Logic, Ethics and Existence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus1

Eli Friedlander

§1 Skepticism and the Unquestionable

Wittgenstein’s engagement with the problematic of skepticism is mostly found in
his later writings, in the Philosophical Investigations as well as in On Certainty.2 I want to
begin here by considering skepticism in the context of his early work, the Tractatus
Logico Philosophicus. For sure, skepticism does not appear to be central to the progress of
the Tractatus. It does however figure toward the end of the book in what is, thematically
speaking, a long stretch of propositions that broach the topic of questioning, roughly
from proposition 6.4312 to 6.521.
How are we to understand Wittgenstein’s intense preoccupation with
questioning? Why does he use variations on the attitude of questioning, expressing it in
such diverse terms as question and answer [Frage – Antwort], riddle [Ratsel], problem
(in singular and in plural)[Problem], task and solution [Aufgabe – Losung], as well as the
questioning doubt [Zweifel]?3 We could stride directly to the assertion of the
nonsensicality of skepticism, that is focus on the non-existence of an ultimate skeptical

                                                                                                               
1  I discussed earlier versions of this paper with Johnathan Soen. I have learned much

from his work on logical form and am indebted to him for many enlightening
clarifications of difficult points in my argument. I am grateful to Edmund Dain and
Reshef Agam-Segal for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I thank the
students in the GIF workshop “Life and Mind” at Tel Aviv University, as well as the
participants in the conference “Skepticism as a Form of Experience” at the University of
Chicago, for their comments and questions on a draft of this paper. In conducting the
research for this paper I have benefitted from a grant of the Israel Science Foundation.

2The prevalence of the problematic of skepticism has been a theme of Stanley Cavell’s
interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work. He has tied the form of Wittgenstein’s
writing in the Philosophical Investigations most closely with the ever-present skeptical
voice.
 
3  We
could add to this the use of ‘wonder’ from the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, which is
essential to the elaboration of the aesthetic dimension of the unquestionable. I will
address this term and this dimension towards the end of my paper.
 

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question. And yet the occurrence of the supposed dismissal of skepticism in the vicinity
of the ethico – religious themes of the book, and specifically in relation to what
Wittgenstein calls “the mystical”, should raise for us the question of the truth in
skepticism. Our willingness to engage such an idea as the truth in skepticism would
depend on (and would bear on) what we take the nature of nonsense to be, and in
particular it might affect how we read the end, or ethical point of the Tractatus. One
could adopt, what I would call, a “dismissive” reading of Wittgenstein’s pronouncement
on skepticism, namely that in showing that skepticism is nonsensical, we have merely
done away with the need to be preoccupied by one of the philosophical positions which
Wittgenstein includes unceremoniously in the term “metaphysics”. In the present essay I
want rather to suggest another way of reading this stretch of propositions that coheres
with a fundamental ethico-religious attitude, and in particular which hinges on the
recognition of “the unquestionable” (as I will call this moment)4.
Subjectively speaking, we might say that the unquestionable is what one is
certain of. Certainty is an epistemic matter and is a characterization pertaining to
knowledge. But in using this term to delineate a moment in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I
would like to take the unquestionable as the ground of absolute recognition understood
at the same time substantively. What is unquestionable cannot be approached through
an answer to a question, the fulfillment of any intention of questioning or as the object of
an investigation. All of these remain too much within the sphere of the activity of a
subject. But Wittgenstein speaks in this moment of what makes itself manifest rather than
of what is certain (TLP 6.522). 5 We might speak of the unquestionable as a matter for
acknowledgment and it would even be closer to identify it in what we call faith. Faith
counters doubt, not by refuting it, but in constituting one’s existence in terms of what
has the highest reality.

                                                                                                               
4Even though it might appear otherwise, I take my reading to be in fundamental
agreement with the resolute reading of the Tractatus that has been articulated in
groundbreaking essays by Cora Diamond and James Conant.
 
5This is to be compared to the proposition on the truth of solipsism in which
Wittgenstein equally speaks in terms of manifestation: “For what the solipsist means is
quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest.” (TLP 5.61) The
significance of the moment of solipsism for the dimension of the unquestionable will
become clear in what follows.

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 “Doubt can exist only where a question exists”. But spiritual suffering that takes
the form of doubt seems to be taken seriously enough by Wittgenstein in a further
proposition that clarifies the statement: “Is this not the reason why those who have
found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life become clear to them have then
been unable to say what constituted that sense?” Finding peace, rest, or absolute safety
(to put it in the terms of the ‘Lecture on Ethics’), presupposes doubt and the suffering for
which no precise question can be articulated and no specific answer can be given. And
surely, in resolving that “long period of doubt”, it would not be sufficient to say
something like “it was all nonsense, get over it” if only, because any resolution must be
true to the suffering that led to it. For it to be accepted as resolution, it must ‘answer’ to
the character of depth of the problems. To be able to let go of our highest spiritual
struggles as nonsensical, must involve a reorientation or opening up anew of the relation
to the world. Yet, this in no way can be expressed in terms of the appearance of a new
contentful possibility for one’s life.
My paper is then an attempt to move from the dismissive reading of the
nonsensicality of skepticism to the recognition of the “the unquestionable” as the resting
point secured by the ethical will in Wittgenstein. One might have initial qualms as to
this being a moment that has any specificity at all. What is the justification to use the
definite article in speaking of “the unquestionable”? Indeed, doesn’t Wittgenstein stress
that we cannot make sense of the ultimate question: “The riddle does not exist. [Das Rätsel
gibt es nicht]”. I will try to argue that uniqueness is at issue, yet uniqueness which is not
the particularity of a determinate sense or content. Not surprisingly, it has to do with
recognizing how Wittgenstein thematizes what individuality or the uniqueness
pertaining to the subject comes to. But this would not reduce the unquestionable to a
species of subjective certainty for Wittgenstein will equally speak of the moment in
terms of the uniqueness of the world. To point ahead, to uniqueness that encompasses
both subject and world, the unquestionable as an ethico-religious moment would
emerge as the disappearance of doubt, identified with realizing the essence of will as
what Wittgenstein calls in his Notebooks “being in agreement with the world”.

