Playing ethics and teaching morality: how wittgenstein could helP us to aPPly games to the moral living

Janyne Sattler[1]

ABSTRACT: In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations the notion of a ‘language game’ gives human communication a regained flexibility. Contrary to the Tractatus, the ethical domain now composes one language game among others, being expressed in various types of sentences such as moral judgments, imperatives and praises, and being shared in activity by a human form of life. The aim of this paper is to show that the same moves that allow for a moral language game are the ones allowing for learning and teaching about the moral living, where persuasion takes the place of argument by means of a plural appeal. For this purpose, literature would seem to be one of the best tools at our disposal. As a way of exemplifying our moral engagement to literature I proceed at last to a brief analysis of Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, to show how playing this game would help us accomplish this pedagogical enterprise.

KEY-WORDS: Play. Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. Language game. Morality. Literature.

introduction

‘Play’ is a pervasive concept. It permeates humanity from childhood to senescence, in being sometimes a matter of leisure and invention, a matter of serious learning, or even a matter of delusion and evasion. It is portrayed in the child’s hopscotch as well as in the sportsmen’s games, the dramaturge’s play and the political persuasion, the newspaper’s crosswords as well as the reading of a novel. It is pervasive enough for ‘being human’ to be deeply entangled with those aspects of play which allow for an entire world to be constructed out of creativity and imagination, where a meaning is assigned to each singular activity as well as to life as a whole.

This first approach to the concept of ‘play’ meets an interesting view developed by John Wall on play, ethics and childhood, where the aforementioned aspects of play are intimately connected to our fundamental human ‘capability for creating meaning’, in a world that is as passively received as is actively and constantly reinvented (WALL 2010, p.36). Play is thus the basis for our ‘human-being-in-the world’. At the same time, however – and for that very reason – it is impossible to explain by means of a meaningful expression. In saying that play ‘is not a meaning but, rather, the very condition for the possibility of meaning as such’, (WALL 2010, p. 53) [2] Wall seems to be thinking about play in almost necessary and transcendental terms – close to those displayed by Wittgenstein in his early account of ethics and the world.[3] Indeed, we don’t need to carry this comparison very far to see how play is thought here as shaping human’s experience, attitude and ethical response to the world in this fundamental sense of grounding a certain ‘human nature’.

Of course, this does not apply to Wittgenstein’s view of ‘play’ in the Philosophical Investigations and Wall’s reading will serve this paper’s aim only to the extent that it qualifies rather nicely that pervasive aspect of play: trespassing life and language at once as a condition for the possibility of meaning – again, of life and language. If it could in a way fit some of the ethical points of the Tractatus, Wall’s reading goes far better to characterize Wittgenstein’s conception of a ‘form of life’ such as used in the Investigations – although not in an essentialist fashion, but in an open and socially constructed way. According to this view, we could very well think of the human form of life as being characterized by important traits of playful activities, including then some (important) ethical responses and our use of language.

However, instead of saying with Wall that play is an impossible activity to explain, – which would once again fit more closely and dogmatically the silent approach of the Tractatus to language and philosophy[4] – we could in fact think of a ‘pluralist’ account of play such as given by Randolf Feezell (2010) as a way to make it clear how ‘play’ is connected to Wittgenstein and why this seems to be crucial to a certain way of understanding the moral living.

Without going so far as to clarify what Feezell calls a ‘metaphysics of

play’ – in summarizing distinct readings of play and its relations to reality – my interest rests in his ‘pluralist, non-reductive account of play’ given in five interconnected points. The suggestion I would like to advance in view of this paper’s portrait of play is that Feezell’s points can be applied unreservedly to Wittgenstein’s way of understanding human activities in the Investigations: be it as manifest behavior or activity itself, as motive, attitude or state of mind, as a form or structure of living, as a meaningful experience (ethical or otherwise), and as an ontologically distinctive phenomenon. As will be seen, all of these elements add up to compose a certain view on ‘language games’ and the need for interrelated forms of activities – tied by family resemblances only. The most important point of Feezell’s pluralist approach is thus this open-ended and multiple, non-essentialist conception of play in tune with the Investigations’ plastic approach to language. Not one aspect would be enough to define what playing is – or, more specifically, what a language game is – as this encompasses variable domains of a human form of life, such as variable activities and variable aspects of one and the same playful deed: not only the activity itself, but the attitude involved and the meaning of that very experience.  Not only a certain behavior, but one manifesting the form of life; not only a humanly phenomenon, but a meaningful and structuring development of humanly activities. It is in this pluralist way that play does not fit a single and comprehensive conception or definition of ‘play’.[5]

This is also one aspect of play stressed by Tilghman when talking about games and art as being types of human activities highlighting our complex human form of life. Tilghman emphasizes the importance of context and background for a better understanding of the differences and similarities of our effective and competent use of human language games. Commenting on paragraph 69 of Investigations Tilghman says: ‘What similarities will be picked out to justify calling something a game cannot and need not be specified ahead of time, and if this means that the application of our words will frequently not have precisely limited boundaries, it does not follow that their application is forever arbitrary and subject to no rational discussion’(TILGHMAN, 1973, p.517) Indeed, the word ‘game’ could be used to put an ‘activity in a certain light’, in the context of our form of life. This use would then imply the way we learn how to play and how to communicate with the tools of language and according to techniques, rules and strategies, which can change from game to game and from context to context, but which are all part of one moment or other of what we are as human beings. Accordingly, if on the one hand there is flexibility in naming something a game, a language game or a plastic dimension of play, on the other hand there is also place for learning and teaching, training and experiencing, according to a meaningful development of what are the proper human activities of a proper human form of life. In making use of the word ‘game’, says Tilghman, to illuminate certain features of this specific activity of partaking in a language game, we get actually involved in a ‘complex system of human relationships’ establishing in turn its own background and context for an appropriate and responsible use of language: “What wants emphasizing is the fact that learning the concept ‘game’ involves learning to play games and this in turn involves, in addition to learning what might be called the mechanics of games, e.g., rules, skills, and the like, entering into a very complex system of human relationships”. (TILGHMAN,1973, p.519).

