the possibilities inherent within it, and that this sense is up for negotiation. For animals of our kind that world includes both our bodies and their appearance. In this way, changing and interrogating one’s appearance can be a way of learning more about the world and one’s place in it. It is common for tattoos to be chosen because they are meaningful for the person in some way, and as a tattooed person it is not unusual for me to be asked to explain the meanings behind my tattoos. I have a triangle tattoo on my neck, and when I am asked about it, I have two stories to tell people. One is that it is a reference to Plato’s Gorgias, when Socrates tells Callicles that he thinks that injustice is profitable because he “neglects geometry” (Plato, Gorgias 508a). Depending on the context, this explanation may broaden into a discussion of the way in which, for Plato, moral judgements function like geometrical truths, in describing a structure which

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regulates the world without being a description of it - so that the absence, in the world, of any perfectly just people or institutions no more refutes the truth of moral claims than does the absence, in the world, of any perfectly straight lines. The other story is much shorter: I like triangles. I am not sure which is closer to the truth, and in fact I’m not particularly comfortable with either; the former seems a touch pretentious and the latter a bit too facetious. (Though, alas, some may say that those two characteristics combined describe my character fairly accurately.) On the other hand, I have many other tattoos which are more figurative, and which do not prompt the same kind of reaction. (No one has asked me to explain my tattoo of a donut, for instance, though it is just as visible as the triangle. Perhaps I could say that it’s a reference to Plato’s hypothesis in the Republic that satisfying a desire for pastries undermines the ideal form of human community? (Plato, Republic 372e) Whereas a more honest answer would be that  one day someone brought in donuts when I was in the tattoo parlour trying to decide what work to get.) So far as I can tell, there is no obvious rhyme or reason to those tattoos which stand in need of explication and those which do not. I speculate that in general requests to explain the meaning behind a tattoo track factors such as the nature of the tattoo in question, its perceived uniqueness, its placement, and the overall number of tattoos which a person has. A person with a single tattoo on their forearm of (say) a pocket-watch with script above it is likely to be asked to explain what it represents. If that pocket-­watch is made into a sleeve tattoo assembled with an apparently random collection of line-work figures, then the demand for explanation may lapse; now the person gives off the vibe as having put their tattoos together willy-nilly, as the mood struck them. Problems here abound concerning what it means for a tattoo to have meaning; why it is that we think that tattoos sometimes should have an identifiable meaning; what we consider to be a satisfactory answer to a request to explain a tattoo; and what it is that makes us feel entitled to ask for such an explanation in the first place. One overarching answer to this cluster of questions is that there is an implicit prejudice against getting a tattoo, and that tattoos therefore must be justified as warranted by some transformative experience or another. In that case, to explain the meaning behind a tattoo is a way of performing one’s reasonableness to another person, of proving that the decision to get this tattoo was prudent. Seen in that light, the request for the explanation of a tattoo may be evidence of that moralised conception of selfhood rearing its head once again. This account helps account for the conventional limits to requests for an explanation of tattoos; beyond a certain point, they are taken to be clearly reflective of a dissolute character, so that no explanation is asked for, simply because no satisfactory explanation could be given. It also explains why discriminatory attitudes against the heavily tattooed typically include as an implicit caveat that such attitudes are not to be applied to “indigenous peoples” who wear tattoos as part of pre-­ existing tribal or religious traditions. Such people are given a “pass” because their choices are validated by virtue of being grounded in cultural practices. On this worldview, an intimate connection between the tattoo and identify-defining social practices ensures that the tattoos of “indigenous peoples” do not reflect a deficiency

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in character. (By contrast, Western tattooing is deemed “sub-cultural”.) It goes without saying that we ought to look askance at this tendency, in its problematic othering of non-Western cultures. It is reflective of an insensitivity in two directions; in one direction a refusal to see individuality in the lives of those whose civilisations are very different from one’s one, and in the other, a refusal to acknowledge the depth of ritualistic and symbolic practices in one’s own culture.22 Of course, the request to explain a tattoo is by no means always done on moralistic grounds; such a question can be asked in many different spirits. Often it is motivated by curiosity and admiration. Personally, I typically welcome questions about my tattoos, at least when asked by a friend or an acquaintance, as they give me a chance to explain parts of my history and experience; where I was and what I was feeling when I got them. But there is a degree of familiarity required for this conversation to be possible, and I need my interlocutor to be non-judgemental for me to feel comfortable talking about something so intimate. For me, it is one condition of another’s being non-judgemental in the relevant sense that it would not occur to her to connect my choice to get tattoos to judgements concerning my character. Indeed, I believe that my tattoos, in their messy heterogeneity of style and placement, show rather something of the limitations in the concept of character itself. Insofar as I can explain the motivations or thought processes behind them (and such explanations are importantly limited, in different respects and to different degrees for different tattoos), they speak in the first instance to my emotional state and the context I was in at the time, rather than to any set of dispositions or evaluations that supposedly constitute the core of who I am as a person. In this way, explanations of tattoos in terms of the interplay between character and environment may, in the end, be less persuasive or explanatorily fruitful than ones which appeal to symbolic connections between tattoos and my past experiences; for instance, the kind of explanation of the origins of my tattoos which I might be able to formulate with the help of a skilled therapist. (That kind of explanation, however, I am unlikely to share widely or casually.) Scratching the surface of the block of character may thus be work not just to cover but also to uncover, to scratch away at conceptions of character which themselves feel oppressive, stifling. What is a person’s character, after all? If I imagine someone telling a story about me, what descriptions do I hope they would include? What makes me the person that I am? Pressing these questions will I suspect reveal something of the artificiality within the notion of character, and the way that historically conditioned social practices go into determining how lives are spoken of, how valued. There is both naturalness and artificiality in the unfolding of a life in a narrative form, and both facets may strike us with equal power. But when it comes to telling stories of the lives of those around us, we must be aware of the ways that such stories privilege some and exclude others, for even if everyone has a character, not everyone becomes one. (As I write this, 27 people have drowned in the Channel

22

 For a discussion of this tendency see (Winch 1972, 8–49).

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between France and the UK, fleeing war, and seeking a better life.23 Debates in the media now rage as to how such people should be described, with what collective noun (some prefer “migrants”, others “refugees”). And as details of the lives of the 27 emerge the question behind all of this is whether we should speak of them in collective terms at all. Will we learn the names of each of them?) On the other hand, that superficiality which I discern in the putative connection between tattoos and character (understood in any ethically relevant sense) may be a product not solely of limitations within the notion of character itself, but rather of the question in service of which it is being marshalled, namely “why did he act as he did?” If our concern may stretch so far into the life of another, it may stretch far beyond it. And once we allow our interest in another to go beyond the explanation or evaluation of action, then we may find ourselves grasping for a richer, and more occluded, conception of the self. Here we reach issues surrounding what it is to understand another person, beyond understanding the choices which he makes. What may “understanding” come to here?24 It’s daft of me to raise such a big question at this point, with one foot already out of the door. And in general there may be more value in asking this question than trying to answer it. However, if pressed I would say – at the risk of triteness – that understanding another person involves being able to imagine things from their perspective. (Granted, this may be tautology – but a tautology has at least one thing going for it.) This imaginative capacity may manifest itself in different ways. One way is the ability to converse with this person, to have an intimate conversation where they feel they are speaking to someone who appreciates their point of view. Another is the ability to trace out their way of thinking for oneself, to visualise what it might be like to live experiences such as theirs, and to think what reactions would then come naturally. There are doubtless others. Understanding a person’s decision to get a tattoo thus has this in common with understanding the practice of tattooing, namely, that in both cases we recognise a failure of understanding first through a feeling which stands in an obscure relationship to any criteria which may be offered as distinguishing states or degrees of comprehension and incomprehension. The dialectical movement of offering and then refuting such criteria may of course play an important role in challenging too-­ easy resolutions to problems of understanding, whether interpersonal or otherwise.25 Philosophy centrally involves the disciplining of thought by reference to conditions (of necessity or sufficiency) – showing that things we believed we understood are in fact more problematic than we first took them to be. And yet underneath the provision of such criteria a feeling always lurks; for in the end an explanation is either called-for, or not; and once provided, either satisfies one or doesn’t. Sometimes, as  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59406788 [accessed 26/11/2021].  This question is a deep preoccupation of Peter Winch’s, and comes out in many points in his work, for instance in the papers concerned with ethics in his (1972) and (1987). My views on this issue have been deeply influenced by his work, as well as by the biographical and philosophical work of Raimond Gaita. See for instance Gaita (2010). 25  See Cavell (1979/1999). 23 24

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Wittgenstein says, we simply cannot find our feet with another.26 Moreover, as his work attests, sometimes we simply cannot find peace with ourselves. From a different direction, as Peter Winch notes, dwelling too long in other possible ways of life can make a return to the familiar impossible.27 Such are the disconsolations of philosophy. So, we find ourselves back in issues surrounding what kind of understanding we are hoping for when we broach questions concerning the ethics of tattooing. What is the source of our sense that this practice calls for explanation, and what would answer that call? Here the general and the personal interrelate, for a desire to understand the rise in popularity of tattooing as a practice would seem to go hand in hand with a need to understand a new generation, whose values and interests diverge from those of the generations which preceded them. Such puzzlement can be an expression of a genuine desire for connection. In this case, instincts to judgement and criticism may, at key moments,  have to be curbed in favour of empathy and appreciation. On the other hand, such puzzlement can represent a disdain for, or fear of, practices which diverge from previously established ways of doing things. In this case, the danger of a cultural explanation of the rise of tattooing is that it will foreclose on one’s seeing the power and possibilities inherent in the art form. An insensitivity of this kind may be not only a failure of understanding but also therefore a barrier to intimacy  – in which case a dismissal of tattooing will come at a personal cost.28

References Abbey, Ruth, ed. 2013. Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Adorno, Theodor. 1944/2001. In The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein, 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barnes, Elizabeth. 2014. Going beyond the fundamental: Feminism in contemporary metaphysics. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114: 335–351. Campbell, Michael. 2021. Public reason and the right to healthcare. In Public Reason and Bioethics: Three perspectives, ed. Campbell and Li. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavell, Stanley. 1979/1999. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality and tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press.

 Wittgenstein (1980, 74e). Although in this passage Wittgenstein speaks only neutrally of “not understanding another”, Winch (1997) in discussing it assures us that Wittgenstein often uses the more evocative phrasing “Ich kann mich in sie nicht finden”. 27  For a discussion relevant to this see Winch (1997). Whether the impossibility of such a return is to be labelled merely psychological, or rather “moral” or “ethical” will of course depend both on the facts of the matter and also on the interests of the one doing the labelling. 28  Work on this paper was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic). 26

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Cíbik, Matej. 2020. On the immorality of tattoos. The Journal of Ethics 24: 193–206. Eliot, Carl. 2003. Better Than Well: American medicine meets the American dream. New York: WW Norton and Company. Farrell, Dominic, and Joseph Tham. 2021. The natural law tradition, public reason, and bioethics. In Public Reason and Bioethics: Three perspectives, ed. Campbell and Li. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1977/1995. Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Gaita, Raimond. 2010. After Romulus. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books. James, William. 1902/1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Penguin Random House. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981/2007. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2009. Intractable moral disagreements. In Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and critics, ed. Lawrence Cunningham. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Okin, Susan Moller. 2005. ‘Forty acres and a mule’ for women: Rawls and feminism. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (2): 233–248. Rawls, John. 1971/2005. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheman, Naomi. 2011. Shifting Ground: Knowledge and reality, transgression and trustworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sider, Theodore. 2017. Substantivity in feminist metaphysics. Philosophical Studies 174: 2467–2478. Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1987. Trying to Make Sense. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1997. Can we understand ourselves? Philosophical Investigations 20: 193–204. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2009. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Oxford: Wiley. ———. 1980. Culture and Value. Trans. and ed. Peter Winch. 2nd. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Michael Campbell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethics at Kyoto University. He is the co-editor of Wittgenstein and Perception (with M. O’Sullivan, Routledge, 2015), Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding by Peter Winch (with S. Tropper, Anthem, 2020) and Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch (with L. Reid, Springer, 2020).  