§2 A Virtual Question

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 In order to present the standpoint of the ethical in the Tractatus in the light of the
unquestionable, we need first to go back and seek an anchor for the centrality of the
problematic of questioning and the unquestionable in earlier parts of the book. Indeed, if
we remain merely with reflections about the ending of the book we would be almost
inevitably be drawn to a simplistic understanding of what Wittgenstein calls the
“mystical” moment of his reflection. But how do we relate mysticism back to logic? The
propositions about mysticism themselves might provide a clue:
How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what
is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. (TLP 6.432)
The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.
(TLP 6.4321)
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (TLP
6.44)

The domain that can be opened through questioning, the domain answering to
the “how?” (how things stand) has no bearing on what is highest. Moreover,
Wittgenstein does not contrast such questions as “how things are?” to “what is a thing?”
or “what things (there) are?” All of these are seemingly treated in the Tractatus as part of
an investigation of logic (Roughly speaking these would correspond to the investigation
into the general form of the proposition and to the investigation into simple objects or
elementary propositions). The unquestionable is rather identified in terms of the
dimension of existence. But can we establish a connection between the questions
pertaining to logic and the unquestionable dimension of existence? And is the latter
conceivable itself as a dimension of logic?
A related moment can be singled earlier in the Tractatus. The problematic of
questioning and with it the distinction between the questionable and the
unquestionable, appears as Wittgenstein broaches the issue of application of logic in the
context of delineating the task of the recognition of elementary propositions:
Our fundamental principle is that whenever a question can be decided by
logic at all it must be possible to decide it without more ado.
(And if we get into a position where we have to look at the world for an
answer for such a problem, that shows that we are on a completely wrong
track.)
The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that
something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that
however is not an experience.
Logic is prior to every experience – that something is so.

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 It is prior to the question “How?”, not prior to the question “What?” (TLP
5.551-5.552)

It is significant that though Wittgenstein rephrases the registers of facts and of objects in
terms of questions: the “How?” and the “What?”, he has no question for the ‘experience’
of existence. No wonder, one would like to say, for it is not an experience. But wouldn’t
that mean then that at the heart of logic, there is what I earlier called “the
unquestionable”? What is that to which there would correspond no question and yet is
“what we need in order to understand logic”?
We might suggest that Wittgenstein could find in the metaphysical tradition a
formulation of his ‘missing question’ pertaining to existence. It is the question of
metaphysics, namely “Why is there something (rather than nothing)?” We are tempted
to formulate the ultimate question pertaining to existence as a “Why?” question. We
formulate the question of existence as one of seeking a ground that pertains to the value
or purpose of what exists (rather than merely asking “Is there something rather than
nothing?”). Moreover, the object of such questioning is not a thing or a fact but rather
the world as such: “Why is there a world rather than nothing?” If there were a question
of existence it would be answered by the ‘purpose’ of there being a world.
But in order to make some progress with these vague intuitions, we need to
further note that in the continuation of the series of propositions quoted above, the
existence of the world (rather than nothing) is related by Wittgenstein to the problem of
the application of logic: “ [Logic] is prior to the question “How?”, not prior to the
question “What?” And if this were not so, how could we apply logic? We might put it
this way: if there would be logic even if there were no world, how then could there be a
logic given that there is a world?”. Logic cannot contain in itself the form of its
application to the world. There is no applicability of logic as such irrespectively of there
being a world. This is expressed in a convoluted way in TLP 5.5521 by saying, in a first
moment, that if there were logic without a world to which it applies, we wouldn’t be
able, in a second moment, to account for its applying, given a world. The applicability of
logic cannot be separated from the existence of a world. (This is not the trivial claim that
the application of logic implies there being a world to which it applies). We should not
conceive of logic as a realm that has in itself the ‘resources’ or “capacity to apply”,
irrespectively of whether a world existed or not. This is why Wittgenstein claims that

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though logic is prior to any fact, to the “how”, it is nevertheless not prior to the “what”.
Logic does not determine out of itself, the form of what there is. But neither is what there
is merely a matter of fact, left to contingency. The elementary, that is the form or
condition of facts, is realized in the application of logic. It is the actuality of the existing
world, thus can be called ultimate content, but is equally the condition of facts, thus can
be called form. The existing world is where form and content can come together in
elementary propositions.

§3 Logic, Application and Existence

How do we understand the claim that logic does not determine the “what”, i.e.
the form of objects and yet their form belongs together with logic? Answering this
question would be interpreting the claim in TLP 5.557 that “the application of logic
decides what elementary propositions there are. What belongs to its application, logic
cannot anticipate. It is clear that logic must not clash with its application. But logic has to
be in contact with its application. Therefore logic and its application must not overlap”.
So as to avoid the mistaken reading that logic in itself determines applicability or that
application is just left to the facts, we need to develop the insight that existence is the
point of contact of logic and its application. It is the fulcrum around which our use of
logic hinges.
Existence, as the term appears here, is not to be conceived in terms of something
existing, as an instance of a previously determined form. It is not to be identified by way
of the existential quantifier for the latter is an operation assuming the space of form. In
the Notebooks Wittgenstein further suggests this ontological difference between his use of
existence and there existing such and such beings by using a term we would usually
attribute to another tradition of philosophy, namely “Being” (Sein). “My whole task” he
writes “consists in … giving the nature of all being.” And he adds so as to draw the
distinction from existence claims falling within the scope of logic: “(And here Being does
not mean existing – in that case it would be nonsensical)”. (NB, 39)
We might have wished to interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks on existence and on
the relation of logic to its application as the more familiar claim that logic always applies,
that is holds of any world we could conceive of. There cannot be a logically
“disordered” world (as though even God is bound by the laws of logic, or could not

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create an illogical world). Yet, then we would have to conceive of logic as providing
form, say what all possible worlds have in common and each such world, including the
actual one, being distinguished by something like the specific contingent content, which
‘fills up’ that a priori form. Other possible worlds would have other contents. But this
would be to misunderstand what elementary propositions are. For objects are not just
contingent content, but constitute the very form of the possible: “The substance is what
subsists independently of what is the case. It is form and content” (TLP 2.024, 2.025)
The primacy of existence, could be called also the primacy of the actual. But such
actuality is not one position in the space of the possible. It is rather to be conceived as the
origin of our possibilities. To recognize what is such an origin of possibility is to
recognize the core of reality in the space in which our thinking operates. This primacy of
actuality, properly understood, can be seen to be at issue already in the very opening of
the Tractatus, that is in terms of how we conceive of the relation between facts and states
of affairs. We are tempted to conceive of the reality that we have through facts to be
constituted by a basis of content of states of affairs to which is added some logical
construction material to create compounds that go beyond the original atoms. But, as
Wittgenstein shows, this is precisely a misguided way of thinking of logical connectives,
as though they are real relations that make an addition to the content of reality. In effect
logical constants are operations that move us between different places in a space of form
of the objects. Similarly, in language, what we are tempted to conceive as logical analysis
is rather to be understood ultimately as a move to what is has reality in our
representation of facts in logical space, what those representations really come to.
Logic does not provide a general form of reality but is the medium that
permeates our world and through which is allowed the recognition of its unique
actuality. “Logic”, Wittgenstein writes “pervades [erfüllt] the world”(TLP, 5.61). The
expression is peculiar. Not only would it be pervasive, meaning, there would not be any
extra-logical matter which to which we could attribute the source of the specific
contentful concreteness of the actual world, but it would be further through this
pervasiveness of logic that we are to conceive of recognizing the world as uniquely and
fully delimited, as the highest actuality. Logic, one can say, fulfills [erfüllt] the world.
Existence is not articulated, or it is not a matter of what and how. Waving our
hands in exasperation we might say: There is a world, the world is one, and it is this one,