Of course, this brief survey is not intended in any sense to be exhaustive on Wittgenstein’s relation to the notion of ‘play’ as broadly conceived.[6] The path outlined aims only to provide a general contextual structure against which to lead a distinctive and detailed inquiry about one particular language game among others in terms of some of the accounts just exposed. Proceeding first to a general approach to language games such as given in the Philosophical Investigations in order to argue for the possibility of a moral language game, I’ll then look for how this language game is used by means of moral expressions, examples, descriptions and displayed moves against the big picture of morality being a pure activity of a human form of life.[7] It is against this picture that learning and teaching on ethics are to be seen as a matter of learning and teaching how to play – and not as a matter of explaining it theoretically or philosophically. In the last point of this inquiry I’ll try to follow up this portrait by applying one game-like activity to the moral learning and teaching by means of our engagement in a literary story. Each of these steps takes as its manifesting background all of the following elements: that, in agreement with Wall, play composes our human form of life as the very condition for the possibility of meaning of life and language, with creativity, construction and exercise being crucial for learning and teaching; that Feezell’s pluralist, nonreductive account of play structures the whole of Wittgenstein’s thinking about games, allowing for the partaking in a language game to be displayed as much as in behavior and expression as in attitude and experience. Finally, following Tilghman, that the notion of ‘game’ is used to contextualize a certain human activity of our form life in view of an effective and developing use of particular language games (as the moral one) and of language broadly understood. All these elements should be conceived of as pervasive of a wittgensteinian reading of playing for the sake of the moral living.

1 language games – a moral language game

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein maintains a radical and narrow notion of (a legitimate) language, this amounting mainly to the language of science and to everyday language. The conditions of possibility there established for this language to be meaningful are pictorial and representational: propositions representing reality truly or falsely are the only real propositions to be said, with the main distinction of the book between saying and showing strictly following the requirements so given. All other expressions transgressing these conditions are to be banned from the domain of the sayable and will be either tautological or nonsensical. Concerning nonsense specifically, meaningless expressions are on the whole to be banned because they try to say what is already shown (by means of legitimate language or by means of acts and activities) and are in this way utterly superfluous. Of course, the nonsensical category will consequently encompass the whole of ethics or of moral philosophy – and then exactly because these propositions intend to be philosophical, where there should be nothing left but philosophical activity. As is well known, one of the main purposes of the Tractatus is to bring a certain metaphysical philosophical chatting to a full stop and to establish philosophy henceforth as pure activity: ‘Philosophy is not a theory but an activity’ (TLP 4.112).[8] Ethics, as an intended field of philosophy, certainly falls under this scope and can no longer be thought of as a theory, a system or a doctrine of any kind.[9] As no legitimate ‘ethical proposition’ can ever be expressed, what is actually left to ethics as such is something closer to an ostensible task, a way of showing or pointing to things which – if they do show themselves – are sometimes unseen or unnoticed and have to be made clear to those one is trying to guide morally.

Now, this should point indeed to a distinction between ethics as a theoretical domain to be silenced according to the Tractatus demands and morality as lived and experienced by the moral subject, for whom there will be happiness and unhappiness as much as moral uprightness – the right view of the world – and vice. And the fact of there being, even if not systematically or theoretically, a moral right and a moral wrong to be shown in one way or another is an important element of a way of understanding the moral living which is extended from the Tractatus to Wittgenstein’s later work.[10] Only in the Philosophical Investigations the moral living is to be found as yet another feature of our human ‘form of life’.

Indeed, the Investigations’ conception of language is not as narrow as it was before, but much more flexible, allowing for a multiplicity with regard to legitimate language. However, this should in no way mean a complete arbitrariness. For there will still be confusion and illusion in the misuse of a language game, in improperly crossing language games with one another and in trying to find common ground to a general human form of expression. The last would doubtless be this symptomatic philosophical wish – just before shared by the Tractatus itself – of searching for the core of language, a foundation which would allow us to explain understanding, communication and learning. If there’s one thing Wittgenstein clearly rejects about its former work, it is exactly this whole philosophical-metaphysical purpose of searching for the ‘essence of language’, for that which would enable us to call many different sorts of activities a ‘language’.[11] There’s no such common ground and language games are in fact related to one another only by means of similarities, which, of course, Wittgenstein calls ‘family resemblances’ (PI §67).

As there’s commonality to enclosure or to restrict the borders of what would possibly count as a language game, we will actually count as many language-games as human activities, Wittgenstein himself saying: ‘Here the term “language game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ (PI §23) – something which would also suppose the possibility of change and adjustment as human activities themselves evolve or disappear. In this way, propositions (Sätze) are also variable to serve many different purposes:

But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and command? – There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call ‘signs’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (PI §23).

In the following of this very paragraph Wittgenstein give us some examples of the multiplicity of language games by listing not only voiced, uttered expressions, but several acts and activities themselves – as constructing and drawing and acting will not necessarily be tied to saying something to that effect. Among these examples, I would like to call the attention to the first one listed, which will in fact count as our first possible clue concerning moral activity and living in the context of the Investigations’ language games: ‘Giving orders, and acting on them.’

Of course, this could at first mean nothing really and strictly moral and the German expression (Befehlen, und nach Befehlen handeln) bears actually no specific point or detail to help us argue in this way. For the kind of expression of orders we could think of could simply be ‘close the door’, ‘stop talking’, ‘let’s go’, or something the like. Ordering and commanding need not (necessarily) bear any moral significance.