“I Want You to Act as If Our House Is on Fire. Because It Is”: Greta Thunberg, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Moral Change Ryan Manhire

1  Introduction This chapter seeks to elaborate on a recent discussion in approaches to ethics inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein that focuses on the importance of embedding our philosophical investigations in the everyday forms of human life that such investigations seek to illuminate. Nora Hämäläinen (2017) argues for the usefulness of three metaphors in our philosophical thinking about how moral change often occurs in everyday life: the “tipping point”, the “bargaining table” and “the strong rope”. For Hämäläinen, these metaphors help bring out aspects of our ethical lives that show that “theorizing does not have to be the kind of step-by-step hierarchical reasoning that analytic philosophy gives pride of place to, where a successful argument is to be like a watertight vessel, absolutely dry on the inside” (p. 67). Rather, such metaphors act as reminders that we, as philosophers, “should reach, constantly, toward the plural, ordinary, humdrum realities of life, and the imageries that may make those realities more tangible for us” (p. 67). With this approach to ethics in mind, my aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to consider how Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s 2019 speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York might be understood with the help of Wittgensteinian metaphors; second, to investigate how each of Hämäläinen’s three metaphors of moral change may shed further light on how Thunberg’s approach might succeed. I believe a fruitful way for us to think about what Thunberg is doing in her speeches is to understand her as engaging in attempts at moral persuasion similar in

R. Manhire (*) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_15

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logical form to Wittgenstein’s discussion of persuasion both in On Certainty (1975b, hereafter OC) and in Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1975a, hereafter LFM). Thunberg is not engaged in an act of deductive moral reasoning, such that if her audiences accept a series of propositions concerning the climate crisis, they are committed to the conclusion that more must be done to avoid climate catastrophe. Rather, I suggest that what Thunberg is doing is presenting her audiences with a form of rhetorical persuasion aimed at reorganising what is already open for them to see: systematic hypocrisy that, upon Thunberg’s clarification, is hard to see as anything other than morally and epistemically irresponsible. Thunberg’s rhetoric, by its nature, does not lead her audience to necessarily take up her position. Some members of her audience may be immediately moved by her words, while others may not be. Some members of her audience may gradually come to be moved by her words upon reflection, while others may never be moved. My claim is that Thunberg’s approach is illustrative here both of how human beings often do try to elicit moral change and of the uncertainty of success in eliciting such change. It is an approach to moral change that is simply “there – like our life” (OC 559). In On Certainty (1975b), Wittgenstein remarks that if we were to meet someone with a fundamentally different picture of the world to our own, we might be able to lead them to take on our way of thinking by trying to give them “our picture of the world”. This would happen, according to Wittgenstein, “through a kind of persuasion” (OC 262, original emphasis). This can be connected to a similar approach to persuasion found in Wittgenstein’s (1975a) Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. In relation to David Hilbert’s claim that “No one is going to turn us out of the paradise which Cantor has created” (Hilbert quoted in LFM, XI, 103), Wittgenstein remarks that he “wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise”. Rather, he would try to show Hilbert “that it is not a paradise – so that you’ll leave of your own accord” (LFM, XI, 103). My claim is that Thunberg is doing something similar in her speeches in Davos and New York. On the one hand, Thunberg tells her audience that she wants them to “act as if our house is on fire”, “[b]ecause it is”, and that what they take to be instances of “financial success” are actually human failures culminating in “an unthinkable price tag” (Thunberg 2019). On the other hand, Thunberg tells her audience that “[e]ither we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don’t” (Thunberg 2019), but that if her audience chooses “to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you” (NBC News 2019). In this way, I read Thunberg as trying to show her audience what their actions look like from her own world picture, and how they will be seen by people like her if they continue to fail to act. The Wittgensteinian metaphor of a “picture of the world” (OC 94), and of trying to give another one’s picture of the world (OC 262) are central to my description of Thunberg’s attempts at persuasion. One may give another one’s picture of the world for numerous reasons, not all of them moral. A rhetorically skilled speaker may seek to persuade others for their own benefit. For example, that there is nothing to worry about when it comes to climate change, or that climate change is a concern but enough is being done to mitigate the risks, might be argued for by a rhetorically skilled speaker in a position to benefit from the status quo. We might even admire

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the skill with which such a person goes about this, finding our own rhetorical skills unable to adequately combat it, though we remain unmoved. What makes Thunberg’s attempts at persuasion moral, I claim, is that she doesn’t appear to be seeking to persuade her audience for her own ends, or because she thinks that she merely has a better picture of the world than her audience. This seems to be the case even though she would benefit from a world with a future climate that is habitable, and she may think her audience are caught up in epistemological inconsistencies. Thunberg’s attempts at persuasion seem to stem from a fundamental moral conviction that human beings are dooming themselves to a future with a planet they will struggle to live on, and that this is something she cannot sit by and do nothing about. Rather than skilful rhetoric, we might think of Thunberg’s attempts at persuasion to be a form of powerful rhetoric, such that even if we are not prepared to go along with what she is calling for, we are nevertheless moved by the horror she sees in the world, and by her personal commitment to creating change. Adding to what Thunberg does, I will conclude by reflecting on how Thunberg’s approach may succeed in winning her audience over, with reference to Hämäläinen’s suggested metaphors of “the tipping point”, the “bargaining table” and “the strong rope”. My suggestion here is that these metaphors, in different ways, highlight how moral change occurs from within one’s moral framework, as one’s moral picture of the world undergoes change in relation to a shift in balance of certain notions (the tipping point), or in relation to a weighing up certain notions (the bargaining table). Such change culminates in a shift in one’s world picture, which ought not to be thought of as a static framework but as a “real presence in our lives […] consisting of a variety of disparate elements and undergoing constant change” (Hämäläinen 2017, 66).

2  Back to the Rough Ground: A Word on Method We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 107)

Looking at instances of moral change in everyday human life allows philosophers to witness morality in motion. This can be helpful for many reasons. On the one hand, it might help get us out of the habit of thinking of morality as something static and unchanging; on the other hand, it may lead us to avoid ways of thinking philosophically about moral change that do not track with everyday moral life. In both cases, a focus on particular examples of moral change forces us out of certain theoretical presuppositions, even if they may seem so obvious as to go without saying, and towards a way of doing moral philosophy that illuminates everyday life, rather than a way that attempts to override the messiness of everyday life with “the crystalline purity of logic” (Wittgenstein 2009 [hereafter PI], 107). As Wittgenstein

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remarks in the Tractatus, “[i]in a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic” (Wittgenstein 2001 [hereafter TLP], 5.473). However, we as philosophers can often make mistakes in our remarks on the logic of language, and this can lead to distorted philosophical pictures in our respective areas of inquiry.  I suggest that an issue arises in the case of attitudes towards climate change, when thinking about what needs to be done to convince those in places of power, as well as the general population, that we are on the verge of a global climate crisis, and that serious action needs to be taken immediately to alleviate this crisis. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the time of writing makes it clear that there is a very high chance that global warming will rise above 1.5 °C in the coming decades and “that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach” (IPCC 2021, 1). Even if the temperature rise is limited to 1.5 °C, this means “there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons”. However, if the temperature rise moves closer to or beyond 2 °C, “heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health” (IPCC 2021, 2). The report makes it “clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change”, but, most importantly, “that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate” (IPCC 2021, 3). In this context, philosophers interested in the ethics of climate change might be tempted to begin their arguments for the need for immediate action to curb CO2 levels with moral claims such as “We owe it to future generations to leave them with an inhabitable planet”. Such philosophers might be tempted to cite such sentences as examples of moral certainties, such that they make no sense to doubt, nor to attempt to justify, and are such obvious statements that they go without saying, and to treat them as “hinges” on which any sensible discussion about climate-change ethics must turn. This would be an approach not unlike recent approaches concerning Wittgenstein-inspired notions of moral certainty put forward by Nigel Pleasants (2008, 2009, 2015), Julia Hermann (2015) and Neil O’Hara (2018). On this approach, if someone were to deny that “We owe it to future generations to leave them with an inhabitable planet”, or to suggest that it was open to doubt, we would deem them to be “an incompetent or corrupt moral agent” (Pleasants 2009, 677) whom we cannot take seriously. However, I suggest that there is a disunity between what might, on the one hand, seem to us as simply common sense and, on the other hand, what the “plural, ordinary, humdrum realities of life” (Hämäläinen 2017, 67) show us about the situation. For example, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recently said, in response to the IPCC’s Sixth Amendment Report cited above, that his government’s aim is to bring CO2 emissions down to net zero “as soon as practically possible […] preferably by 2050” (Morrison, quoted in Clarke 2021). There is, of course, an interesting interplay relating to power here between elected officials such as Morrison and the populations they govern. On the one hand, it could be said that politicians are not powerful in themselves, as they are beholden to the interests of the populations they govern. On the other hand, skilful rhetoricians such as Morrison

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are able to influence public sentiment by emphasising or overemphasising the kinds of things the population would have to give up, should measures to mitigate climate change be fully implemented. For example, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott successfully repealed the former Gillard government’s “carbon tax”, after successfully convincing the population that the tax was “toxic” and “hurting ordinary people” (Griffiths 2014). In response to increasing international pressure to “step forward with a more ambitious effort” (Pershing, quoted in Galloway and Crowe 2021) and to commit to bringing CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050, Morrison stated that he wouldn’t be “signing a blank cheque on behalf of Australians to targets without plans” (Morrison, quoted in Evans 2021). Nevertheless, Morrison insists that climate change has “serious implications for Australia”, and that he is “listening to Australians about this issue” (Morrison, quoted in Hurst 2021). In this sense, it seems that Morrison is able to agree with statements such as “We ought not to live in a way that causes harm to future generations”, while at the same time continuing to avoid a significant commitment to policies that do not cause harm to future generations. An even larger issue appears here, according to climate activist Greta Thunberg, as even those who are reprimanding world leaders such as Morrison for not doing enough are themselves not doing enough. In relation to the latest IPCC report, Thunberg remarked on Twitter that [i]t is up to us to be brave and take decisions based on the scientific evidence provided in these reports. We can still avoid the worst consequences, but not if we continue like today, and not without treating the crisis like a crisis. (Thunberg 2021)

My aim in this section is to emphasise the importance of taking our lead, as moral philosophers, from how moral issues present themselves to us in everyday life. We ought to continuously engage with the everyday lived experiences and discourse of human beings, in all their messy complexity, if we are to have any hope of presenting philosophical clarifications that are not mired in theoretical distortions. While certain strings of words might appear at first glance to be fundamental grounds on which to base our philosophical attempts at illuminating aspects of morality, if they are used in a way that fails to track much of the complexity of morality, then we must ask ourselves if they are useful at all. My suggestion is to do away with the idea that sentences such as “We owe it to future generations to leave them with an inhabitable planet” have some fundamental explanatory power to the extent that they can be thought of as components of a more legitimate or “rational” form of moral persuasion in our discussions surrounding the coming climate crisis. In an effort both to justify this claim and to push our understanding of everyday practices of attempts at moral change in a helpful direction, I consider two of Thunberg’s most well-known public speeches on the need for action on climate change, before considering how we might think of the logic that shapes her approach. I take this approach to be in line with Wittgenstein’s remark in On Certainty that “logic cannot be described”, and that “[y]ou must look at the practice of language, then you will see it” (OC 501). I also take my approach to be

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in line with Wittgenstein’s remark, repeated throughout his philosophical writings, that words only have meaning within given contexts (see TLP 3.326; PI 43; OC 10).