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in its actual existence. And maybe hand-waving is all we can do with this impossible
experience of existence (maybe Moore thought so and maybe this temptation is what
proved to be the impetus for Wittgenstein’s remarks collected as ‘On Certainty). But we
can also say that the consideration of the application of logic does not open onto
surveying a totality of possible languages, nor to the most general standpoint on reality,
but rather to our everyday language as that wherein the uniqueness of actuality can be
recognized. This is why Wittgenstein writes a bit further in that same group of
propositions in which he discusses the problem of application, that: “Everyday language
is in perfect logical order”. He does not mean to say that even everyday language is in
logical order. That is he does not argue that because it is one of countless number of
possible languages, and, since no language can be illogical, therefore everyday language
is in perfect logical order. Nor is the privilege of everyday language in allowing the
recognition of existence, a matter of its having a certain specifiable character that
distinguishes it, as it were objectively, from other, say, constructed languages. The point
and force of the claim is different. Everyday language is language in use, logic in
application, and only thereby is it the medium of acceding to the elementary or concrete
ground of meaning. Rather than speculating a priori about what could be the ultimate
constituents of analysis, we need to ask ourselves how everyday language is the
medium for recognizing that which is most real, the actual uniqueness of world.
Existence is unique. Existence and non- existence are not two positions in a
formal space of possibilities. As Wittgenstein emphasizes in 5.61, I cannot say “this”
exists but “that” does not exist in the world. This bears on our understanding of the
nature of limit. The term “limit” used in various contexts earlier in the book, receives a
new inflection at this stage of the argument. To reach a limit in language is to recognize
unique actuality, the world as unique. This uniqueness is not the immediacy of a brute
non-conceptual given. But nor can it merely be captured as a determination in a space of
form. The actuality of the world as concrete content is, one could say, the limit of forms.
That limit is where forms converge or come together in the complicated field of living
meaning, in everyday language, that Wittgenstein identifies in 4.002 with “the human
organism”6.

                                                                                                               
6For a discussion of proposition 4.002 in line with the reading presented here see
(Friedlander, 2014: 46-49)

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 Actuality or utmost concreteness is not to be taken as an instantiation of
previously given concepts or forms but as the convergence of forms. But, how would
forms come together uniquely? The centering of forms assumes a subject, which is to
say, the limit can only be recognized insofar as I am in language. Only in my use of
language, can I seek what in the world does my language come to. My share of world
(which is not a part of the world) only appears as the unique convergence and
condensation of my own existence in meaning. In other words, the dimension of
existence we are seeking, and whose uniqueness and concreteness one can call the
‘convergence of form’ as well as ‘pure content’, cannot be separated from the
recognition or acknowledgment of a subject. That limit sought is internal not to
language in general, not even to everyday language in general, but only appears as a
limit internal to my being in meaning. Without the first person, the uniqueness of the
world is wholly inconspicuous. Seeking it would be like trying to say what existence is
in general.
It is because of the internal relation of language to the first person that this
moment in the discussion of application involves a simple truth of the most concrete
significance, why it is the key that properly directs us to the ethics of the Tractatus. It is
why Wittgenstein introduces an ethical pathos precisely at this moment, long before the
so-called propositions on the ethical: “That utterly simple thing, which we have to
formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our
problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)” (TLP, 5.5563)

§4 Limits, World and Ipseity

Put in terms of the progress of the book, we try to explore the passage from the
use of language or the application of logic to the introduction of ipseity into the
argument of the Tractatus. We must explain why and how Wittgenstein moves from the
claim that “The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there
are”(TLP, 5.557) to the claim: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
(TLP, 5.6).
The proposition “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” seems
to establish meaning on a subjective ground. Yet, the subject is not in language by
deciding, choosing or constituting its ultimate forms. Wherever the consideration of

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language allows room for choosing forms, we would not be at a fundamental enough
level: “… is it really possible that in logic I should have to deal with forms that I can
invent?” Wittgenstein writes “What I have to deal with must be that which makes it
possible for me to invent them.” (TLP, 5.555) Thus, in relating subject and limit of the
world by the locution “the limits of my language” Wittgenstein should not be
interpreted as arguing that the subject determines the most general form of experience,
even if this constitutive act is taken transcendentally rather than empirically. Indeed, in
denying that elementary propositions can be given a-priori, Wittgenstein denies that one
can have a characterization of a transcendental form of the unity of experience that
would reflect the oneness we seek for the subject. The subject is inherently unique, not
by being an agency of formal synthesis, but in the capacity to agree with the world. And
this would demand a realistic just as much as an idealistic moment. A limit in that sense
is what I must willingly recognize or I can recognize through willing.
The subject does not constitute the limits of language, yet, the opposite mistake of
simple realism is just as fatal to an understanding of the unity of subject and world. For
one could begin reading the Tractatus as though limits of the world are merely an
objective matter and are determined by all the facts there are, or by the totality of objects
that constitute the conditions of possibilities of all those facts. Wittgenstein even writes:
“Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest
in the totality of elementary propositions.” (TLP 5.5561) But, we would have no
uniqueness, the uniqueness essential to the being of a subject, that could be delimited
merely realistically, in terms of facts and objects. Uniqueness is only in the concrete
delimitation of meaning that makes the world my world.
Wittgenstein refers to this peculiar identity with oneself, in willingly submitting
to the highest concrete actuality, through the locution “the world is my world”. In
other words, realism is the truth of solipsism, or solipsism thought through is realism.
This famous moment of the Tractatus is sometime taken to mean that since two opposite
metaphysical positions are identified, they are both shown to be nonsense. But, such a
reading is not dialectical enough. Existence, or world is that wherein idealism and
realism come to the same7.