Still, couldn’t we also think that ‘giving orders, and acting on them’ exemplifies just as well the normative expression of rules and requirements for the best moral form of living? Due to the variety of propositions and of language games, we could indeed think of a reading of that sentence as indicating sorts of expressions such as moral judgments, imperatives, praises (and maybe something else) to constitute a moral language game; ‘reporting an event’ would compose the language game of giving news in newspapers or ‘making up a story; and reading one would compose the language game of literature. Moreover, to give orders and to express moral judgments, imperatives and praises could also be put side by side to ‘asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying’ and, additionally, ‘instructing, advising, exhorting, demanding, urging and showing.’ As Wittgenstein later says, ‘this and similar things are called games”’ (PI § 69). The moral activity, the moral living and its proper way of expression, build in this way one legitimate language game among several others: a moral language game played in the context of a moral human form of life.[12]

However, as Wittgenstein does not say much in the Investigations about ethics itself, we are immediately faced with difficulties with respect to its extent and efficacy: if ‘by definition’ a language game does not necessarily call for a rule or even if existing rules can change ‘as we go along’,[13] how should we account for ‘ethics’ in the sense we ordinarily conceive of it, that is, as a prescriptive support or guide for right acting and right living? If ‘ethics’ should go beyond the mere description of human social interactions, how should we account for its normative content? If in a given occasion we are led to tell someone that ‘he is behaving like a beast’ – this being the Lecture on Ethics’ expression to which I shall return – what are we to appeal to if he answers something to the extent of ‘I know I am behaving like a beast, but then I don’t want to behave any better’? It seems that the most we could do would be to appeal to the right sort of moral expression or attitude. But, then, is this what ‘ethics’ is?

Indeed, when Wittgenstein finally mentions the term ‘ethics’ in the Investigations, it seems exactly to dismiss the whole ‘ethical’ enterprise. The following is thus the only paragraph where the word appears, in connection – as was already the case in the Tractatus (TLP 6.421) – to aesthetics:[14]

And if we carry this comparison a little further, it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the degree to which the latter lacks sharpness. For imagine having to draw a sharp picture ‘corresponding’ to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle; you replace it with a sharp one. Of course a several such sharply delineated rectangles could be drawn to correspond to the blurred one. – But if the colours in the original shade into one another without a hint of any boundary, won’t it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won’t you then have to say: ‘Here I might just as well draw a circle as a rectangle or a heart, for all the colours merge. Anything – and nothing – is right.’ – And this is the position in which, for example, someone finds himself in ethics or aesthetics when he looks for definitions that correspond to our concepts. (PI § 77).

Apparently, according to this remark, when it comes to ethics we are left (again) with nonsense and silence. For, if ‘anything – and nothing – is right’, how should we account for moral concepts such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? If everything we can express in an ethical tone is in this way blurred and indefinite, what kind of status could a moral imperative (for instance) have at all? From this point of view, that question of the Tractatus seems in fact to be a legitimate one: given an ‘ethical law’, says Wittgenstein, we can always ask ‘and what if I do not do it?’ (TLP 6.422). Since ‘anything – and nothing – is right’, why even bother to express a moral imperative, an order or an instruction?

Notice, however, that Wittgenstein is talking about ‘defining ethical concepts’ and not about ‘being moral’ or ‘being morally responsible’. In trying to provide ‘ethical concepts’ and ‘ethical laws’ a sharp limit, in trying to afford ethics an essence, we will never get it right. For, what is at stake here is not a theory – a philosophical domain of investigation – but an activity, whose concepts ‘the affinity is as undeniable as the difference’ (PI §76). Of course, this should recall us that tractarian distinction between ethics and morality, where theoretical, essentialist, unilateral definitions and explanations should be abandoned for another way of proceeding how to learn and how to play a language game – paying attention to the words connected by resemblances so as to give us a good picture of the intricacies of the activity in question. This already is evidence against mere blur, shadow and arbitrariness. The following is the conclusion given in the sequel of the paragraph above: “In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (‘good’, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what languagegames? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings. (§77).

In dismissing definition and explanation, Wittgenstein is denying morality the determinacy philosophy has generally searched for, recognizing at the same time, however, the importance of a ‘correct indefiniteness’ as attached to a family of expressions and a family of meanings (§ 356, Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment xi). So, we would have to understand the word ‘good’, for instance, in understanding other moral terms as well, such as ‘happiness’, ‘moral uprightness’ or ‘standard’ and ‘moral judgment’. And not only for one given context, but concerning all sorts of circumstances where these words acquire their meaning.

This distinction between playing and explaining an activity, or the use of a word, can be traced explicitly to the following paragraphs as well:

Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to regard the facts as ‘proto-phenomena’. That is, where we ought to say: this is the language-game that is being played. (§654).

The point is not to explain a language-game by means of our experiences, but to take account of a language-game. (§655)

The ‘facts before the facts’ (proto-phenomena) are the possibilities of phenomena (§ 90) which philosophy is conceived to investigate by means of a grammatical inquiry: not into the core of what language is, but into the use of words in the context of a language game – taking account of it being played.[15]

With this picture in mind and in order to argue for the effective possibility of a moral language game as human activity and interaction, I would now like to turn to one particular perspective portrayed in the Lecture on Ethics and to some related remarks made by Rush Rhees in his Discussions of Wittgenstein.

For our present purposes, the interest in the Lecture on Ethics lies in the examples provided to clarify the distinction between judgments of relative value and judgments of absolute value.[16] Take a tennis player or, more precisely, someone offering in fact a very poor performance in playing tennis. As we watch him play, we could make the following remark: ‘well, you play pretty badly.’ Yet, given the circumstances he could very well answer us in these terms: ‘I know, I’m playing badly but I don’t want to play any better.’ All we could then say is ‘Ah, then that’s all right.’ However, if the play changes the answers have to change too: passing from playing tennis badly to behaving badly, all of the following remarks become judgments of (absolute) value, and not mere statements of contingent circumstances:

But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said ‘You’re behaving like a beast’ and then I were to say ‘I know I behave badly, but then I don’t want to behave any better,’ could he then say ‘Ah, then that’s all right’? Certainly not; he would say ‘Well, you ought to want to behave better.’ (WITTGENSTEIN 1965, p.05).