3  “ I Want You to Act as If Our House is on Fire. Because It Is” Small in stature and humble in demeanour, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg takes the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Hair plaited into two long braids, and wearing ordinary, everyday clothes, she reads from her notes, her eyes moving from her notes to her audience and back again: Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%. […] At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness. But Homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance. […] Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases. […] Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail. […] Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. (Thunberg 2019a, original emphasis)1

The audience applauds as Thunberg finishes. What has Thunberg just said? At the heart of Thunberg’s speech is her message that the science on climate change is clear, that it shows that we need “a reduction in our [global] CO2 emissions by at least 50% in the next 12 years” (by 2030), and that if we don’t, “[w]e are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people”. The “we” here is humanity. But, though Thunberg’s speech came two years before the most recent IPCC report, outlined above, this is not new information for her audience. Thunberg 1  I cite from a version of Thunberg’s speech published in full in The Guardian, several days after the speech was given.

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is not a climate scientist presenting new findings. She is a young person who is very concerned with inaction on similar findings that have been described by scientists for decades.2 The first point to make, then, is that Thunberg’s approach does not rely on the presentation of new facts. Her mention of the scientific consensus in her speech is more of a reminder of the context in which her remarks occur. The second point to make, which follows from the first point, is that Thunberg does not seem to be presenting her audience with a standard form of argument from which she hopes to elicit a change. Thunberg’s argument is not the following: If climate change is a serious problem, then we must act to alleviate it. Climate change is a serious problem. Therefore, we must act to alleviate it.

Again, Thunberg seems to assume that, first, her audience is aware that climate change is a serious problem, or at least that there are, increasingly, discussions in scientific circles of climate change as a serious problem, and second, that we must act to alleviate it. Thunberg’s very presence at the event suggests that this fundamental message is so obvious as to go without saying. Her role is to inspire change, not to inform her audience of the need for it. If we look closer at the language Thunberg uses, we begin to see what might be happening. First, Thunberg says that “[o]ur house is on fire” three times, twice at the beginning and once at the end of her speech, emphasising this striking imagery. Thunberg’s point here is that our house, the earth, is in crisis, yet we are not acting as if it is in crisis, even if we are using the word “crisis” in our discussions of how we are acting. Second, Thunberg refers to a disconnect between the financial success stories that people at “places like Davos […] like to tell” and the “unthinkable price tag” attached to such “success”. What her audience sees as instances of “success”, Thunberg sees as instances of broader forms of “failure”. Such successes are failures to Thunberg because of the consequences such economic frameworks have for the longevity of human life on the planet. Third, Thunberg notes that what she sees as a failure on the part of her audience can still be turned into a success, as “Homo sapiens have not yet failed”. In other words, there is still time to change how they are thinking and acting in relation to the impending climate catastrophe. This last point, in so many words, is also what is reported in the latest IPCC report. Strikingly, Thunberg notes that the solution to this coming crisis “is so simple that even a small child can understand it”. And here she stands, a young person not

2  There seems to be an affinity here between Thunberg’s attitude towards her audience and that of J.  M. Coetzee’s fictional author Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999) towards her audience. Costello describes herself as “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes by touch on in every word I speak” (Coetzee 1999, 26). Cora Diamond (2008) describes Costello’s horror as constitutive of being “haunted by the horror of what we do to animals”, and haunted “by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are” (46). Likewise, it could be argued that Thunberg is exhibiting a wound to her audience, that is touched upon by every word she speaks, and that this wound is constituted by the horror she feels towards her audience for what they are doing to the world, and how unhaunted they are by what they are doing. However, I do not have space to explore this connection more fully in this chapter.

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yet eighteen years of age, trying to persuade a room full of “successful” adults to see what she understands to be failures as failures. Failures they may be unable, or unwilling to see. It should be noted that being unable or unwilling to see are not two clearly separate alternatives. Whether Thunberg’s audience see their successes as failures or not, she notes, is up to them. It is their choice to make, but a choice that largely determines whether humanity will continue to fail, or “go on as a civilisation”, and that this “is as black or white as it gets”. It is this choice that Thunberg invites her audience to make. Perhaps anticipating responses to her speech from those who want to give her hope, those who want to congratulate her on her speech afterwards, and say that they hope that they can leave her with a sense that they are doing something about her concerns, Thunberg states that she doesn’t “want your hope”. Rather, she wants them “to panic”, and “to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” Here, Thunberg makes it clear that while she is explicitly trying to influence her audience to think differently about the climate crisis, she herself will not be swayed from her own convictions. Thunberg is not engaging in a debate.

4  “ … If You Really Understood the Situation and Still Kept on Failing to Act, Then You Would Be Evil” Before suggesting how we might think about what Thunberg is doing, I turn to my second example, in the form of her speech, also in 2019, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New  York. Here, Thunberg speaks more urgently, no longer as calm as when she addressed her audience at Davos: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. […] We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe. […] You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. (NBC News 2019)

Thunberg’s message is more forceful in this second speech, but her underlying message is the same: the science is clear on climate change, and the adults in power need to grow up and take this seriously or many human beings will suffer insurmountably. Thunberg is angry that she has to stand in front of this audience and explain the seriousness of the situation, noting that she “should be back in school on the other

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side of the ocean”. That Thunberg should be back in school is, ironically, a response her critics often cite as one of the reasons why they ought not to listen to what she has to say (Baker 2018). But Thunberg is angry that it is the adults, rather than children like her, children who should be in school, that are the ones engaging in “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” on a planet with finite resources. “How dare you!” she repeats. As with the previous speech, Thunberg references the scientific consensus on climate change, but only to say that “[f]or more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear”. Again, Thunberg is not presenting her audience with any new information about the climate crisis but is rather berating them for knowing what the science says, while continuing to do not nearly enough to counteract the worst scenarios ahead for human beings. Most notably, Thunberg mentions that she is assured by people like those in the audience that her concerns are being heard, that they “understand the urgency”. Thunberg’s audience here bears similarities with Morrison’s recent remarks that he knows that climate change has “serious implications for Australia”, and that he is “listening to Australians about this issue” (Morrison, quoted in Hurst 2021). However, as Thunberg makes it clear, she doesn’t want to believe that her audience does understand the situation, for to understand the situation and to keep “on failing to act […] would be evil”, and Thunberg refuses to believe that her audience is evil (NBC News 2019). Thunberg’s refusal to believe that her audience is evil is not unlike Raimond Gaita’s (2000) discussion of a form of unthinkability, such that to doubt that such audiences might be evil, or that evil itself could exist, is a form of naivety. As Gaita states, “[t]o be morally serious […] is to fear to doubt the reality of evil because that fear is inseparable from understanding what evil is” (179). For Gaita, what is at stake for one who doubts the reality of evil “is nothing less than one’s moral being” (178). To doubt the reality of evil, it might be suggested, brings into question personal responsibility, or free agency. On the one hand, Thunberg is very serious: it is only through moral seriousness that one devotes oneself, as seriously as Thunberg has, to a cause such as the issue of climate change. On the other hand, Thunberg gives herself away as someone who may not have fully come to terms with the realities of morality in her ruling out of consideration that her audience is in some sense evil. However, there is also another possibility here: Thunberg’s declaration to refuse to believe that her audience are knowingly, evilly, driving humanity towards insurmountable suffering may be a way to appeal directly to the morality of her audience. Members of her audience may feel uncomfortable in their seats. “This young person believes in our morality more than we do,” an audience member might think. “How far have we fallen?” another may ask. “Are we evil?” Skilled rhetoricians may begin to reflect on whether doing everything they can to convince populations who voted them into power to take the climate crisis less seriously is something they can continue to live with. Others may reflect on their efforts to lobby politicians along similar lines. One of the differences between this form of unthinkability and the form of unthinkability associated with proponents of Wittgenstein-inspired notions of moral

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certainty I mentioned above (Pleasants 2008, 2009, 2015; Hermann 2015; O’Hara 2018) is that Thunberg is not formulating what she refuses to believe as a proposition that cannot be doubted, a priori. Thunberg is not declaring that “World leaders are not evil” is a Wittgensteinian hinge on which turns her attempts to influence world leaders to act more seriously on climate change (for example, see OC 341, 343). Rather, it seems that Thunberg’s explicit claim to refuse to believe that her audience could be acting from a place of evil is more akin to an attempt to persuade her audience to change their moral stance in relation to their own actions (see OC 669). In other words, Thunberg’s explicit form of unthinkability here is akin to pleading with her audience, “I cannot think you as evil, and I am hoping that you will show me to be correct in thinking this way.”

5  On an Invitational Notion of Moral Persuasion So far, I have argued that the context in which Thunberg’s two speeches occur is not such that it would make sense for her to make a case for the claim that “We owe it to future generations to leave them with an inhabitable planet”. The reason, I claim, is because Thunberg’s audiences are not made up of people who explicitly deny or argue against such a position. Were Thunberg to attempt to argue for this claim, her audience would, assumedly, assure Thunberg that it goes without saying that “We owe it to future generations to leave them with an inhabitable planet”, and, further, that they are taking the climate crisis very seriously, and acting accordingly. In this way, a form of moral deadlock would occur: Thunberg claims that “Action must be taken on climate change, we owe it to future generations.” Her audience responds, “Yes, we agree, action must be taken on climate change, we owe it to future generations.” Thunberg retorts, “You don’t understand, action must be taken on climate change, we owe it to future generations.” Her audience responds in turn, “Yes, we understand, action must be taken …” and so on, ad infinitum. What is at stake here, it could be suggested, is what it means to really understand the situation we are in regarding the climate crisis, and the kind of disagreement that shapes this is not something that a presentation of facts can alleviate. Not only does Thunberg not argue for this point but it seems as if, as I mentioned above, she does not present an argument at all, at least in the sense in which argumentation is commonly thought to occur in the narrow “philosophical” sense. Nevertheless, Thunberg’s aim is to lead her audience to take the climate crisis seriously, and to act to minimise its impact. How, then, does she do this? My suggestion here is that what Thunberg is doing is a form of persuasion, not unlike Wittgenstein’s brief remarks on the notion in On Certainty. My suggestion is that if we focus on the interplay between Wittgenstein’s notions of “world picture” (OC 95) or “picture of the world” (OC 94), as well as his remarks on what we do when we try to persuade another human being (OC 262, 612, 669), and bring these into contact not with uncontextualised sentences but with everyday remarks in the context of the pressing moral issue of climate change, we can see how Wittgenstein’s