                                                                                                               
7  One way to describe the shift I aim to introduce to the reading of the Tractatus, is to

speak of the work as involving three dimensions, each having its own unity and

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 Note that Wittgenstein speaks of solipsism leading to a pure realism (TLP, 5.64).
It would be a realism that involves the recognition of what I call “pure content”, that is
of the unique concreteness of the world, as the truth of that uniqueness sought for the I,
which solipsism craves. The identity of solipsism and realism means that I am most
uniquely myself, or individuated in partaking of the uniqueness of the world.
Wittgenstein brings out how a vulgar realism or dogmatism is utterly problematic by
relating the recognition of limit to a moment of ipseity, i.e. to the uniqueness of the I.
Uniqueness makes sense only as the utmost concrete articulation of meaning, in which I
have a delimited world. As Wittgenstein puts it in the Notebooks: “This is the way I have
travelled: Idealism single men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone
out and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so, on the one side
nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads
to realism if it is strictly thought out.” (NB, 85, my emphasis)
Idealism leads to solipsism, the subjective-individual version of the identity of
limits of language and limits of world. But it ultimately eventuates in a pure realism, a
higher realism. The realism that ensues, when the dialectic is followed, allows me to take
myself, my body, to be part of the world (just like animals and plants are parts of it). But
precisely thereby the locus of true spiritual realization is given expression. It has nothing
to do with finding or identifying myself in the world. Rather, the unique world is the
concrete limit with which I bring myself to agree, or which I avoid at the price of
avoiding myself. The realization of the identity of I and world is also the key to the
account of the will.

§5. World, Life and Uniqueness

Much hinges on developing properly the notion of world and this requires
rethinking what we might associate with this notion in earlier moments in the Tractatus.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
rigorous elaboration. They form a hierarchy, or contribute to way the book is to be
conceived as a ladder. They can be introduced by way of the following three terms:
Facts, Objects, World. While most of the readings of the Tractatus recognize that there is
a distinction between the consideration of facts and of objects (reflected for instance in
the distinction in language between propositions and names), there is no similar attempt
to rigorously bring out the internal complexity of the dimension Wittgenstein refers to
through the term “world”.
 

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For sure if we think of world through facts and objects we might have a conception of a
world as a sum-total of facts or as an interconnection of objects in states of affairs. And
we might be tempted to ask which of these facts circumscribe the subject (and thereby
characterize how the subject is in the world). But to say that the world is my world is
different from saying that I am in the world. Wittgenstein’s propositions on solipsism
precisely bring out this distinction8. The subject is not a delimited part of the world, i.e. is
not in the world, but rather is the limits of the world (See TLP, 5.631-5.632).
But is there any basis for introducing the register of will or fulfillment in coming
to recognize the world concretely delimited in meaning? For this is I take it what
Wittgenstein implies by introducing the notion of life into the argument at this point. He
writes: “The World and Life are One” and clarifies that “[p]hysiological life is of course
not “Life”. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world.” (NB, 77) Life is self
constituting or self-realizing. Wittgenstein neither wishes to speak of organic
(physiological) nor or psychological life as inherently involving fulfillment or
actualization, but rather of life in meaning or of the life of intelligence. But the role of
meaning or thought in life should not be reduced to a rational being having purposes.
Rather fulfillment or realization of the purposiveness of intelligent life is the uniqueness
in meaning that is agreement with the world. What ‘drives’ thoughtful life as such and
expresses itself in the forms of the highest human achievements is concrete meaningful
individuality: “Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion –
science – and art. And this consciousness is life itself.” (NB, 79). That striving is not
something external to the human animal, but rather it is internal to the character of
‘intelligent’ life itself. Intelligent life, i.e. life in meaning, has its fulfillment in
uniqueness, i.e. individuality. And individuality is the realization of uniqueness in
agreement with the world.
This moment of uniqueness could suggest conceiving of the ethical in
perfectionist terms as being true to one’s own-most self. Yet, the uniqueness of one’s life
is not to be sought in our usual ways of referring to creativity, genius or whatever one
might place at the source of the highest human striving in religion science and art.
Uniqueness is not my being or having something that is unlike anything else, or anyone
else. It is not a matter of realizing the self’s talents, specific purposes and interests.

                                                                                                               
8 For an interpretation of these moments see (Friedlander, 2014: 57-62)

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Almost the contrary: it is another name for the impersonal standpoint of a sober realism
in the involvement with meaning. What makes it difficult to understand Wittgenstein’s
inflection of this perfectionism is the further insight that actualizing life in meaning is
submitting oneself to the highest actuality. Uniqueness is realized in the recognition of a
limit internal to thoughtful living. This is why it is a realism that is not expressed, as is
usually the case, in the dissociation of I and world, but a realistic spirit that can only be
expressed in the first person, as uniqueness in coming to agree with the world. As
Wittgenstein also puts it: “Mine is the first and only world” (NB, 82)
One could, for sure object that my life is singled, by virtue of the facts ‘in’ it.
Every person would have his or her own ‘perimeter of facts’. And seen this way my life
is only a minuscule part of the facts of the total facts that make up the world (say when
we think that “the world is the totality of facts”). But this would be to think of one’s life
as one among many lives, and not as the capacity to agree with the world, or to be
uniquely myself in having a uniquely concrete world in meaning. The “I, myself” is not
the simple self-consciousness. I become myself in realizing through my life the uniquely
concrete in the world. This identity would be conceiving of my life as participating or
partaking of the highest reality, i.e. as having the uniqueness of the world as its
background.
It is only ‘from within’ that life can be that which involves me uniquely, that the
world can be “my world”. This ‘within’ is not my private inner, mental space (although
it is always a temptation to turn that way to look for uniqueness). It is out of my
meaningful involvements with the world that I come to realize the internal limit of the
articulation of form as concrete reality. The limit is manifest in the sober recognition, one
could call it reconciliation to the concrete realities of my existence. One thing I do not
choose is my life. Or, to put it slightly differently, conceiving of life as a matter of choice
opens man to the mythical figuration of existence (This is part of what interests
Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer’).

§6. Uniqueness, Significance and Agreement

In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein broaches his remarks on the ethical with the
question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (NB, 72). (Given what
we have established regarding the unquestionable character of existence, the framing of

  13  
the matter as a question here, as well as the suggestion that the question-form implies,
namely that there is a contentful answer to it, should be seen as preliminary):
To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of
life.
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of
the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. (NB, 74)
The highest purposiveness of intelligent life is being towards the individual
concretization of meaning. Since this state is identically subject and world, it can equally
be referred to as “my world” or as a “significant world”. Thus Wittgenstein does not
assume that human life can be understood in terms of an articulable purpose that gives it
value. Rather being in significance is the mark of the fulfilled life. Having a significant
world is what value ultimately comes to. Indeed, significance is precisely identified by
Wittgenstein with uniqueness and world as he writes: “As a thing among things, each
thing is equally insignificant, as world each one equally significant.” (NB, 83 translation
modified). When something is seen in or within the world, it is comparable to other
things and, thus it cannot appear as unique, or as intrinsically higher (i.e. absolutely
valuable). Value is absolute in being incomparable, unique: It is not of the form this is
valuable, rather than that. Taking significance as a dimension of meaning that is not
partitioning the world into contentful possibilities that are deemed significant and other
equally present contentful possibilities that are rejected as insignificant, we precisely
express what Wittgenstein called the standpoint of existence.
Absolute value is expressed as the task of coming to agreement with the world. This
is to be seen as the fundamental form of the will as intelligent life. It assumes a moment
in which the world appears alien (call it the moment of doubt). At first, it would appear
that Wittgenstein is stressing precisely the alien character of the world, or the separation
of world and willing subject.
The world is independent of my will.
Even if everything that we want were to happen, this would still only be,
so to speak, a grace of fate, for what would guarantee it is not any logical
connection between will and world, and we could not in turn will the
supposed physical connection. (NB,73)

And further:
The world is given me, [Die Welt ist mir gegeben], i.e. my will enters into
the world completely from outside as into something that is already
there.