This is a moral requirement. The last imperative has to be expressed as the appropriate answer to the bad behavior. If the responder were to agree to the bad willing of the performer, he would seem himself to be behaving badly. In fact, both judgments expressed by the observer – ‘You’re behaving like a beast’ and ‘Well, you ought to want to behave better’ – are the only suitable and correct answers to give in the face of the bad behavior, however not as an answer to pre-existing or necessary rules or ethical laws. What is effectively required of the responder is the partaking in the language game of, say, giving correct moral responses in the face of certain attitudes and dispositions.

Turning now to Rush Rhees, he makes three interesting points about this text in the direction of what he calls a ‘game of ethical judgments’ – maintaining nonetheless a strong link to some of the positions held in the Tractatus and in the Notebooks. For, among other things, the expression of the last imperative given in the example of the Lecture would be the expression of one’s will in a tractarian sense. Something that would therefore go unchanged from the Tractatus to the Lecture and later to the Investigations. As Rhees (1970, p.97) says:

The Tractatus distinguishes the will that is good or evil from the will of which I have experience (this is a grammatical distinction). He had written in the Notebooks that ‘the will is a position the subject adopts towards the world (or he might have said, ‘towards life’). I know only that ‘I have to go that way’. I cannot do certain things without feeling ashamed. This is part of how I look on life, what I recognize that I must meet. In the same way, I may find problems where another would find none – or it may be the other way about. I praise the character a man has just shown, or I tell him ‘You ought to want to behave better’.[17]

This expression would then be ‘a natural remark to make in the circumstances; the only remark you could make, in fact. It is not a distortion or misuse of language.’ It is thus an expression in tune with both one’s look on life and one’s fine perception of particular conditions at stake. The expression is in this way connected to the specific demands of a complex activity or piece of life, the observer being responsibly responsive to and taking account of the language game at play: “We express (or try to express) judgments of value, not just any time, but in circumstances in which it makes sense to do so. Then there are certain replies one can make and certain questions one can ask, and others which would mean nothing.” (RHEES,1970, p.96)

This means that, for us to be able to apply these judgments and replies correctly – and for the listener to be able to grasp them and to comply with them (or not) – we have to be talking to each other from one and the same perspective. No understanding will ever be possible beyond the limits of a shared language game. Hence again the importance of noticing that communication is a matter of agreement in judgment and in form of life (PI §§241, 242). Of course, sharing a common normative ground of dialogue does not yet mean (for the listener, in this case) compliance and following – so that a ‘formal’ agreement entails not necessarily agreement in content. To put it in another way: the sharing of a language game implies not consonant moves in play. One could thus just stubbornly refuse to follow a moral demand – to the detriment though of his own moral character alone.[18]

That’s precisely the reason for the expression of the moral judgment in the given context to be mandatory for the observer – more than for the one already behaving badly. From the observer moral point of view, he cannot simply dismiss it – or he would be standing morally irresponsibly too. Even if the other does not listen or does not want to go for changing his behavior, to exhort for a better wanting is the one thing he can and should do. To shrug off is reckless.

But this outcome surpasses Rhees saying that concerning ‘a judgment of absolute value the question [‘And what if I do not do it?’] makes no sense’ (RHEES, 1970, p.95). Rhees is thinking about the possibility of ‘explaining’ the consequences of a judgment of relative value while being left with ‘no alternatives’ with respect to a judgment of absolute value:

You ought to make sure that the strip is firmly clamped before you start drilling’. ‘What if I don’t? When I tell you what will happen if you don’t, you see what I mean. But: ‘You ought to want to behave better’. ‘What if I don’t?’ What more could I tell you? (RHEES, 1970, p.96).

Well, I would like to suggest that much more could in fact be said. Certainly not in terms of unfolding resulting events, but in terms of trying to show, by means of persuasion, what is really at stake in the situation: the appropriate actions, attitudes and behavior.

Something to that effect is indeed reported by George Edward Moore on the Philosophical Occasions about Wittgenstein’s description of the activities of ‘aesthetics’ and ‘ethics’. The following quote summarizes the approach here exposed about a legitimate moral domain and the way it fits both a pluralist account of ‘play’ as human activity of a human form of life and of ‘game’ as fundamentally complex and porous:

[…] Reasons, he said, in Aesthetics, are ‘of the nature of further descriptions’, e.g., you can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing him lots of pieces by Brahms, or by comparing him to a contemporary author; and all that Aesthetics does is ‘to draw your attention to a thing’, to ‘place things side by side’. He said that if, by giving ‘reasons’ of this sort, you make the other person ‘see what you see’ but ‘still doesn’t appeal to him’, that is ‘an end’ of the discussion; and that what he, Wittgenstein, had ‘at the back of his mind’ was ‘the idea that aesthetic discussions were like discussions in a court of law’, where you try to ‘clear up the circumstances’ of the action which is being tried, hoping that in the end what you say will ‘appeal to the judge’. And he said that the same sort of ‘reasons’ were given, not only in Ethics, but also in Philosophy. (WITTGENSTEIN, 1993, p.106.).

Contrary to Rhees’ ‘no alternatives left’, these seem indeed to constitute the kind of tools one could use to say more, with the whole of the procedures emerging as pure activity. This means to say that persuasion (for rectitude and beauty) would be attained by certain moves in the game: by ‘drawing attention to a thing’, to a situation, a behavior or an attitude; by ‘placing things side by side’ and showing the different uses one can make of moral and aesthetical concepts;[19] by ‘appealing’ to someone as we would to a judge whom we would like to believe in our innocence. Hence the language game of giving aesthetical and ethical ‘reasons’ involving more than one appropriate answer. It would call for examples and for coming oneself forth as an exemplary person to show the right attitude towards life and the world. It would encompass praise, exhortation, advice and, finally, instruction. What I would like to argue in the next section is that this way of playing the game is now precisely the way to proceed in teaching and learning the moral living as well.