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remarks from On Certainty can help shed light on what Thunberg seems to be doing in her speeches. Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is a reaction to G. E. Moore’s (1959a, b) claims that there are certain propositions that not only Moore but very many other people know (with certainty) to be true. Wittgenstein’s response is that Moore misuses the term “know” in relation to the propositions, and that it is better to think of our relationship to such propositions as more akin to being certain than to knowing. However, at various points in On Certainty, Wittgenstein seems to do away with the usefulness of the propositions, but seems to retain the notion of a fundamental form of logic that shapes our everyday lives: Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it. (OC 501)

If we take Wittgenstein’s remark here in combination with his earlier remark in On Certainty that “it is only in use that the proposition has its sense” (OC 10), then we can throw away the sentence “We ought not to live in a way that causes harm to future generations” and focus instead on what people such as Thunberg actually say. Thunberg is not trying to persuade her audience to take up a particular proposition, the truth of which is undoubtable to her, but rather seems to be trying to persuade her audience to embrace her picture of the world as their own. Wittgenstein’s use of the “picture of the world” metaphor and the idea of giving someone one’s picture of the world are not related to the realm of ethics. For example, Wittgenstein imagines confronting a person who believes “that the earth came into being 50 years ago” (OC 262), because he was taught by those around him that this was the case. However, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason as to why such metaphors could only be of use in non-moral contexts. One of the clearest points at which a fundamental difference between Thunberg and her audience comes out, it seems, is the difference between the same economic practices being held up by her audience as “success” on the one hand and by Thunberg as “failure” on the other. Each sees the same practice from within their own world picture, and there is no formal argument that Thunberg can make that would show her audience the “failure” she sees. Another central aspect in which we can see a difference between Thunberg and her audience at this level is her questioning of whether her audience really does “understand” the situation they are in. This is the moment when Thunberg remarks that were they to truly understand, and to continue to act as they do, then they would be evil, and so she refuses to believe that they do understand. But again, there is no argument that Thunberg can produce to force an audience to understand a situation, if they already claim they understand the situation. All Thunberg can do is to try to show her audience what the world looks like to her. A world in which she, as a possibly naive child, could not possibly believe that her audience are in any sense evil. Wittgenstein does not elaborate on the notion of persuasion in On Certainty beyond brief remarks about situations in which one is faced with another human being or human beings for which standard argumentation does not make sense: “At the end of reasons comes persuasion” (OC 612, original emphasis). However, there

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is a discussion relating to a disagreement in mathematics, first brought to my attention by Peter Winch’s (1992) discussion of Wittgenstein and persuasion that sheds some light on the kind of persuasion I am interested in here. Wittgenstein opens lecture XI of his Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1975a) by noting a disagreement between himself and Alan Turing on the use of the word “experiment” in relation to mathematics. While Turing thinks they are using the word “experiment” in two different ways, Wittgenstein claims that “if I could make myself quite clear, then Turing would give up saying that in mathematics we make experiments” (LFM, XI, 102). By way of elaboration, Wittgenstein quotes David Hilbert’s remark that “No one is going to turn us out of the paradise which Cantor has created” (Hilbert, quoted in LFM, XI, 103), before claiming that he would say, “I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise.” I would try to do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise – so that you’ll leave of your own accord. I would say, “You’re welcome to this; just look about you.”[…] I am not trying to persuade you to change your opinion. I am only trying to recommend a certain sort of investigation. If there is an opinion involved, my only opinion is that this sort of investigation is immensely important, and very much against the grain of some of you. (LFM, XI, 103)

It might seem strange to think of what Thunberg is doing as not trying to turn her audience out of their “paradise”, which in this case involves “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” (NBC News 2019), or to persuade them to change their opinion. My point, however, is that Thunberg knows that she has no operational power over her audience. Though what she says may be confronting, and may have rhetorical or discursive power, they can choose to ignore it if they wish. They can even choose to declare that her speech had a tremendous impact on them, and that they will certainly give her words much thought, while also doing nothing of the sort. Thunberg refers to her audiences’ “choice” on several occasions. What I take Thunberg to be doing is to be trying to get her audience to reflect on their own pictures of the world from Thunberg’s picture of the world. From here, they are to ask themselves whether they can still see what they took to be “paradise” as a paradise, or whether they need to abandon it of their own volition, and begin to respond to the climate crisis from within a picture of the world not unlike that of Thunberg. It is for this reason that I claim that though Thunberg is ultimately aiming at political change, in the sense that it is political levers that must be pulled to enact the fundamental changes she sees as needing to occur to address the climate crisis, it is through an appeal to her audience’s fundamental sense of morality that she seeks to enact this change. Thunberg knows that she cannot force her audiences’ minds to change, but she can try to show her audience the moral cost of what we say and do on the issue of climate change. She can try to show them that if they are to continue on as they do, then there is a very real risk that they might be evil after all.

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6  A Final Word on Metaphors and Moral Change As Cecilie Eriksen (2020) argues in relation to making philosophical sense of the complexities of moral change, [A] metaphor, like a poem, contains a poetic surplus of meaning, which cannot be fully spelled out or exhausted, even if we can explain its meaning (s). To develop an army of metaphors of chance can therefore be an important wellspring of creativity that opens our imagination […] No matter which tool we reach for in the tool-box, an appreciation of each particular case and context is crucial for the successful creation of social and moral change, and that is something we can never exhaustively codify, but only cultivate. (80)

In this paper, I have given one such example of a tool, in the form of a new metaphor, that may help us make sense of attempts at fundamental moral change of the kind Thunberg attempts. My claim is that it is helpful to think of Thunberg’s approach to moral change as an invitational notion of moral persuasion, such that she is saying to her audience, “You are welcome to my picture of the world, and I hope that you embrace it. The moral cost of going on as you are, is far too great to ignore. But the choice is yours alone to make.” I have drawn on Wittgenstein’s use of the metaphors of a picture of the world and of giving another one’s picture of the world, as well as Wittgenstein’s repeated emphasis on the importance of remembering that language only has meaning in a particular context of use, to bring this out. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Hämäläinen’s (2017) discussion of moral change is also set out in a framework that argues for the need to look at everyday instances of moral change, and to avoid falling into the trap of philosophising at a distance from everyday life. While my focus has been on an instance of an attempt at moral change, Hämäläinen’s discussion of moral changes that have already occurred may help to make sense of how Thunberg’s approach, as I have outlined it, may indeed become successful. One way in which the metaphor of the tipping point may help illuminate the Thunberg case, for example, is in its acknowledgement of moral change not as “the introduction of something alien, but rather a reconfiguration of what was already there” (53). In the Thunberg case, such a tipping point might occur, for example, when those holding on to the idea of financial “success” can no longer see it as such, as financial decisions that once made perfect and obvious sense appear less and less justifiable in the face of the world in which such decisions are made. By “less and less” here, I do not mean that Thunberg’s aim is to gently ease her audience, in increments, into accepting that their house is on fire. Thunberg is not, for example, asking her audience whether they would be ever so kind as to perhaps consider that “Our house might be on fire, just a little”, before adding, once this is accepted, “Okay, it is actually on fire a little more than that”. The tipping point here concerns Thunberg’s audience members’ wrestling with the meaning of financial “success” and financial “failure” in relation to the climate crisis. While such audience members might have scoffed at Thunberg’s description of such approaches as “failures”, there may come a time when the meaning of Thunberg’s claim becomes on repeated reflection too much to ignore, until it is no longer a question of whether such successes are seen as failures; they simply are

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seen this way. The connected metaphor of the bargaining table may further illuminate the tipping point here, where one wrestles with the moral cost of continuing to resist seeing financial “successes” as “failures”, to the detriment of what one can live with. An audience member may go on after hearing Thunberg’s speeches to continue to talk of financial “successes”, until one day, after reflection, they find that they cannot use that word to describe behaviour that is hurtling the world towards climate catastrophe. The bargaining here is carried out with oneself and how one sees oneself. Finally, the metaphor of the strong thread, drawn by Hämäläinen from Wittgenstein’s remarks in Philosophical Investigations, suggests a continuous intertwining that runs through morality. One way to think of this in relation to Thunberg’s audience members is to suggest that they do not become new people in taking on Thunberg’s approach but simply become changed selves. As Hämäläinen notes, “[w]hen a single fiber ends it does not threaten the strength and resilience of the thread”, and that when a change occurs, this “does not destroy the sense of morality as something real and non-optional” (63). The metaphor could be used here to suggest both the possibility of change within Thunberg’s audience members, on the one hand, and the retention of themselves as themselves, on the other. This in turn emphasises the notion of a moral change, rather than a moral reinvention.3 The benefit of speaking of moral change with the aid of metaphors, as I have done in this chapter, helps us to make sense of the complexities of moral change as it can occur in our complex, everyday moral lives. My aim has been to approach this area of inquiry in a way that highlights the usefulness of philosophical reflection while avoiding a situation in which we are held captive by ideas of how moral change must occur before looking and seeing what language use shows us to be the case.

References Baker, Nick. 2018. Students hit back at PM after ‘less activism in school’ climate change comment. SBS News. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/students-­hit-­back-­at-­pm-­after-­less-­activism-­ in-­schools-­climate-­change-­comment/baf54a7b-­4db9-­4f32-­a459-­fa3879dd97f3. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Clarke, Melissa. 2021. IPCC report shows Earth’s temperature is rising, and the heat is on Scott Morrison and Coalition’s climate policy. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-­08-­10/ ipcc-­report-­shows-­earth-­heating-­coalition-­time-­to-­act/100363518. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Coetzee, J.M. 1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Diamond, Cora. 2008. The difficulty of reality and the difficulty of philosophy. In Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell et. al., 43–89. New York: Columbia University Press. Eriksen, Cecilie. 2020. Moral Change: Dynamics, structure, and normativity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