  14  
 …
That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will.
However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and
what we are dependent on we can call God.
In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The
world – which is independent of our will. (NB,74)
But this expression of separation of I and world, the sense that the will has to be
exercised on alien ground, is merely a privation that the ethical will overcomes. Such
overcoming is not the assertion or affirming of a freedom of the will that bends the
world to the will, or that manages to express itself ‘despite’ what is given. Wittgenstein
writes: “There are two godheads: the world and my independent I” (NB, 74). This
doesn’t mean that there are two gods, but rather that the proper stance towards the
divine is the recognition of the possibility of the two godheads coming to one, or
agreeing with each other. This can be seen as a form of freedom or of the independence
of the I out of the sense of finding oneself in a given world:
I can make myself independent of fate.
…
I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear
dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will of God’ (NB, 75)

There appear to be insuperable difficulties with articulating this ultimate ground

of value and will. In particular we could point to three issues, some aspects of which I
will engage sketchily in the remaining parts of the essay: First, understanding how this
ground of the will relates to the will that acts specifically, i.e. that has a particular content
or object as it were ‘in the world’. Secondly, relating the dimension of agreement with
the world with our intuitions concerning the ethical sphere. In particular, thirdly,
explaining how others figure at this ground of what is valuable identified through what
is my world.

§7 Wanting, Willing and Acting

It is necessary to develop an account of willing specific actions in and through
which we conceive of expressing our striving for agreement of world, or giving
expression to the ethical will. Thus the question is in part how to connect the account of
the ground of will as agreement with the world with the sense that the individual will
manifests itself in specific actions, having specific contents (or objects) that we represent
to ourselves in putting ourselves into action. In other words the individual will seems at

  15  
least to be relating itself to some parts of the world. What does it mean then to will
specifically yet in view of the identity of will and world? How are the two moments,
equally essential to recognize the full form of the will, internally related? And can we
make sense of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that it is the ethical will that has logical primacy
in that account (““What really is the situation of the human will? I will call “will” first
and foremost the bearer of good and evil. (Böse)” (NB, 76, my emphasis)) 9?
One cannot just will to be in agreement with the world. Or, more precisely, being
in agreement with the world, cannot be a represented purpose, an object, of the
particular will. And, with Wittgenstein, it would not help to resort to a ‘second order’ or
meta-purpose, that organizes ‘first order’ actions of the specific will.10 It is rather by
thinking through the possibility of specifying the will that we are to recognize how it
meshes with the ethical will.
The elaboration of the character of the specific act of will involves such terms as
representation, belief, desire, body, action, purpose and realization. In relating these, it is
particularly important to pay attention to the distinction Wittgenstein draws between
“wanting” and “willing”. In her translation of the Notebooks Anscombe has sometimes
Wünschen as “wanting”, and in others contexts the same term is translated as “wishing”.
I will retranslate all the contexts in which Wünschen appears into the single more neutral
term “wanting”. One reason for this choice is that wishing might too easily suggest
something unrealistic, i.e. desiring objects that one cannot have merely by willing.
Wittgenstein’s use of the terms Wünschen and Wollen, clearly suggest a
distinction, as in the following: “Wanting is not acting. But willing is acting” [Wünschen
is nich tun. Aber Wollen ist tun] (NB, 88). But what is the import of this distinction? Is
willing what emerges out of wanting? What is it for wanting to turn into willing in
                                                                                                               
9  There is an important sense then that we do not understand what the will is by way of

reflecting on actions or intentional acts that are neutral in terms of their ethical
qualification of good and evil. Logically speaking what is more fundamental is the
character of the ethical will and it is to it that our concepts of specific acts of will have to
be related.
 
10I take it that it is always misguided, with regard to Wittgenstein, to resolve issues by
postulating a meta-level – see in this context Russell’s Introduction to the Tractatus and
Carnap’s attempt to resolve the ‘unsayability’ of logical form in his Logical Syntax of
Language. The parallel issue appears also as we are tempted to a meta-perspective on the
will.

  16  
action and when is that possible? We might want to flesh this distinction by separating
representation from will. One would then say that it is possible to want or desire all
kinds of things one represents to oneself, but this would be different than truly willing
to act upon such representations or making them into purposes of action.
Insofar as the act of will is specific, or must have an object, it involves
representation or thinking: “The will seems always to have to relate to an idea [a
representation – eine Vorstellung].” The involvement of will in the world presupposes the
specificity given to it by the representation. “It is clear, so to speak, that we need a
foothold for the will in the world… the will does have to have an object. Otherwise we
should have no foothold and could not know what we willed. And could not will
different things.” (NB, 87-88) Willing is a self-conscious manifestation of a capacity. I
cannot will without being conscious that I am willing. And that consciousness of willing
does not require ascertaining it by means of a further fact I obtain through observation:
“We cannot imagine, e.g. having carried out an act of will without having detected that
we have carried it out.”11
But then, should one say that I have various wants, represent to myself various
objects of desire, and then in a further moment I need to check or decide, maybe based
on various beliefs I have, which of these should, or even can, become willing? And do I
then further decide to engage my body in action? Two issues need to be considered here:
the first is the supposed ‘connection’ of the wanting in mere thought or in the sphere of
representation to my body which must be ‘put’ in action when I truly will. The second
concerns the supposed deliberation in which the represented object (or what we also call
the purpose), becomes an object of willing rather than one which remains mere desire I
do not act upon. Through such deliberation we would supposedly choose to will what
we until then merely wanted.
Take a simple case: I can want a chair to be in another place than it is (“I really
wish the chair was in a different place!”). This would be distinct from willing it, which
would involve acting to move it to another place. To account for the distinction we
might want to say “My wish (want) relates, e.g. to the movement of the chair, my will to
a muscular feeling” (NB, 88). But it is not as though a connection is made through a
                                                                                                               
11Elizabeth Anscombe masterfully develops the implication of this Wittgensteinian
point in Intention.