2 moral language games – teaching, learning, literature

If we do take Wittgenstein’s remark seriously about the difficulty (and, then, about the refusal) implicated in drawing a sharp and neat picture of a given concept in line with a blurred one – because ‘anything and nothing’ will thus be right – then the object of teaching and learning will bear this quality of a composed, entangled picture, with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ not being indisputably settled. These concepts will be shaped in use as pliantly as our ethical experiences themselves in accordance to our complex moral human form of life. As Wittgenstein says: ‘What is true [richtig] or false [falsch] is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life’ (PI §241).

Thus, learning to play the game entails more than learning several instances of moral expressions in certain circumstances – as the ultimate criterion is actually knowing how to use them and what to do with them. That’s indeed Wittgenstein’s meaning for what ‘learning’ is: ‘“Learning it” presumably means: being brought to the point of being able to do it. Only then the question arises, what will count as a criterion for being able to do it?’ (PI §385). Here, of course, the answer is ‘applying it’, ‘using it correctly’, ‘playing it’ in the context of the game.

As the criterion is met by he who plays it rightly, moral value and responsibility is attributed to the subject expressing the right sort of judgments of value, at the right moment and concerning the specific situation – as in the case of the responder in the Lecture on Ethics, – so that the person comes himself forth as an ostensible criterion.

Wittgenstein is talking below about the way of learning how to judge ‘expressions of feeling’, but his remarks apply perfectly to moral judgments as well. The hard task, in this case, says Wittgenstein, is to express correctly the indefiniteness implied in this kind of human learning and teaching:

Here too, there are those with ‘better’ and those with ‘worse’ judgment.In general, predictions arising from judgments of those with better knowledge of people will be more correct. Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can learn it. Not, however, by taking a course of study in it, but through ‘experience’. – Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. —– This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. —– What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them rightly. Unlike calculating rules. (§355 Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment xi).

The way the activity is described here seems indeed to correspond to the example given in the Lecture: the point of view of the responder saying ‘you ought to want to behave better’ is the point of view of he who has a better knowledge of people behaving good or badly, showing in this way an experience of what is important to notice and to say in this case. Some can learn this in effectively playing the game. But some can teach this in mastering the game as a whole. Wittgenstein’s word translated here as ‘tip’ is ‘der Wink’, which could also go for ‘waving’, ‘signaling’, ‘warning’, ‘indicating’ and ‘drawing attention to’ – all of them composing in fact a picture of ‘teaching’ as plainly a human activity of the kind thought to characterize a language game. No ‘course of study’ [Lehrkurs] or ‘system of rules’ should ever account for what experience in application and use alone allows for correctly playing the game of the moral living. According to this, in expressing the imperative ‘you ought to want to behave better’, the responder is indicating the liar a morally better attitude and course of action and drawing his attention to the sort of ‘willing’ that is morally proper with respect to others. But he is not following or signaling a rule. If there’s a rule implied, it is (and should be) integrated in the context of the game itself and manifested in the responder’s own correct disposition. It is unlike ‘calculating rules’ because in human activities such as teaching, learning, and playing, the moral language game comprehends this indefiniteness distinctive of morality itself.[20]

This is why we do proceed in teaching morality by means of persuasion more than by means of argument. The appeal, – according to Tilghman’s words – being one for seeing things in a certain light: ‘Don’t think, but look!’ (PI §66). And it is precisely because of what we see that the appeal does reach us as learning and experience: as we do learn the ‘family of moral expressions’ and the ‘family of our own moral experiences’ by drawing attention to certain circumstances, persons and their acts, the intricacies of which are impossible to be simply reduced to ‘one’ view or ‘one’ moral concept. For we do understand the meaning of a word by inquiring into the way we did use it and learn it before. Hence the need of ‘seeing things side by side’ and ‘clearing up the circumstances’ so as to take account and shed light on every important move in the game.

With this fundamental structure in mind, I would like to propose as one of the most trustworthy pedagogical tools we have at our disposal to be literature.

Of course, to argue in this way, we must first of all assume that literature offers us indeed a faithful portrait of our complex and tangled moral lives,[21] where the expression of moral judgments as applied to a variety of deeds takes place and acquires meaning in a variety of contexts. This is the starting point for a reading of literature as the place par excellence for playing ethics. In what follows, three different but related claims will be offered to argue for literature’s playable quality in moral learning and teaching.

First of all, to engage in literature would help us to accomplish the task of learning the meaning of specific moral concepts such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, and the like, by means of their relations to a family of other words, expressions and judgments constituting the whole of the moral life. Hence the need of a language game to enclose these notions in view of a comprehensive moral portrait. No moral term would ever be ‘explained’ or ‘defined’ separately and none would bear a supposedly cognitive self-sufficiency of any kind. The way we would see these notions throughout the reading of a literary work, would appeal to that complex set of moves which – as Wittgenstein says – are the ‘reasons’ given in morality. We could think, for example, that in its continuous complexity a novel displays the family resemblances of certain aspects of our moral lives by ‘drawing attention to a thing’ or ‘placing things side by side’ and showing that no single and sharp distinction could ever be made between essentially blurred moral notions – as between essentially blurred moral livings.

Second, to engage in reading literature is to engage in imagining activities which would help us to understand the complexity of our own moral lives. Undoubtedly, imagination plays a central role in the act of reading itself: we see in a way what the characters themselves see.[22] This flexible point of view allows us to have ‘the whole story’ – not one side at the expense of another, but all the entangled circumstances and reasons leading to a picture of what being moral beings really means. In seeing ‘the whole story’ we do access morality by means of imagination, by means of (literary) examples, by means of a language game and its family of meanings – and not, again, by means of an explanation. In a way, there’s no explanation whatsoever which could ever account for that complexity and for that living – except experiencing the complex moral life oneself in reading it and in living it through.