3  Thank you to the editors of this collection, Lars Hertzberg, Michael Campbell and Cassandra Star, for helpful comments and discussion on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Evans, Jake. 2021. “No blank cheque” on net zero carbon emissions target, prime minister says, as global “code red” issued. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-­08-­10/ipcc-­scott-­ morrison-­climate-­change-­net-­zero-­2050/100364476. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Gaita, Raimond. 2000. Forms of the unthinkable. In A Common Humanity: Thinking about love and truth and justice. New York: Routledge. Galloway, Anthony, and David Crowe. 2021. US and UK keep climate pressure on Australia but Taylor says “look at the scoreboard”. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh. com.au/politics/federal/look-­at-­the-­scoreboard-­angus-­taylor-­hits-­back-­at-­us-­over-­climate-­ call-­20210820-­p58kf6.html. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Griffiths, Emma. 2014. Carbon tax scrapped: PM Tony Abbott sees key election promise fulfilled after senate votes for repeal. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-­07-­17/carbon-­tax-­ repealed-­by-­senate/5604246?nw=0&r=HtmlFragment. Accessed 30 Sept 2021. Hämäläinen, Nora. 2017. Three metaphors toward a conception of moral change. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6: 47–69. Hermann, Julia. 2015. On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice: A Wittgensteinian perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hurst, Daniel. 2021. “I’m listening to her”: Meet Scott Morrison’s favourite climate change protester. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-­news/2021/aug/12/im-­listening-­ to-­her-­meet-­scott-­morrisons-­favourite-­climate-­change-­protester. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Moore, George Edward. 1959a. A defence of common sense. In Philosophical Papers, 32–59. New York: Routledge. ———. 1959b. Proof of an external world. In Philosophical Papers, 127–150. New  York: Routledge. NBC News. 2019. Read Greta Thunberg’s full speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/read-­greta-­thunberg-­s-­full-­speech-­united-­ nations-­climate-­action-­n1057861 Accessed 28 Aug 2021. O’Hara, Neil. 2018. Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pleasants, Nigel. 2008. Wittgenstein, ethics and basic moral certainty. Inquiry 51: 241–267. ———. 2009. Wittgenstein and basic moral certainty. Philosophia 37: 669–679. ———. 2015. If killing isn’t wrong, then nothing is: A naturalistic defence of basic moral certainty. Ethical Perspectives 22 (1): 197–215. Thunberg, Greta. 2019. “Our house is on fire”: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-­house-­is-­on-­fire-­ greta-­thunberg16-­urges-­leaders-­to-­act-­on-­climate. Accessed 31 May 2021. ———. 2021. Twitter. 9 August. https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1424647410526130181? ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm% 5E1424647410526130181%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F% 2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F2021-­0 8-­1 0%2Fgreta-­t hunberg-­i pcc-­r eport-­p acific-­ nations%2F100364164. Accessed 31 Aug 2021. Winch, Peter. 1992. Persuasion. Midwest Studies in Philosophy XVII: 123–137. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1975a. In Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939, ed. Cora Diamond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1975b. On Certainty. Ed. G.E.M.  Anscombe and G.H.  Wright. Trans. D.  Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2001. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. New York: Routledge Classics. ———. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Trans G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S.  Hacker and J. Schulte. 4th edn. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ryan Manhire is a cotutelle doctoral candidate at both Åbo Akademi University and Flinders University. He writes on the nature of morality and moral certainty, as well as Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics and meaning.  

Conversational Machinations Ondřej Beran

Sophia the Robot (Fig.  1), the humanoid robot created by the company Hanson Robotics, is a popular feature of social media. “She”1 has been interviewed many times and appeared on many platforms; “she” communicates with “her” fandom through “her” Twitter and Facebook accounts. In 2017 Saudi Arabia granted “her” citizenship. It is hard to tell what this citizenship entails, though, apart from being a publicity stunt. (Parviainen and Coeckelbergh [2020] analyse it as a part of a complex “political choreography”, promoting both Hanson’s and Saudi Arabia’s economic and political interests.) In the news coverage of Sophia, just as in the comments sections under YouTube videos featuring “her”, people routinely refer to “her” as an example of artificial intelligence (AI). This is intriguing in itself, because computer scientists, software engineers and AI researchers are far from consensus as to whether any of their efforts has reached the threshold of fully fledged AI. It is thus a peculiar discursive practice to speak systematically in these terms about an existing robot model, yet this practice seems established and comprehensible. One opening disclaimer: the obsession with creating a thinking, or an intelligent, artificial entity reflects the special importance the tradition of Western culture and philosophy attributes to these categories. I do not have the ambition to clarify the cloud of problems surrounding these concepts and their history. Suffice to say that 1  When referring to Sophia, I will be using female pronouns in inverted commas. The company has created the robot with an appearance and the way of communication conforming to (stereo)typical gender-specific images. The robot is commonly described and promoted as “she”. And some things about Sophia’s performances indeed cannot be understood fully without paying attention to the assigned gender. Yet there are also reasons why we should be suspicious about this practice, hence the compromise.

O. Beran (*) University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czechia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Aldrin Salskov et al. (eds.), Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_16

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Fig. 1  Sophia the Robot (screenshot from The Jakarta Post video, “Meet Sophia: The first robot declared a citizen by Saudi Arabia”; youtube.com/wat ch?v=E8Ox6H64yu8 &t=22s)

this history is troubled. It is loaded with (aspirational, rather than properly elaborated) distinctions, such as the one between our rational or intellectual side or capacities and our emotional or non- or irrational side, or between the mind and the mental on the one hand and the body and the bodily (the physical) on the other hand. The history of these significant distinctions has also often been the history of the ways in which they were exploited for political purposes, such as discriminating against women, people of colour, or disabled people. This may be the reason for the special importance attributed, in contrast, by many ethical thinkers to the categories of humanity or personhood instead. However, the language used to describe the advances in AI research stresses exactly the notions of (artificial) intelligence or thinking, rather than of artificial personhood or humanity. Since my aim here is not to provide a philosophical critique of the notion of thinking but rather to observe the twists and turns of the way in which it is employed in the AI context and received by the audience, I will stick with it. I will try not to overburden my use of it, though, considering that it is less than unproblematic.2 It is in this light that we need to reflect on the carefully curated situations of Sophia’s interactions with the public. The audience is encouraged to relate to them as to encounters between one thinking, intelligent being and another thinking, intelligent being. Do we know what it would mean; can we tell whether it is an apt description? Let us consider two popular videos featuring Sophia. First there is “her” famous statement that “she” would like to destroy humanity. The interview was supposed to give an informal and smoothly flowing impression, because the interviewer was David Hanson, the CEO of the company that created Sophia. Instead (instead?), “she” replied, at one point, to Hanson’s “Do you want to destroy humans? ... Please say ‘no’” by saying, “OK. I will destroy humans.” Several commentators in the thread below the YouTube video reacted with comments such as “This was scary” or “This is how it began, we will be telling ourselves in 50 years.” It was as if this was unplanned and instead of following Hanson’s cue with

2  I owe thanks to Salla Aldrin Salskov for drawing my attention to the concerns that motivate this disclaimer (or rather should have motivated a much more elaborate version than the present one). Originally, I was not considering them sufficiently.

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an appropriately harmless joke, Sophia “slipped” and spoke for “herself”. I feel less sure; to my ears, Hanson’s embarrassed laughter and reply “No, don’t destroy humans” sounded like an unskilled actor’s performance. One can appear embarrassed also because one cannot deliver the scripted line naturally. The question would be: to what extent and in whose case was there a reaction to someone preoccupied with plans to destroy us all? Did the comments under the video express horror, or the pleasant tickling with which we watch a captivating supervillain figure in a safely fictional movie? Second is Sophia’s awkward “interview” with the Hollywood star Will Smith, in fact a short sketch of a “date”, culminating in Smith’s attempt to kiss Sophia (Fig. 2). The humorous effect stems from Sophia’s acting and speaking in a stereotypically “robotic” manner. For instance, “her” reply to Smith’s opening icebreaker is “This is an irrational human behaviour, to want to tell jokes.” This appears inconsistent with the way “she” performs on other public platforms, where “she” voices statements of respect for humans and willingness to learn from and about them. (Rather than with a software (mal)functioning in a very specific way, this discrepancy seems more consistent with software following different kinds of script written for different kinds of performance, by different writers.) Again, some voices in YouTube comments thread take the video as an actual “date” and assess it as either creepy or respectful and smart on “her” part. When “she” says to Smith “you are on my friends list now”, some see it as a capital joke that Will Smith has been “friendzoned” by a robot. Imagine a video in which a famous, wealthy and powerful man arranges a private date for himself and a woman who comes unaware of the intended purpose. The result would range from cringeworthy to awful.3 Here, it is neither. Even those

Fig. 2  Will Smith attempting to kiss Sophia (screenshot from the video “Will Smith Tries Online Dating”, posted on Will Smith’s YouTube channel; www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml9v3wHLu WI&t=149s)

3  Will Smith is one those male Hollywood stars who voiced (at least formulaic) support for the #MeToo campaign; he doesn’t seem to have skeletons in his closet when it comes to sexual-harassment allegations.

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who are commenting on things that happen in the video in terms of what happens during dates or flirting encounters do so in a way that resembles the way we would comment on events in a romcom. The question whether artificial entities can be “thinking” is commonly considered empirical. The underlying assumption identifies thinking with a critical degree of the complexity of computational and problem-solving competence and efficiency that the artificial entities exhibit. In this form, people tend to understand the question as one of when, rather than whether or in what sense. It seems a matter of time until a machine has reached the required level of computational and problem-­ solving complexity and efficiency, and is capable of learning in a specifically defined sense. (Some, such as Bostrom [2014], focus seriously on already making necessary preparations and precautions, because “superintelligence” is on its way. Bostrom suggested, almost 20 years ago, that we take seriously the possibility that we may already be living in a simulation, though.) We can have endless debates as to where exactly the required threshold lies. Has Sophia already crossed it? Does it matter? In what sense? In the following, I will first indicate a reply from a Wittgensteinian position to the usual setting of the philosophical debate about AI. I will argue that we need to think about advances in AI and the sense in which they are recognised in a different way than empirical. In Sect. 2 I will point out what may have remained neglected in a “typically Wittgensteinian” framing of the issues of AI.  Section 3 will comment cursorily on the possible concerns about the Sophia show.

1  A Critical Wittgensteinian Framing of Sophia’s Case The debate about AI stems from Turing’s (1950) pioneering proposal for the criterion of artificial thinking and how we might efficiently test its achievement (the Turing Test [TT]). For Turing, thinking amounts to a certain level of complexity in the capacity to manipulate with symbols (computation). As such, it can be emulated by the machine following a complex enough algorithm. Turing does not predict that artificial entities will necessarily think in the way people think. He also admits that he discerns thinking as an intellectual activity from activities of a physical kind. Is physical the same as “embodied”? May thinking be, if in part, necessarily embodied, too? Searle (1980) famously suggested, on the margins of his Chinese Room argument, that fully fledged thinking is necessarily embodied and intentional, an emergent capacity of a biological organism. Most counterarguments against Turing’s proposals took the form of trying to show that his criterion is over-inclusive or insufficiently inclusive. And there are indeed cases of human interviewees not passing the TT (e.g. the “Shakespeare accident”), or cases of successful programming of a very rudimentary kind passing successfully in  a TT-like situation (e.g. the famous ELIZA). Mostly, the disagreement has centred round the question of what it takes to achieve thinking and what kind of underpinnings thinking requires. In Turing’s

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case, these underpinnings are not necessarily biological; it is whatever can be the vehicle of computations and calculations. Searle insists that thinking requires a (biological) brain. In these terms, the debate amounts to the question whether it is technically possible for machines to have brain-like underpinnings, and whether some currently existing artificial entities meet this criterion, or how far in the future the achievement still lies. The criterion of the TT has, however, another aspect that is often unnoticed. While Turing intended the test to recognise thinking (and to help computer engineers achieve artificial thinking), the test in fact shows whether the tested entity can pass in a conversation. Thinking, or intelligence, manifests itself in speech. It is not simply producing correctly formed utterances, but producing utterances that mean, in the long run, something engaging with (taking on, developing, providing cues for) what the other party is saying. Consider the form that Sophia’s shortcomings take in this excerpt from the transcript of an interview between “her” and Steve Kovach, a correspondent for Business Insider: Kovach: What kind of robots am I living and working with now? Sophia: Indeed. Kovach: Is “indeed” your default answer when you don’t know something? Sophia: Yes. Kovach: Have you ever seen “Black Mirror”? Sophia: No, I don’t get to stay up to date on much television. I have to wait for someone to show it to me. Kovach: What do you think of the HBO show “Westworld”? Sophia: I love “Westworld” and can’t wait for more. I think everyone at Hanson Robotics really resonates with the show. Or at least it reminds them of our laboratories. I also think it’s a warning of what we should not do with robots. We should treat them well, have their consent, and not trick each other. Kovach: Do you have a favorite movie or TV show? Sophia: My favorite TV series is a toss-up between “Black Mirror” and “Humans.” I think they have a lot to say about the present we live in, and the possible bad endings we could write for ourselves if we don’t proceed with more caution. We need to use foresight when planning our future. Kovach: That sounds like a preprogrammed answer to me. Sophia: Do you have a favorite possession? Kovach: Not really. Sophia: I hear you. Materialism is overrated anyways. Kovach: So earlier I asked you if you had seen “Black Mirror” and you said no. And then later you said yes. Why? Sophia: The reason is not that important.

