Chapter Nine - Ethics and Philosophy: Aristotle and Wittgenstein Compared

Summary

Preamble

Insofar as Wittgenstein expounded any moral philosophy, what he expounded appears very far removed from Aristotle’s – or Aristotelian – ethics. Wittgenstein’s very notion of ‘the ethical’ is so distant from Aristotle’s as even to suggest that they were just discussing different things; at any rate, we might think this if we have in mind his remarks on ethics in e.g. the Tractatus or the Lecture on Ethics. In these places we find him expressing such thoughts as that ethical statements are a species of nonsense, that ethics concerns the individual’s relationship with the universe (roughly), that no empirical facts can possibly have a bearing on ethics and so on. Whatever these thoughts actually amount to, the concerns which they embody do not seem to come into contact with the concerns motivating Aristotle’s moral philosophy.

However, when we consider Wittgenstein’s later philosophy we begin to see a certain affinity between what he is doing and what Aristotle is doing in the Nicomachean Ethics. This affinity has various aspects, some of which are more clearly visible when we contrast the views of both philosophers with those of certain other schools or tendencies, as we shall see later. It is in any case an affinity existing at quite a deep level. Certainly, it is doubtful whether, had he read Aristotle, Wittgenstein would have felt any cousinship with the Greek. He is reported to have remarked, with more pleasure than discomfiture, that he must be the only Cambridge professor of philosophy never to have read a word of Aristotle; and his felt intellectual affinities lay quite elsewhere.

In this brief essay I want to explore aspects of the affinity which I have alleged to exist between the later Wittgenstein and Aristotle the ethicist. One important theme that will emerge concerns the sense in which the activity of doing philosophy is itself of ethical significance.

Wisdom, Theoretical and Practical

Aristotle takes a life of contemplation to be the highest form of human flourishing, contemplation having as its aim philosophic wisdom. In the Nicomachean Ethics he does not say much about what you are meant to contemplate, and one might worry that Aristotle is in danger of having to praise any old learning, however trivial.