Third, to engage in reading literature is to engage in reading actively or in playing actively one’s own moral story. If, on the one hand, the role of imagination is to account for the whole story of what it means to live a moral life, this very imagining activity entails, on the other hand, much more than an uninvolved reflection of what is being read: it would rather be an assertive commitment to the characters implicated by means of self-reflection. We could say that it is in this way that one learns about one’s own moral life, as if he were a co-writer – but now of his own story – while regarding from multiple perspectives his own moral commitments and judgments and the place they take in his life. By engaging in the reading of literature one is therefore engaging in reshaping and adjusting one’s own (blurred) moral experiences to the ones encountered. At the end, this reading makes itself up for this kind of experience and one is then able to ‘clear up one’s own circumstances’ by appealing to one’s own character as to the whole of the ‘reasons’ read. Finally, we could say that in reading literature one engages oneself in playing the game which is being played and takes part in the story which is being told.

As my last point in this paper I would like to square the claims made above with a concrete example of how the moral language game can effectively be played – and the moral learning effectively achieved – by means of literature. This will be done through a brief analysis of one particular piece of literary work – deeply appreciated by Wittgenstein himself: Tolstoy’s Father Sergius and its lesson of humanity and humility.[23]

To offer but a short description of the novel, this is the story of Stepán Kasátsky, the young soldier who chooses to become a monk after being betrayed and then left by his fiancée. Taking vows, he becomes Father Sergius. Now, the monastic life shows to suit him deeply, for he is a religious man and wishes to serve God truly and obediently, striving constantly to overcome the whole of earthly temptations. He does indeed believe in the purity of his faith and devotes his life to help people by praying and healing. Indeed, his healing powers make him a famous and venerate character, and Father Sergius spends most of his time receiving and curing people – being in his turn regularly served by other monks around him. After years of religious service, feeling flattered by his renown but exhausted by the unending activities, Father Sergius commits the dreadful sins of lust and murder, and then flees from the monastery at a complete lost and despair. Spending a night in the woods, he dreams with his cousin Páshenka and decides to go to see her. At his arrival, Páshenka does not at first recognize that tortured person and takes him for a pilgrim, offering him money and food. When finally recognized by his cousin, Father Sergius announces himself not as the famous monk and healer he once was, but as a great sinner. Asking Páshenka to tell him about the kind of life she lived, he now hears a story of violence and misery, but also of true faith and love – a life devoted entirely to others. This story brings Father Sergius the true meaning of his life and he understands at last what it was that he was looking for, but mistook for praise and grandness. These are the decisive words he says to himself after leaving Páshenka’s house:

So that is what my dream meant! Páschenka is what I ought to have been but failed to be. I lived for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining that she lives for men. Yes, one good deed – a cup of water given without thought of reward – is worth more than any benefit I imagined I was bestowing on people. But after all was there not some share of sincere desire to serve God’ he asked himself, and the answer was: ‘Yes, there was, but it was all soiled and overgrown by desire for human praise. Yes, there is no God for the man who lives, as I did, for human praise. I will now seek Him! (TOLSTOY, 1967, p.544-545).

He then starts a real pilgrimage, helping people as he meets them, waiting not for reward or gratitude and feeling increasingly within him the real presence of God.

Undoubtedly, the story seems to appeal deeply to our sense of dignity and modesty, but how would reading it enable us to learn anything about our own moral lives? How is playing this game in any sense morally relevant? Does this specific reading really meet the three claims made above about literature’s playable quality? Offering these questions a positive answer I would like to argue as it follows.

First, if the work achieves its moralization in a crescendo, it is the context of the story as a whole that allows us to learn the meaning of its most important notions – not a single definition or explanation is given of ‘faith’, ‘virtue’, ‘goodness’, ‘humility’ and ‘love’, but we do understand at the end what these concepts really mean, as we do understand their being necessarily tied to a way of living life. They are, moreover, contextually linked to one another by means of a shared language game – a moral and religious and deeply, humanly compromised language game. For all these notions are tangled in a life unselfishly devoted to others – whoever they are – and they would gain no meaning at all out of that specific context.

Second, engaging in the story here means to follow in Father Sergius’ steps as well. Our imagination is indeed required for us to share in the various moral and religious stages he goes through – and nothing is really simple in distinguishing his moments of deep commitment from his moments of confusion, for we do believe with him, for a very good while, that faith is truly lived through the life of a monk – especially through the life of a healer. Moreover, complexity hinders us from giving a single and definite reason why Kasátsky chooses the monastic life as he later chooses to leave it for pilgrimage: only on account of the whole story the meaning of his life becomes in fact clear – and we can give him ‘reasons’ only as far as we see what he sees by putting things side by side in a complex panoramic landscape we ourselves contemplate.

Finally, in reading it we commit ourselves not only to Father Sergius personal story, but to our own as well. If at first we agree with his flawed faith and feel as strong as he feels in fighting vanity, we do at the end feel ashamed for not being from the start as humble and forgiving as Páschenka. But selfreflection comes also in the form of self-judgment: What kind of moral life are we living? What kind of moral commitments do we cherish? Do we really accomplish ‘virtue’, ‘goodness’, ‘humility’? Should we walk so long a path as Kasátsky did to find meaning and comfort in life? Couldn’t we learn with him and find a short cut? Shouldn’t literature meet the task of showing us the way, so that we live a richer life? Shouldn’t we engage in playing literature as seriously as we intend to play ethics? After all, are these games not one and the same?

To conclude affirmatively in this way, I would just like to add that reading and engaging in literature for the sake of morality is a matter of playing, philosophically, more than a matter of, philosophically, explaining it. And I think Wittgenstein would very well agree with this way of learning what ‘ethics’ is about.