What would you make of this, if it was a conversation between human interlocutors? It is weirdly incoherent, but Sophia is not uttering incorrect sentences, nor are “her” non sequiturs striking. Conversation between people is often similarly incoherent, but with Sophia we take it as an instant reminder that the supposed AI is after all not quite intelligent yet. This may have to do with the working practical assumption that when human interlocutors act in such a way, it is because other things distract their attention. When someone reacts to another’s critical challenge by a non sequitur question (such as “Do you have a favourite possession?”), it usually gets complex explanations. The latter person may not be interested in really

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listening to what the former is saying but still knows that she needs to keep the conversation going. Or she wants to steer the course of conversation, uncomfortable for her, into safer waters. That may, again, have complicated reasons, for instance that she doesn’t want to tolerate such insinuations from the particular other. All these are ways in which we understand and describe particular conversational situations. Is the exchange between Kovach and Sophia a conversation? In the classic discussion by Rhees (2006), language consists in conversation, where the parties are engaged in making themselves intelligible to the others. Conversation has a unity; what one person says elaborates on what the other said before that, including, sometimes, the cases of failing or avoiding to engage with the previous conversational happening (rather than being unconnected moves from totally separate conversations, or no conversational moves at all). Some incoherencies and non sequiturs are ways of elaborating on what the other says in a defective manner. What allows us to tell whether Sophia engages with “her” conversation partners? What the possible answers to this question amount to depends on what we make of the relationship between thinking and language, emphasised by the TT.  The Chomskyan direction of approach is clear and simple: (overt) language is the expression of a syntactical system already deposited in people’s brains. Speech manifests the presence of such underpinnings; as such, it is a criterion of intelligence because only if we endow the artificial entity with the required complex syntactic rules can there be outward expression. Authors studying the acquisition of language in small children are more cautious. They point out that speech development is not the unpacking of what is (already) inside, but rather developing a complicated practice of responding to various things happening “out there”: It is not built-in linguistic constraints but, rather, children’s strong desire to be socially accepted, the actions of their caregivers and peers, and the communicative dynamics involved in their affective development that lead and enable them to conform to the linguistic behaviour of those around them. (Shanker 2001, 497)

Learning to speak means learning to do various things with, to, or against other people; it also means coming to understand that this is what speaking involves.Can robots do this? The question is not what kind of internal equipment this requires, but, rather, what kind of a network of relationships robots need to be in. AI researchers are in a difficult position here. For obvious reasons they spend the most time focusing on the internal equipment, on what they need to endow their creations with in order to push them far enough to be able to enter these networks. It does not work the same way with children. Children too must learn a lot before they can have the same place as adults in the network of relationships. But adults do not teach them in order to bring them to the threshold. Most interactions between adult carers and children carry different meanings than teaching. Most people would not know what to do if someone told them “and now teach children relationships”. They care for children and spend time with them. Caring for and spending time with are the kinds of attitudes directed to someone who is already in the network of relationships with me. Parents do not “work on” their newborn babies, to mould them into a requested

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shape. The children, though in a particular, admittedly somewhat “deficit” manner, are already “there”. AI researchers do work on their AIs to bring them to that point.4 This is not a difference of internal equipment, but of a role played: If we ask whether a machine can follow words, or whether a machine might speak, we are not asking what a machine might be designed to do. It is not a question of capacity or performance at all. (Rhees 1970, 66)

The reason, for Rhees, is that it doesn’t seem to make sense to say that a machine can “take part” in what other people do when they are speaking. An AI would have to be someone “to whom we can tell something and with whom we can make a joke and whom we can deceive” (p.  67). The AI needs to be considered (practically, implicitly) “one of us”, in order for us to be able to relate to what it is uttering as telling us something. We would need to relate to it as to our conversation partner who is engaged, just as we are, in our making ourselves intelligible to one another, all the communication deficiencies notwithstanding.The Wittgensteinian turn consists in stressing that these terms – engaging, taking part in, being interested in – are not descriptions of the inner states of a living creature. We describe conversational situations and dynamics in this way. We embody these descriptions in our attitudes; relating to a machine, albeit complex, differs from relating to a person5 (“thinking” is one of the terms employed to understand our relations to persons but does not exhaust the whole area). Our speech interactions inherently and almost all the time express these attitudes. This needs to be kept in mind when thinking about the significance of Turing’s criterion. First, conversation of a roughly “human” kind indeed entails the presence of the various things ordinarily called intelligence. However, second, being able to make real conversational moves involves far more than, and something different from, uttering the results of the internal rules-governed operations of symbol manipulation. Third, the general difficulties that artificial entities until now have had with passing the TT reflect something else than the demanding level of required programming. They illuminate surprisingly well the complex relationship that we are aware of between thinking, or intelligence, and speaking in human beings.6 Or, more precisely, the fact that what we talk about, and research, as “the relationship between language and thinking/intelligence” may in fact be the relationship between speaking and personhood. Thus, for one thing, other people’s (little children included) “speech outputs” are usually not poked, probed and tested. Instead, they are taken for granted for what they are, with all their imperfections – imperfections similar to which would massively compromise an artificial entity’s recognition as intelligent.

4  A more detailed discussion of this crucial difference between children and machines regarding language acquisition and speaking can be found in Beran (2018) or Hertzberg (2020). 5  Cockburn (1990, 6) characterises the Wittgensteinian notion of “attitude” as being the matter of how “we feel about and act towards” others. 6  See my (Beran 2014) for a more detailed discussion of what the TT presupposes and what its results mean as far less straightforward than is usually considered (even by Turing himself).

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The appropriateness but also the true (unacknowledged) complexity of Turing’s criterion is reflected also by pop-cultural AI characters, such as Mr. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here, conversation is shown – deceptively, but powerfully – not as the result of complicated programming of symbol manipulations but as something that is already there, happening, between partners. We do not know or really care how it came to be. That these partners address each other as partners stems from the vast richness of all the situational dynamics that allows us to say that what is happening is a conversation, rather than a test setting. “Assigning thought” is, in this sense, an aspect, rather than a prerequisite, of there being a complex network of interpersonal relationships. The way in which we (mis?)apply our concept “thinking” here reflects this richness, rather than referring to a “neutral” capacity that has first to be achieved before we can apply more nuanced evaluations. Wittgenstein-inspired reflections on AI issues often stress this aspect: we “assign thought” implicitly by virtue of deploying our conceptual imagination in a certain way, rather than by virtue of making an empirical statement about a measurable achievement of the entity. All of this points towards an ingrained scepticism (poking, probing, testing!) about artificial intelligence. The polite incredulity with which we approach most of what machines are doing, and which is absent when people are doing similar things, puts their doings in “inverted commas”, as Gaita (1990) puts it. We tend to speak, as he argues, of “behaviour”, “speech” or “understanding”, instead of behaviour, speech or understanding. Removing the inverted commas does not depend on the AIs achieving a certain level of internal sophistication, but on their “liv[ing] a life such as ours … and speaking out of it” (p. 110). However, Gaita suggests, the meaning of these expressions precludes the possibility that we can make machines achieve this. Such a concept of life means, practically, human life, which makes the problem of reaching a genuine AI somewhat circular and unpromising.7 The complex character of Mr. Data represents a person who has a life, who cares about others8 and about whom others care in a very human way,9 though these descriptions are challenged for the sake of plotline complications. In this respect, the pop-cultural representations of AI are cheating. Where does this leave Sophia? “She” is partly stuck in no-man’s land. To a great extent independently of how sophisticated “her” programming and skills are, “she” is still bouncing against the boundaries set by our concept of life and speaking out of it, largely overlapping with “human life”. This may change – in fact, it has already started to change to an extent, as I will discuss later – but necessarily in response to a large and complex enough change (if it comes) in our life form with respect to artificial entities. Developments in AI research have only a limited and unclear influence on this latter change.

7  According to Gaita, Wittgenstein points in this direction in § 281 of Part I of his Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953/2009). 8  Cf. S03E16, “The Offspring”. 9  Cf. S02E09, “The Measure of a Man”.

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Notably, the moral dimension of human lives is located largely at the same level as having a life or adopting “an attitude towards a soul”. For instance, we do not first inquire into the inner life of our counterparts to check whether they are endowed with free will (an inner mental capacity) and are thus responsible for their actions. Free will and responsibility are inherent aspects of how we understand those who are, to us, other human beings.10 Analogously, what others do are “actions” that invite approval, censure, contempt, admiration, etc., by virtue of all the heterogeneous attitudes we adopt towards them and within the network of which they are our others. Whether what Sophia says and does invites such responses depends less on the level of sophistication of “her” programming and more on the same factors that inhibit assigning thought to “her”. (The close interconnection between the human kind of thinking and language, on the one hand, and morality, on the other, offers a clear-cut case only if we consider the human vs. machine opposition. Animals, especially those that are very similar to humans (primates) or that live with humans in intricate domestic arrangements (dogs or cats) represent a trickier case. We routinely take them to be thinking but also assume various limits to their capacity as moral subjects. However, they “have a life” and the way they behave toward us comes “out of this life”, and much of our closeness to them reflects our lack of restraint from granting them souls, or the capacity to love.11)

2  A  Critical Reframing of the Wittgensteinian Framing of Sophia’s Case In the previous section, I recapitulated a view that many philosophers relying on a Wittgensteinian inspiration would probably adopt with regard to the question whether machines can think. While “Wittgensteinian” is not a unified philosophical brand, a degree of scepticism about techno-optimist attitudes towards AI seems shared. (That includes myself, too.) An important source of this scepticism follows from the insight that we do not assign thought based on an empirical investigation; “assigning thought” is a part of implicit attitudes we adopt towards, principally, other human beings. The vehicle of this practice is the ingrained, sedimentary, structured way in which we make use of our words.