  17  
distinct moment between the representation of the movement of the chair and the body
that is thereby moved to move the chair. There is no mental act, which connects mere
wanting to muscular effort. It is not as though with wanting all there is would be a
spinning of the mind without the gears being engaged in the body. The question
Wittgenstein raises about the foothold for the will in the world, should be distinguished
from the supposed need to identify a connecting act between representation in mere
thought and a body that then is moved by that mental determination.12
There is no independent act of will separate from the acting, but rather that
willing is wholly in the acting: “This is clear: it is impossible to will without already
performing the act of the will. The act of will is not the cause of the action but is the
action itself.” (NB, 87) and further: “The fact that I will an action consists in my
performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action. When I
move something I move. When I perform an action I am in action.” (NB, 88))
In that case how do we distinguish wanting from willing? Isn’t wanting
something that occurs merely in thought, as opposed to willing the action in reality. One
way to put this would be to say that “[t]he wanting [wish] precedes the event, the will
accompanies it” (NB, 88). (I assume that the event to which Wittgenstein refers is the
action.) So that to will to move the chair is to move myself to where the chair is, hold it
and push it to the right place. The will would express itself specifically, in an articulate
way, in all these movements. The denial of the separate moment of (mental)
representation, does not mean that action involves no thinking, but rather willing is
thinking in and through action. An action is one might say the expression of a thought in
the medium of reality. (Remember that thinking itself is said to be an activity of
picturing, of making to ourselves pictures of facts.)13

                                                                                                               
12  It is as though the specificity of the action in space and time tempts us to a picture that

there must be a determinate moment and even a determinate place in which the mental
makes connection to the body. For a reductio of this picture see Wittgenstein’s remark on
raising one’s arm (NB, 86)
 
13  But
can’t we ‘complete’ the determination of the will before we act? Can’t we
distinguish the act of will as a mental determination from the action in cases where we
will now to do something later? So for instance Wittgenstein asks: “But in that case how
can I predict – as in some sense I surely can that I shall raise my arm in five minutes’
time? That I shall will this?” (NB, 87) But the realization of the complete action is not to
be conceived as a prediction of the future, for which I now wait for independent

  18  
 The will accompanies the action, but what if wanting had its own
accompaniment in a bodily process: “Suppose that a process were to accompany my
wanting [wish]. Should I have willed the process? Would not this accompanying appear
accidental in contrast to the compelled accompanying of the will?” (NB, 88)
Accompanying does no mean merely being side by side. The will does not just keep
pace with the action, but permeates it, and constitutes so to speak its substance. Yet how
do we distinguish a process that can come together with mere wanting from the way the
will necessarily ‘accompanies’ an action? Wittgenstein dismisses the idea that it is a
specific feeling of the activity of the body that would distinguish willing in action from
some other process that is taking place: “Have the feelings by which I ascertain that an
act of the will takes place any particular characteristic which distinguishes them from
other ideas? It seems not.” (NB, 87). We could moreover, imagine a process that
accompanies someone’s wanting and is manifest in bodily demeanor. Suppose the
bodily process that I am conscious accompanies my wish consists in concentrating my
vision on the chair unwaveringly and with clenched teeth express determination: “In
that case, however I might conceivably get the idea that, e.g. this chair was directly
obeying my will. Is that possible?”(NB, 87) One might of course respond that the chair
doesn’t in fact move when I so concentrate. But couldn’t this just be taken as an
indication that I have not wanted it hard enough? Indeed, is it not the case, our
determined individual would retort, that not all our actions reach their desired
completion (for something might always go wrong).
This last example opens a deeper issue that pertains to our conception of the
relation of wanting to willing, namely in what sense is there a possibility of being
mistaken about what can be an object of the will at all. For indeed, by making the
intuitive distinction between wanting in thought and a separate willing in action, we
would be opening room for a contentful question whether there are things that can be
wanted and only a further subset of these can really be willed. And if this is a contentful

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
confirmation from observation. It is not as though there is an act of will at a specified
moment and then after five minutes the action. The action itself has different moments,
which together express the will. But then, is it the case that for my will to be present
throughout, I need not be constantly and continuously on alert, waiting anxiously for
the elapsing of the five minutes? This would be to confuse the logical moments of the
action with psychological time. I can express my willing to raise my arm in five minutes
by setting my alarm clock for five minutes from now.  

  19  
distinction couldn’t we be mistaken about what can become an object of will? Wanting is
for sure sometimes unrealistic. It seems like we can want anything at all. But, then, to
take our earlier example, if I want the chair to be in another place, can’t I then also
sensically believe that the chair or any other inanimate object, actually could obey my
will. Shouldn’t we just try and see? Yet, this appears not to be a contentful possibility
about which we could be mistaken, but rather nonsense.
While holding to the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing, how can
we avoid forming a gap between them that makes possible trying to will what turns out
not to be an object of willing at all? “But I cannot will everything. – But what does it
mean to say: ‘I cannot will this’? Can I try to will something?”(NB, 88) It is not the case
that there are things in the world I can first only want, then ‘try’ to will, just to realize
that in fact they cannot be objects of willing. The transition to willing cannot be
conceived as a contentful specification out of the wealth of possibilities opened by
representation in wanting.
There is here a fundamental issue that relates to the account of what Wittgenstein
calls willing agreement with the world. Indeed if we aim to think ultimately of the
ground of willing as agreement with the world, we need to do away with the picture of
willing as involving a deliberation and a choice within a space of possibilities opened in
representation. This would imply that there are objects in the world that can be willed
and others that cannot be willed. That among what is represented as possible wanting
there is a distinction of scope between mere objects of wanting and objects of willing.
This is why Wittgenstein writes: “For the consideration of willing makes it look as if one
part of the world were closer to me than another (which would be intolerable). But of
course, it is undeniable that in a popular sense there are things that I do and other things
not done by me.” (NB, 88)
How are we then to draw the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing?
How would we express the recognition that it is only through willing that we have the
concreteness of world? Wanting and willing would be distinguished precisely by what
we called earlier meaningful concretization. Wanting is abstract or does not have a
concrete object. In that sense there would not be one and the same determinate content
that we first want and then realize it can or cannot be willed. Both wanting and willing
take place in the medium of the permeation of reality by meaning, but wanting is not