RESUMO: Nas Investigações Filosóficas de Wittgenstein, a noção de ‘jogo de linguagem’ dá à comunicação humana uma nova flexibilidade. Contrariamente ao Tractatus, o domínio da ética compõe agora um jogo de linguagem, entre outros, sendo expresso por vários tipos de sentenças, tais como juízos morais, imperativos e louvores, e sendo compartilhado enquanto atividade por uma forma de vida humana. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar que os passos que nos permitem falar de um jogo de linguagem moral são os mesmos que possibilitam o aprendizado e o ensinamento da vivência moral, onde a persuasão toma o lugar do argumento, com o uso de apelos plurais. Para esse propósito, a literatura parece constituir uma das melhores ferramentas à nossa disposição. Como forma de exemplificar o nosso engajamento moral para com a literatura, eu procedo, ao final, a uma breve análise da novela Padre Sérgio, de Tolstói, a fim de mostrar que o fato de jogarmos esse jogo nos ajuda a cumprir um empreendimento pedagógico.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Jogo. Wittgenstein. Investigações Filosóficas. Jogo-de-linguagem. Moralidade. Literatura.

references

CAILLOIS. R. Man, play, and games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

CARVALHO, M. Esclarecimento e prática: gestos ostensivos nas investigações filosóficas e antes. In: MORENO, A. R. (Org.), Wittgenstein: compreensão, adestramento, treinamento, definição. Campinas: UNICAMP, 2013. (Coleção CLE v.68).

CURRIE, G. Narration, imitation, and point of view. In: HAGBERG, G. L.; JOST, W. (Org.). A companion to the philosophy of literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. p. 331-349.

DALL’AGNOL, D. Jogos Morais de Linguagem. In: MORENO, A. R. (Org.). Wittgenstein: Ética, Estética, Epistemologia. Campinas: UNICAMP. (Coleção CLE, v.43).

______. Semelhanças de família nos usos de ‘bom’. Ethic@. Florianópolis, v.15, n.2, p. 216-230, 2016.

FEEZELL, R. A pluralist  conception of play. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. v. 37, n. 2, p. 47-165, 2010.

GIBSON, J.; HUEMER, W. The literary Wittgenstein. London; New York: Routledge, 2004.

HARRIS, R. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: how to play games with words. London; New York: Routledge, 1988.

HUIZINGA, J. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Beacon, 1995.

HUNTER, J. F. M. Wittgenstein on language and games. Philosophy, v. 55, n. 213, p. 293-302, Jul.1980.

HURKA, T.; TASIOULAS, J. Games ant the Good. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Suppl. v.80, suppl., p. 217- 235, 237-264, 2006.

KIVY, P. The experience of reading. In: HAGBERG, G. L.;JOST, W. (Org.). A companion to the philosophy of literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. p. 106-119.

NACHMANOVITCH, S. Free play: improvisation in life and art. New York: Penguin Group US, 1991.

NUSSBAUM, M. C. Love’s knowledge: essays on philosophy and literature. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

RHEES, R. Discussions of Wittgenstein. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970.

SATTLER, J. L’éthique du Tractatus: non-sens, stoïcisme et le sens de la vie. 2014. (Dissertatio Filosofia)-UFPel., Nepfil, Pelotas,  2014. Available in: <http://nepfil.ufpel.edu.br/ dissertatio/acervo/8-janyne.pdf>. Access in: 18 jan. 2016.

SUITS, B. The grasshopper: games, life and utopia. Toronto: Broadview, 2005.

TILGHMAN, B. R. Wittgenstein, games, and art. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. v. 31, n. 4 p. 517-524, Summer 1973.

TOLSTOY, L. Father Sergius. In: Great short works of Leo Tolstoy. New York: Perennial Library, 1967.

WALL, J. Ethics in light of childhood. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2010.

WITTGENSTEIN, L. A lecture on ethics. The Philosophical Review, v. 74, n.1, p. 03-12, jan. 1965.

______.  Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Organized by F. Waismann, and  B. McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979.

______. Recollections of Wittgenstein. Organized by R. Rhees. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

______. Philosophical occasions, 1912-1951. Organized by J. C. Klagge and A. Norman. Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett, 1993.

______. Notebooks 1914-1916. Translated by G. E.M. Anscombe. 2. ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998.

______. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by. C.K. Ogden. Routledge, 2005.

______.  Philosophical investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and J. Schulte. 4. ed. Southern Gate: Blackwell, 2009.

Recebido em 07/01/2016

Aceito em 12/12/2016

Notas

[←1]

Docente do Departamento de Filosofia e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), doutora em Filosofia pela Université du Québec à Montréal (2011); pós-doutorado pela Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC - 2011-2012); atuando especialmente nos temas seguintes: ética e estética em Wittgenstein; a ética estóica e ética das virtudes; cosmopolitismo; literatura e filosofia, estudos de gênero. E-mail: janynesattler@yahoo.com.br

[←2]

In a more frolicsome spirit, Suits seems to be thinking about more or less the same ‘meaning’ of play as a fundamentally human ‘condition’ when talking about playing games as intrinsically good, in such a way that it would be the first and the sole human pursuit if all other possible goods were already given and secured. See, for instance (SUITS, 2005, p.149-150).

[←3]

See, for instance, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, mainly the paragraphs 5.621-5.6331, 6.421, and related notes in Notebooks 1914-1916, entry 2.8.16.

[←4]

And which would also be something rather odd to say in view of the extensive literature on play, its description, analysis and explanation, from Suits to Huizinga and Nachmanovitch, to give but a few names. See, among others, Suits (2005), Caillois (2001), Nachmanovitch (1991), and the classical, Huizinga (1955).

[←5]

Although, with Suits, Hurka and Tasioulas claim that ‘Wittgenstein was not right’, and that there is indeed a unified account of games given by Suits analysis of ‘playing a game’: ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ (HURKA; TASIOULAS, 2006, p. 217-218). – However, according to Wittgenstein, all games would not be played voluntarily and require that we overcome obstacles. This alone would constitute an objection against Suits’ definition. – For another view on the difficulties concerning Wittgenstein’s ‘playing games’ with language see Hunter (1980).