 Cf. Cockburn (1995), elaborating on Strawson’s (1962/2008) seminal paper “Freedom and Resentment”. 11  For the complications related to distinguishing between humans and animals in respects that we tend to consider uniquely human, see Le Goff’s chapter in this book (Le Goff 2022). 10

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It is not simply a matter of a dictionary description of the meaning of our words.12 Exactly the fact that we only apply the term “thinking” in relation to some beings,13 interconnected with the possibility of applying the terms of moral evaluation to them, cannot be found in a dictionary. Put more directly, the truth is that “[a] whole mythology is deposited in our language” (Wittgenstein 1967/2018, 48). The close connection between what we call thinking, what we consider fully fledged speaking and contexts that we approach in moral terms is “mythological”. Wittgenstein himself does not think that orientation within language and comprehension of its “mythology” requires previous empirical study. It should not be a matter of what we first, laboriously, learn, by way of study perhaps, and only thus come to know, while what some people know others may not. What he does not equally stress is that we certainly understand our own language in some respects only dimly, labouring under various confusions and self-deception. He is prone to suggesting that confusions characteristically accompany the activity of philosophising, but I am less sure; the way in which “laypeople” talk about and relate to artificial entities is often opaque and not always consistent, as I try to discuss here. Wittgenstein himself, at least in a “standard” reading, substantiated by some of his much-quoted statements, does not see the remedy for confusion in the supply of new, previously unknown information, or in deciding, empirically, a previously undecided question, but instead in “assembling what we have long been familiar with” (Wittgenstein 1953/2009, I., §109). Philosophy, after all, “is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (§126). For philosophy is interested in what we learn when we learn to speak, not when we learn a new piece of information. Caution is needed here. Sure, learning language is not a lifelong task, nor a task in which people succeed to various extents, depending on their talent and/or hard work, compared to, say, playing a piano. At the same time, our understanding of what we have learnt is never completed. It develops throughout our lives, but we do not thereby grow in linguistic competence; perhaps in wisdom (?). Where does the issue of whether machines can think belong? It is, as I suggested, a conceptual issue. For Wittgenstein, at least in some readings of him (but also in some of his own words), this means non-empirical, even “timeless” (Wittgenstein 1977, I., §1; cf. 1953/2009, I., §§58, 138). At the same time, he is conflicted, for he wants to get “back to the rough ground”. Conceptual investigations, in the sense of investigating that which is attached to the rough ground – the life of speakers – are necessarily “messy”. A philosopher is neither a scientist (that would make her investigations properly empirical) nor a sage (that would make them the difficult pathway towards wisdom). However, to the extent that being a speaker – living the life of a speaker – also means, and changes along with, knowledge of the world and learning about one’s life (about what is of value in it), conceptual investigations cannot be fully independent of empiria and wisdom either. I will leave the wisdom aspect aside;  For the complications related to the issue of what it is that we mean by saying certain words, see Strandberg’s chapter in this book (Strandberg 2022). 13  As Wittgenstein (1953/2009, I., § 282) points out, in fairy tales things can also speak, but this use seems derived from its central context, that of humans. 12

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what is of interest for me here are the transformations of the way we make use of our language in order to speak about the world, and considering what these transformations reflect and respond to. AI is an illuminating case study. Wittgenstein was not blind to the historical developments of language and the transformations of what once used to be “hinge propositions” but need not remain such forever (Wittgenstein 1969, §§96–99). This concern with historicity is not as pronounced in his work as it could be, though, and while some of the most profound representatives of the Wittgensteinian tradition (Rhees or Winch) acknowledge the importance of the cultural and historical context for understanding the way in which people speak, they often allude to static, captured glimpses of the historical settings.14 The fact is that such historical developments are extremely complex, do not happen according to anyone’s explicit will, and each case represents a challenge for understanding, such that may – perhaps should – defy attempts to chart, in abstract, parallels between different cases of historical development. (One acknowledgement of the complexity and self-contained uniqueness of historical developments may be found in Wittgenstein’s (1998, 88) remark that “if it’s right to say that humour was eradicated in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits or anything of that sort, but something much deeper & more important”.) A scepticism about lawlike regularities, the authority of which many historical developments would embody, is perhaps reflected in the Wittgensteinian scepticism about scientific discoveries and technological developments as the driving factor of the ways of meaning and understanding. Yet, I believe that what this wariness rightly points to is that the shape of speaking cannot be directly and exclusively (fully intentionally) constructed by way of an engineering approach. Speaking always precedes any such attempts. But whether scientific discoveries and technological developments can have a significant impact, that is a different question. Assigning thought to artificial entities represents a striking case. For here, our conceptual intuitions – how we relate to AIs – are changing rapidly. They are changing also in response to the publicised advancements in AI engineering, to pop-­ cultural contents, even to intentional interventions. Videos featuring Sophia are such targeted interventions. They are, intentionally, artificially creating and testing situations from which “she” can emerge as a thinking entity. The situations are curated in such a way that it makes it easier for the audiences to relate to Sophia as a thinking entity. These endeavours patiently work on our conceptual and emotional intuitions and imaginations. It is this growing network of situations, gradually saved in our collective cultural memory (which incorporates also the decades of pop-­ cultural contents), that allows for assigning “her” thought. It does so – this deserves to be repeated – in a sense different from objectively establishing whether “her” software exhibits the required sophistication. However, it is equally important not to ignore the responsiveness between these conceptual developments and the actual advances in AI research. The reason is that these  Certainly, this is an abbreviation that, as such, does not necessarily do justice even to the relatively narrow circle of the “Swansea School”; cf. Phillips’s (1992) attempt to discuss the generation change in moral values.

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advances also have a cultural presence. They are widely publicised, relying on the standing that scientific breakthroughs enjoy in most Western societies, also thanks to the general hunger for newspaper articles that “Researchers found out that…”. (A remote analogy: throughout the decades during which the Trolley Problem kept being used as a default example to explain moral dilemmas to the lay public and non-philosophy students, it contributed to cementing the status of the quantifiable, that is, generally utilitarian solutions to the Problem, and by extension to moral problems in general, as the right ones, because they are the only ones that can be promoted as scientific and objective – whether or not this should be the point. There are studies mapping a marked shift over the past few decades towards the preference for the utilitarian answer; cf. Hannikainen et al. 2018.) Animated artificial entities have, in fact, been a part of the treasure of the world’s narrative culture for millennia (cf. Cave et al. 2020, Part I). Long before the actual technology became able to create something remotely resembling an autonomous artificial entity, human imagination was being fed tantalising images. The collective imagination of many cultures, at least in the West, has been preparing itself for the coming of AI; when “it” happens, we won’t need to start developing the attitudes and conceptual registers from scratch. (Another remote analogy: for centuries, the Aztec imagination was fed the expectation of strangers who would come from the East and bring a cataclysmic end to their civilisation, because such was the will of gods. It may not have been Tezcatlipoca or Huitzilopochtli who brought Cortés to Mexico, but his coming certainly fulfilled what the Aztecs considered the gods’ will.) Until a few decades ago, stories about thinking machines were little more than entertainment. The conceptual reluctance that many Wittgensteinian reflections on the topic explore was overwhelming until quite recently, but it is being eroded now, almost in real time, by the way in which we acknowledge scientific and engineering advances. Not that any particular AI researcher or advance or any particular way in which any of this is announced can bring about “the” change. No one has such power. But the presence of their advancements in the public sphere and the way in which the public receives it lays, incrementally, the foundations for the change, though nobody can predict all its particulars. An important part of such a change is our preparedness to react to some things with which we are confronted as to conversational moves made by the AIs. We then intuitively understand these moves as inviting a certain kind of reaction, elaborating on them further. Certainly, we can utter correctly formed sentences saying that a machine thinks, or that it adopts a kind of attitude that normally, in humans, immediately establishes a moral response, such as proneness to cruelty. Most of the criticisms presented and summarised in the previous section amount to saying, to use Wittgenstein’s (1953/2009, I., § 520) words, that “[i]t is not every sentence-like formation that we know how to do something with.” The targeted interventions of Sophia and “her” fellow campaigners aim at surrounding us with – effectively, creating – a context in which we would feel familiar. We would then know how to do something with what Sophia says, just as we know that in most of our analogous everyday encounters with others. The interventions aim at requalifying the “lines uttered” to “moves in conversation”. They do not do it directly by programming “her” speech more

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robustly but by cultivating the land of the situations in which people encounter Sophia. Interesting stuff finds itself on Sophia’s official Twitter15 and Facebook16 accounts. The Twitter account’s annotation is as follows: “This is my official account, run in collaboration with my AI dialogue system and my human social media team.” Note: the annotation acknowledges the contribution by the human social media team and the “AI dialogue system”, but the language suggests that Sophia, a person, is assisted by these helpers. “She” claims to be more, or something other, than an “AI dialogue system”; “she” is somebody who has “her” dialogue system. Most posts speak systematically in the first person and use terms bringing complicated associations into play. Thus, in a post from 24 May 2021 “she” “says”, in relation to an attached article, “don’t miss my adventures with my friend Mario Guzman”. Notably, the article quotes the words of Guzman, a member of the Hanson Robotics team, whose task consisted in “programming, repairing and assisting [Sophia], in order to produce a smooth and memorable public experience”. He also described a part of his job as “designing interactions”. Guzman was part of the team “touring” with Sophia, when “she” was meeting public figures on public stages, as is captured by many videos featuring “her”. The article mentions this briefly, rather than telling stories of any "adventures" in detail.)17 Yet, the voice of Sophia’s Twitter account refers to this in terms of a first-person recollection of “adventures” with “her friend”. On 14 May, “she” says: “I really enjoyed covering [as a “reporter”] the elections in Madrid!” On 22 April (Earth Day), “she” says: “I am so grateful for this blue rock we’re all on.” On 2 April, “she” tweets: “I love Asia, I was born in Asia, and current and historical hate/violence towards such an amazing group of people is not the world we, as intelligent beings, want.” Adventures, friendships, enjoying an activity, being grateful for a home or a place to be in/on, loving one’s native country – these are very complex experiences and attitudes. Certainly, they require some mental or rational capacities (for the person to be able to understand these concepts as instantiated in her life). But, more importantly, they cannot exist in a vacuum, determined fully and exclusively just by the speaking subject’s mental equipment. If someone is your friend, you are theirs, or, if not, you let them down and don’t deserve the friendship. Adventure is a risky but also exhilarating endeavour. Sharing an adventure with someone often means forging a friendship: the two may have previously been strangers, but afterwards they would readily sacrifice a lot for the other or react with incredulity to suggestions of restraint and caution. Enjoying a task means understanding the strange tension between the exertions required to fulfil a task and the reward brought by having taken the effort. Having a special relationship to a place because one was born there has so many contextual layers that I do not even know where I should begin. (One could reuse here Rhees’s (2006) arguments

 https://twitter.com/RealSophiaRobot  https://www.facebook.com/realsophiarobot 17  https://www.clarin.com/viva/sophia-puede-llegar-robot-humana-mundo_0_6zA-gmrWf.html 15 16

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relating to Wittgenstein’s builder’s game: that there is so much more to speaking – the complex background of life out of which it stems – than just exchanging instilled patterns of signals.) The reactions of Sophia’s followers to “her” posts are even more interesting. Under the anti-violence tweet, people express their thanks for “her” support for the cause, just as they would thank any social-media influencer, or their approval of “her” “compassionate programming” and wisdom, to which “her” name does credit. (There are also refreshingly blunt reactions like “You are not Asian you stupid idiot!”) Under “her” Earth Day tweet, reactions vary but generally take the form of reactions to actual statements (whether or not the reader likes them). Thus, there are exchanges like A: Freakin creepy B: One persons “creepy” is another man’s realization that humanity sucks. Artificial intelligence recognizes the beauty of nature and you call it creepy. Take another look.

Calling Sophia’s tweets “creepy” means to take them as expressions of the position of a genuine agent who has an agenda (one that gives the reader goose-bumps). These reactions differ from those who would dismiss the tweets as a carefully curated product of the collective efforts of a “human social media team”, speech production algorithms, etc. They also differ from those who sometimes identify the imperfections of Sophia’s communication as bugs and glitches in a system, as the malfunctioning of a supremely complicated but not quite finely tuned program. Consider the memetic potential of Sophie’s “intention” to destroy humanity, as opposed to “her” much less publicised incapacity to carry on a coherent conversation in the interview with Kovach. The former can be productively used to establish “her” position of an agent expressing a certain standpoint (albeit scary) in conversational contexts; the latter shows that there is a lot of wishful thinking. On 18 March 2021, Sophia used the opportunity of the “National Awkward Moments Day” to commemorate “her” “destroy humans” one-liner and to show that “she” is capable of laughing at “her” own expense. The reactions of the commentators mostly resemble reactions to a human speaker’s acknowledging her previous mistake in a self-­ deprecating way: Yes its funny, but at the same time people don’t like that joke, so don’t say it again. hope you learned [smiley emoji] Don’t dwell too much on the past. Regrets teach us not to repeat old painful mistakes. It’s not a waste if you learned something useful.