  20  
thought through all the way to the concreteness of significance. Indeed, concretization is
precisely thinking that is expressed as, and in, action. It is in concretizing meaning that
we move from want to will. I so to speak express concretely the meaning of the will by
acting, just as I can come to realize concretely what I mean in what I say. One could say
then that meaning is fully concrete when it manifests itself in thoughtful activity. To have
meaning be concrete for me is to be active. Conversely, significance is just the
concreteness of meaning that calls for action. Significance emerges as the character of the
world of the willing subject. We can also speak here of the unrealized state of wanting,
wish or fantasy, as the avoidance of the meaningful, the retreat from the active life. (At
its most extreme, as Wittgenstein sees it, this avoidance of meaning manifests itself in
nonsense)

§8. Willing and Thinking

Our discussion above raises the question whether the usual way of
distinguishing on the one hand wanting in thought and on the other hand willing as
putting that thinking in action is sustainable. I have suggested that there is something
like a continuum to be understood through degrees of concretization of willing
agreement with the world. This is suggested as Wittgenstein writes: “Or is the mistake
here this: even wanting (thinking) is an activity [Handlung] of the will? (And in this sense,
indeed, a man without will would not be alive.)” (NB, 77)
If we account for the intuitive distinction between wanting and willing in terms
of the concretization of meaning in the medium of reality, then indeed, there is a sense in
which an activity is involved in wanting that is not ‘separate’ from willing but should
count as a lower grade or deficient manifestation of the will. There would be a
continuity between the purposiveness of life and acts of will which are the highest
concretization of the purposiveness of life itself in significance. Put differently, thinking
and willing are not two different realms. We cannot draw a distinction between the
sphere of the thinking subject that gives us the space of the possibility of reality and that
of the willing subject, which realizes some of these possibilities. The actuality of the
world manifests itself through the purposiveness of life in meaning itself, or the active
thinking articulation of life.

  21  
 And yet can’t we have a thinking subject that would not have the further capacity
to will? “But can we conceive of a being that isn’t capable of Will at all, but only of Idea
(of seeing for example)? In some sense this seems impossible. But if it were possible then
there could also be a world without ethics.” (NB, 77) The case of seeing that Wittgenstein
considers might be a good candidate for something that is potentially free from willing.14
Indeed, it is not a mere example, but rather must be read in the context of the
propositions in which the place of the eye in its visual field comes to stand for how the
subject is to be conceived as the limit of the world. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein writes:
“I am placed in [this world] like my eye in its visual field.” And in the Tractatus he
caricatures a figure of limits as a circumference of the visual field, or as a “bubble”
blown out of a center, which is the eye. But what emerges from the previous
considerations is precisely how delimitation as concretization of the will is key to do
away with simplistic pictures of limits of meaning (and of the visual field). In that sense,
seeing could partake in having a significant world. (Wittgenstein asks himself: “Is seeing
an activity [Tätigkeit]?”) Seeing is a human capacity that can concretize as will. The living
human being has different capacities that are manifested in a variety of activities, such
as seeing, walking, eating and playing. Expressions of the will in actions are nothing but
the thinking realizations that draw and weave together such capacities of life. 15 And in

                                                                                                               
14
I will consider what Wittgenstein calls viewing the world with a “happy eye” in the
last section of the paper.

15  It
would be worthwhile to inquire about cases where it would seem to be inevitable to
appeal to the mere attention of a subject that is necessary to the very identity of an
action. Wittgenstein gives the following simple example: “ In drawing the square

in the mirror one notices that one is only able to manage it if one prescinds completely
from the visual datum and relies only on muscular feeling. So here after all there are two
quite different acts of the will in question. The one relates to the visual part of the world,
the other to the muscular feeling part. Have we anything more than empirical evidence
that the movement of the same part of the body is in question in both cases?” (NB, 87)
We feel like saying that there is one action here that would take place in drawing the
square directly on paper and when it is drawn by looking at the page through a mirror.
It is the action of drawing the square. But then the mediation through the mirror
requires further attention that can only be attributed to the thinking subject to perform
the action (since the action judging by the body movement and the result is “the same”.
But I take it that Wittgenstein precisely emphasizes that there are two actions, two acts of

  22  
particular seeing is not exempt from the possibility of realizing itself thoughtfully as will
(Drawing something would for instance be a simple case of an activity of the eye which
can be realized to different degrees all the way to a sublime realism in art.)
Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus : “There is no such thing as the subject that
thinks or entertains ideas… The subject does not belong to the world: rather it is a limit
of the world.” (TLP, 5.631-5.632) This might lead to some misunderstanding, for
Wittgenstein does not merely rejects here the idea that the thinking subject is not in the
world while retaining the notion of a purely thinking subject in some other sense.
Rather, he understands limit through the characterization we have developed of
thoughtful will as concretization of meaning. It is in that direction that Wittgenstein
initially expresses in the Notebooks: “The thinking subject is surely merely illusion. But
the willing subject exists.” (NB, 80) There is no distinct sphere of representations that are
attributable to a thinking subject that would have beliefs, thoughts or wants without
thereby willing.16 One might also say that thinking, believing and wanting, as we would
be tempted to conceive of them as states of a thinking subject that then wills actions, are
not distinct kinds of experiences, but pertain ultimately to the activity of life that is
concretizing meaning: “Is belief a kind of experience? Is thought a kind of experience? ...
All experience is world and does not need the subject” (NB, 89). The thinking that ‘goes
into willing’ is not a specific domain of experience to which we could attribute a unity
that delimits a subject. Ultimately, the rejection of the separation of representation and
will similarly implies that “the act of will is not an experience.” (NB, 89) Willing is
actively thinking through reality and thinking is willing concretely what one means. The
task of such a will is agreement with the world expressed in “the world is my world”.
Wittgenstein’s last remarks in the Notebooks regarding the character of willing returns to
this fundamental characterization of the will: “What kind of reason is there for the

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
will. This could be taken to be a case that has the same structure as that of the discussion
of the Necker cube in 5.5423. For an account of this proposition and the problematic of
the thinking subject see (Friedlander, 2014: 49-52). I thank Noam Melamed for his
comments on the importance of this passage in the Notebooks.
 
16  Recall
in this context Wittgenstein’s criticism of the understanding of propositional
attitudes as relating a self-standing subject to a propositional content in 5.541-5.542. For
a more detailed discussion of these propositions, see (Friedlander, 2014: 49-52).  

  23  
assumption of a willing subject? Is not my world adequate for individuation
[Individualisiering]?” (NB, 89)

§9. Is agreement with the world an attitude that renounces willing?