[←6]

For a very specific approach to ‘playing’ and ‘games’ in Wittgenstein see Harris (1988).

[←7]

It should be noted here that this will be slightly different than Dall’Agnol’s approach to “moral language games” in his paper ‘Jogos Morais de Linguagem’ (2006): he may be more worried than I am with normativity and more focused on the (meta-ethical) analysis of moral concepts (e.g. ‘good’) and moral (prescriptive, evaluative, etc.) judgments as such. See also (DALL’AGNOL, 2016).

[←8]

References to the Tractatus will be given with the numbers of its paragraphs preceded by TLP, as references to the Investigations preceded by PI – except for the remarks of the second part of this work, followed then by the title ‘Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment’.

[←9]

And Wittgenstein refers explicitly to a superfluous ‘chatting’ about ethics in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. See the entry of 30.12.1929 (WITTGENSTEIN, 1979).

[←10]

This is surely too brief an account of various logical and ethical aspects of the Tractatus which have of course to be here merely assumed. For a detailed approach on the work’s chief distinctions between sense and nonsense, saying and showing, and theory and activity (SATTLER,2014).

[←11]

PI §23: ‘It is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are used, the diversity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (This includes the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.).’

[←12]

The question concerning the possibility of a plurality of moral language games as meeting a plurality of forms of life would lead us to yet another question concerning relativism. This is not the place, however, to discuss the different readings of the concept of ‘Lebensform’ such as given in the Investigations, and my own stance on this subject has to be taken for granted. All I would like to say in favor of ‘one single human form of life’ (as opposed to a relativistic perspective), is that Wittgenstein seems all the way long to be arguing for language as, generally, ‘human language’ – as plural as it can be in fitting many plural human activities. Notice that ‘human activities’ demand not different ‘human forms of life’, and that ‘a human form of life’ seems also to be contrasted with ‘a leonine form of life’ (§327, Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment xi) or ‘doggish form of life’ (§1, Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment i ) and that agreement and understanding in human language suppose agreement and understanding in a human form of life: ‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life’ (PI §241); consequently: ‘It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgments that is required for communication by means of language’ (PI §242).

[←13]

See PI §83: ‘And is there not also the case where we play, and make up the rules as we go along? And even where we alter them – as we go along”; and PI §84: ‘Speaking of the application of a word, I said that it is not everywhere bounded by rules.’

[←14]

Connection that will once again appear in the context of a report made by Moore.

[←15]

Wittgenstein’s German term for ‘taking account’ is ‘Feststellung’ which could also mean something like ‘noticing’, ‘identifying’, ‘observing’ or ‘taking notice of’. I do refer to term again below.

[←16]

This being in fact Wittgenstein’s central subject all along his lecture – still very much in tune with some of the thesis established in the Tractatus. Judgments of relative value are obviously ‘relative to’ a given pattern and refer to contingent facts alone, always capable of being described by means of their criteria – a ‘good’ chair, for example, is ‘good’ relatively to the function it fits as a specific piece of furniture. But judgments of absolute value correspond to no real propositions of language [as still conceived of by Wittgenstein) and cannot go for mere statements of facts; they will never lose their appearance of judgments of value. Being ‘absolute’, they have no factual, natural reference in the world and have consequently no ‘meaning’ at all (again, as ‘meaning’ is still conceived of by Wittgenstein (1965)].

[←17]

For the remarks mentioned, see the Tractatus 6.423 and the entry 4.11.16 of the Notebooks. – Of course, we should apparently count here with a normative criterion to judge the correctness of one’s own expression of will, as there is indeed a moral rightness implied in the need of one guiding someone else to a certain disposition or behavior. I cannot deal with this question here, but I would like to refer again to Sattler (2014 – chapter 3.1), mainly – for a deeper inquiry into the relations between the examples given in the Lecture and a normative stoical standard of judgment.

[←18]

As the ‘consequences’ of his acts (not ordinarily empirical) will be intrinsic to their own good or bad qualities. See the Tractatus 6.422, for instance: “There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable).”

[←19]

This could also call for an analysis of “ostensive gestures” as they are tools for learning (words, a language game, language itself), against the background of certain contexts and in the midst of activities and practices of our human form of life. For an interesting survey about the specific notion of ‘ostensive gesture’ in Wittgenstein’s later work, see (CARVALHO,  2014).

[←20]

In saying that human activities such as teaching, learning and playing are unlike ‘calculating rules’ I’m not trying to deal with the notion of ‘calculus’ itself, anymore than with its application when it comes to indefiniteness or accuracy. In denying that morality is a matter of ‘calculating rules’, I’m actually thinking about the way normative ethical theories standardly proceed in teaching, and justifying, moral rightness or wrongness. Utilitarianism would here constitute the example par excellence: proceeding by means of a ‘course of study’ or a ‘system of rules’ and ‘calculating’ the best course of action available.

[←21]

A suggestion developed, among others, by Martha Nussbaum from an Aristotelian point of view on ethics. See mainly her Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). Her perspective on literature is taken somewhat as our own background for the present topic and should be here assumed for the sake of argument. In spite of that, it is not wholly indispensable for this paper’s consistency in view of its circumscribed proposal. – Moreover, this is not the place for reflecting upon the possibility as such of a similar view to be found in Wittgenstein’s inconclusive remarks on ethics in the Investigations. Some reflections on Wittgenstein’s specific relation to literature (with respect both to the Tractatus and the Investigations and some other works) can be found in (GIBSON; HUEMER, 2004).

[←22]

Of course, this is itself a controversial subject of discussion in the field of literary studies. For details see, among others (CURRIE, 2010; KIVY, 2010).

[←23]

See, for instance, Wittgenstein (1984, p.187).

Table of Contents

Janyne Sattler1

introduction

1 language games – a moral language game

2 moral language games – teaching, learning, literature

references