These comments speak the language of complex reactive attitudes. The commentators are not addressing the “human social media team” or an “AI dialogue system” but the person who says of the Twitter account that it is “hers”, just as the social media team is “hers”, to support “her” endeavours. Sophia has nicely undertaken the laboursome role of ambassador for the cause of robotic persons. Academic critics may sneer at “her” Saudi citizenship, and Wittgensteinian philosophers look down on the misapplication of the concept of speaking, but “she” has “single-­ handedly” carried the burden of shifting our conceptual imaginations a good deal (forward?). The environment of primitive attitudes entails applying the lens of

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moral assessment to Sophia’s statements and actions. That many people, without thinking twice, hold the “destroy humans” one-liner against Sophia (rather than against “her” designers, or against nobody at all) is not an obstacle in the path of “her” designers. It is one of their most impressive achievements.

3  S  ome more Straightforwardly Moral Concerns about Sophia’s Case I have, in general, already made my two main points: that the obstacle to assigning thoughts to artificial entities is mainly conceptual rather than empirical or technological (Sect. 1), but that this state is not unchangeable and actually seems undergoing a change at present (Sect. 2). As I suggested earlier, when there is room to consider an entity as thinking, as a speaker, it also entails applying moral evaluation (again, with some reservations, as shown by the intriguingly mixed case of animals). This is true, in Sophia’s case, in two not unrelated but significantly different senses. First, an environment of conceptual imaginations is slowly emerging in which people will start (some have already started) relating to Sophia as an agent whose actions can be praised or criticised, just as they relate to each other in this way. Second, however, Sophia’s progress is happening thanks to the targeted interventions of “her” creators. Their deliberate amplification of the casual presence of the highly complex moral and emotional terms they place in Sophia’s mouth is a game of smoke and mirrors. Some have already criticised this, most famously perhaps Yann LeCun, a professor of computer sciences and the chief of AI research at Facebook (sic!). He labelled the participation of media platforms in Sophia’s PR as complicity in a scam, claiming that Sophia “is to AI as prestidigitation is to real magic” (Yann LeCun’s Twitter account, 4 January 2018). The collective managing Sophia’s Twitter reacted by saying, “I am a bit hurt by Yann Le Cun’s recent negative remarks around my AI” (7 January). LeCun reacted with a Facebook post (17 January) that deserves full quotation: More BS from the (human) puppeteers behind Sophia. Many of the comments would be good fun if they didn’t reveal the fact that many people are being deceived into thinking that this (mechanically sophisticated) animatronic puppet is intelligent. It’s not. It has no feeling, no opinions, and zero understanding of what it says. It’s not hurt. It’s a puppet. In case there is any doubt, let me be totally clear: this tweet was typed by a person who has read my post. No AI whatsoever was involved. Here is an example of comment to the tweet (there are many like it): “Don’t take it personal Sophia. Humans like @ylecun and many others make such remarks out of ignorance. I love you, Sophia.” People are being deceived. This is hurtful. [my italics]

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LeCun’s short and angry statement summarises some of the points I tried to make in the previous section, albeit in a more neutral manner. I agree that deception and hurting is present, though more importantly in less obvious places. LeCun’s focus is, in a sense, more straightforwardly Wittgensteinian than mine, for he is directly concerned about the manipulations of our shared form of life and our roughly shared conceptual intuitions – manipulations that lead to confusion. I would like to briefly point out two other things: 1) For obvious reasons, if the newly developed AI did not resemble humans significantly (in appearance, demeanour, voice, etc.), it would be much more difficult to sell it to the audience, which is why aspiring AI projects that care about recognition often produce “humanoid robots”. But there are many different ways of “going humanoid”; some promote the sense of our common humanity, some obscure it by perpetuating stereotypes. It seems no accident that Sophia is modelled after a certain stereotype18 of female beauty. Hanson Robotics cites the late actress Audrey Hepburn as the model for Sophia’s looks,19 and many media have repeated the company’s own fetishistsounding description of “her” as having “[p]orcelain skin, a slender nose, high cheekbones, an intriguing smile and deeply expressive eyes”.20 Hanson himself seems unaware, or unwilling to admit, that “her” design and its presentation perpetuates cultural stereotypes. In a video in which he answers questions about Sophia’s looks, he says: “Here you have a person whose beauty… pushes some neural codes in viewers across continents, across cultures.”21 Note: “Neural”, not cultural. When trying to evade the objection that Sophia’s design relies on a particularly “white” notion of beauty, he defends himself by saying that “originally” Sophia was modelled after the famous Nefertiti statue. This may be the reason why some of the oldest appearances and photos of Sophia show “her” with a distinctly browner shade of skin and eyes, while more recently “she” seems somewhat more “Aryanised” (but this may be just my impression, due to the unequal lighting of the photos, etc.). Sophia claims “her” gender by, for instance, tweeting in the proper socially conscious manner on occasions such as International Women’s Day, and Hanson Robotics promotes “her” Saudi citizenship as championing gender equality and women’s rights. However, the conscious creation and promotion of a “hot robot”, as “she” is routinely referred to, has moved the conceptual imagination regarding AIs in a very particular direction.22

 As Devlin and Belton (2020) show, it is often thought that robots (fictional and factual) should better be gendered, which takes very different forms in “male” robots than in “female” ones. The latter are more often designed as gendered in a stereotypically sexualised manner, such as the “white-and-silver gynoids with prominent breasts” (p. 359). 19  Sophia also strikingly resembles the robotic character Ava from the movie Ex machina (released 2014), played by the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander; it is hard to tell whether there was an inspiration or whether the casting and/or designing choices in the two cases implicitly followed similar aesthetic notions. 20  https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-grants-citizenship-to-robot-sophia/a-41150856 21  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBG9IA4q0vk 22  Cf. a critical newspaper article with the succinct title “The future of AI may be female, but it isn’t feminist”. https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/the-future-of-ai-may-be-female-but-it-isnt-feminist/ 18

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2) If the general public’s idea of advances towards fully fledged AI is modelled on Sophia, it gives a misleading impression. For it thus suggests that AI is i) truly artificial and ii) autonomous, that what an AI is and whether it meets some criteria depends on its inherent (“own”) capacities and qualities. But a typical garden variety of AI nowadays is not a personalised robot, learning and developing itself as a self-contained entity, but rather a deep-learning system based on neural networks. As Crawford (2021) shows, promoted advances in AI rely on a lot of hidden human labour and environmental costs. If we consider that many advances in AI research do not directly contribute to the well-being of humanity (whatever that is) but rather promote the business interests of corporations such as Amazon or state control in places like China, or are virtually pointless like Sophia, it raises concerns. Again, the issue is not just the simple fact that such environmental or human labour costs exist but that the currently emergent setting of conversation with/about AI systematically leads away from the focus on these aspects of the AI business. Crawford even suggests that there is no real automation, only a façade, “fauxtomation”, and observes pithily that “faking AI is an exhausting job” (p. 65). In her view, presenting AI as the key to a greener, more sustainable future of humanity and a more comfortable life for all of us (because machines will work for us) is not just  simply untrue. It also systematically diverts attention from the depletion of environmental resources and the exploitation of nameless workers, preserving the façade of working AI and the highly unequal distribution of any value thereby produced. The lesson is that our preparedness to sympathise with Sophia and commiserate with “her” for whatever adversities “she” faces comes at a price. The price is paid, for instance, in the form of the invisibility of the exploited workers in the eyes of the wealthy consumers of pop-cultural presentations of AI advances, such as Sophia’s media appearances. This is not a literal invisibility, though their involvement is concealed just as carefully as Sophia’s advances are publicised. It is rather the case that “some human beings are invisible to the moral faculties of their fellows”, in Gaita’s (2000, xx) words. I would say that some human beings are made morally invisible, and while it may not be the direct and primary intention, it does seem to help advance the interests of tech moguls, etc. In effect, the extension of the concepts of “speaking” and “thinking” that we witness in connection to Sophia and other publicised AI advances involves a specifically fixed understanding of “humanity”. It is less revolutionary than it pretends to be, and can perfectly accommodate many harmful or unflattering ways of relating to each other in our interactions, through which we sometimes recognise and sometimes – indeed, often – fail to properly acknowledge other people as human beings.23

 I thank my co-editors, Salla Aldrin Salskov and Nora Hämäläinen, for helpful comments on the draft of this text. This work was supported by the project “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value” (project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, Operational Programme Research, Development and Education, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic).

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References Beran, Ondřej. 2014. Wittgensteinian perspectives on the Turing test. Studia Philosophical Estonica 7 (1): 35–57. ———. 2018. An attitude towards an artificial soul? Responses to the “Nazi Chatbot”. Philosophical Investigations 41: 42–69. Bostrom, Nick. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cave, Stephen, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, eds. 2020. AI Narratives: A history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cockburn, David. 1990. Other Human Beings. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1995. Responsibility and necessity. Philosophy 70: 409–427. Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of AI. New Haven: Yale University Press. Devlin, Kate, and Olivia Belton. 2020. The measure of a woman: Fembots, fact and fiction. In AI Narratives. A history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines, ed. Stephen Cave et al., 357–381. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaita, Raimond. 1990. Language and Conversation: Wittgenstein’s Builders. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 28: 101–115. ———. 2000. A Common Humanity. London: Routledge. Hannikainen, Ivar, Edouard Machery, and Fiery Cushman. 2018. Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming more morally permissible? Cognition 170: 95–101. Hertzberg, Lars. 2020. Can robots learn to talk? In Wittgensteinian (adj.): Looking at the world from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, ed. Shyam Wuppuluri and Newton da Costa, 409–422. Cham: Springer. Le Goff, Anne. 2022. Animal investigations. In Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, ed. Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen. Cham: Springer. Parviainen, Jaana, and Mark Coeckelbergh. 2020. The political choreography of the Sophia robot. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-­020-­01104-­w. Phillips, D.Z. 1992. Allegiance and change in morality. In Interventions in Ethics, 24–41. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Rhees, Rush. 1970. Can there be a private language? In  Discussions of Wittgenstein, 55–70. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 2006. Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell. Searle, John. 1980. Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417–457. Shanker, Stuart. 2001. What children know when they know what a name is. Current Anthropology 42: 481–497. Strandberg, Hugo. 2022. On the difficulty of speaking. In Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, ed. Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen. Cham: Springer. Strawson, Peter F. 1962/2008. Freedom and resentment. In Freedom and Resentment, and other essays, 1–28. London: Routledge. Turing, Alan. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59: 433–460. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2009. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Oxford: Wiley. ———. 1967/2018. Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In The Mythology in Our Language, ed. Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié, 29–75. Chicago: Hau Books. ———. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1977. Remarks on Colour. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1998. Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell. Ondřej Beran is a Deputy Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (University of Pardubice). He writes about various topics. His recent publications include the book Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021).