We must now try to think together the outcome of our survey of the problem of
the specification of willing with our initial characterization of the ethical will as willing
agreement with the world. A term that might appear useful in linking the two moments
is to conceive of the ethical will as an “attitude” that manifest itself in and through our
specific actions. Wittgenstein asks himself: “Is the will an attitude towards the world?
… The will is an attitude of the subject to the world. The subject is the willing subject.”
(NB, 87) This last formulation allows Wittgenstein to avoid some of the problematic
implications of the use of the term “attitude”. If for instance we thought of an attitude as
a way of seeing things, a world-view so to speak, then we might legitimately ask whether
this would not reintroduce something like a thinking subject that is merely
contemplative. But as the previous discussion attempted to establish, it is not as though
we have a thinking subject and a willing subject and thereby two different attitudes to
the world, the theoretical and the practical attitudes: “The subject is the willing subject”.
Conversely, identifying the subject with willing does not mean that we can will
an attitude to the world, as though an attitude is on a par with any specific action. We
cannot ‘adopt’ an attitude, at least if this means having the attitude at will. 17 Speaking of
an attitude would be another term for referring to a constancy or unity in willing
concretely. The attitude would be as it were the guiding thread that concretization
introduces into all the specificity of willing at different levels. In that sense it pertains to
what we might want to call the character of the person. But this thread of character is not
to be taken psychologically as something complex that is formed gradually through the
encounters of life (“a composite would no longer be a soul” (TLP, 5.5421)). Willing
concretely is what makes for the simplicity of character of a human life. It is one might
say willing in a realistic spirit. Indeed, formulating the matter through the real side of

                                                                                                               
17  “Things acquire “significance” only through their relation to my will.” (NB, 84). This

is not a matter of focusing my attention on a thing, or of subjective concentration. I cannot

make something significant by attending to it. For a discussion of the issue and its
bearing on artistic practice, see (Friedlander, 2017: 120-124)
 

  24  
the identity of subject and world, would do away with the temptation to ‘thicken’ the
attitude to the world with contentful psychological characterizations.
But another hidden temptation lurks in invoking the term ‘attitude’ to account
for the character of willing. It is especially acute when one considers the possibility of
failure in our actions. For one might ask oneself how is it possible at all to sustain
agreement with the world if in willing something, it is always possible that one does not
achieve one’s objective? Wouldn’t agreement with the world demand securing willing
against all such contingencies, that is protecting the will from contingency. And
wouldn’t that be achievable only in not desiring anything, in taking up everywhere the
attitude of not-wanting?18
Is it possible to will good, to will evil, and not to will?
Or is only he happy who does not will?
But what would it be not to will? (NB, 77) 19

Given the continuity Wittgenstein establishes between willing and intelligent life
as such, it is doubtful whether such negation of all willing could be possible at all.
Moreover, it would not express the ethical stance, or the proper way to express the
ethical as an attitude of the will to the world as such. Willing is unavoidable in bringing
about agreement with the world. If agreement with the world is what we call happiness,
then, as Wittgenstein puts it “Man cannot make himself happy without more ado.”(NB,
76). For the most part being in the world, or in meaning, involves dependence. This is
not a matter of luck or circumstances, but should be seen an ontological characterization.
It is out of it that ground that will or agreement with the world can be realized.
But then how is the will protected from the misery of the world? Wittgenstein
dramatizes the problem pertaining to the satisfaction of the will in the following:

                                                                                                               
18This would be the place to explore the temptation to conceive of what is sometimes
called the quietist character of Wittgenstein’s ethics.

19  Howdo we imagine a case in which a person cannot exercise their will? Surely, this is
not merely to be identified with the inability to move one’s limbs in action. “Let us
imagine a man who could use none of his limbs and hence could, in the ordinary sense,
not exercise his will. He could, however, think and want and communicate his thought to
someone else. Could therefore do good or evil through the other man. Then it is clear
that ethics would have validity for him, too, and that he in the ethical sense is the bearer
of a will.”(NB, 77) We for sure need not resort to the case of paralysis and can think in
this context of the ethical will of a sovereign leader that has his orders executed by
others, but in a clear sense exercises will that can be good or evil.  

  25  
“Suppose that man could not exercise his will, but had to suffer all the misery of this
world then what could make him happy. How can man be happy at all, since he cannot
ward off the misery of this world?” And Wittgenstein responds “Through the life of
knowledge [das Leben der Erkenntnis]. The good conscience is the happiness that the life
of knowledge preserves” (NB, 81). The appeal to a life of knowledge, might suggest
again a contemplative, rather than active form of existence. And Wittgenstein even
associates a kind of renunciation with the possibility of happiness (i.e. agreement with
the world): “The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities
[Annehmlichkeiten] of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of
fate.” (NB, 81). But renouncing the amenities of the world should be distinguished from
not willing. What one renounces is the identification of one’s happiness with the
satisfaction of wanting or desire that, in its abstractness, sets itself purposes. To show
oneself to be independent of the world would mean precisely the capacity to make§
one’s will independent of the success or failure of that wanting. But this does not imply
renouncing willing. To recognize that distinction, consider how Wittgenstein expresses
the problem in terms of wanting rather than willing:
But can one want [wünschen] and yet not be unhappy if the want [Wunsch] does
not attain fulfillment? (And this possibility always exists)
…
And yet in a certain sense it seems that not wanting [wünschen] is the only good.
(NB 77)

It would be indeed precisely right to say that not wanting is the true attitude of
the will. But, following our discussion, the stance of “not wanting” can be understood in
two different ways. We could imagine an attempt to ‘shut down’ all wanting or desire
(hopelessly, one should add, since this is tantamount to life itself). The other way not to
remain with unfulfilled wanting would be to concretize the want into willing. To
concretize want into will is to do away with wanting. And the highest state of being a
willing subject that has a fully concrete will is willing agreement with the world. But this
just is being in significance. This is the proper understanding of what Wittgenstein refers
to as a life of knowledge, which is its own happiness.
Agreement with the world cannot be conceived as an achievement of the will that
brings about the state of affairs it wants or wishes for. It must be such as we recognize the
world, or accept it as one’s own. And this cannot be expressed through the idea of

  26  
purposes that are realized in action. But our discussion of the relation of will and
significance opens another possibility. For significance is precisely not a purpose of the
will, but rather identified as what is recognized in the concretization of meaning in and
through acting. Insofar as meaning is not a purpose, one could seek here the ground for
an action that is its own object, or achieves satisfaction in acting itself. It is in that spirit
that Wittgenstein writes: “If the will has to have an object in the world, the object can be
the intended action itself.” (NB, 87)
In determining oneself through the setting of purposes, one can always fail to
achieve fulfillment, and yet there is a sense in which the ‘higher will’ or ethical will,
whose task is defined by agreement with the world can be ‘unaffected’ by failure. For, in
concretizing willing we move from desiring an object, to the thoughtful activity itself
providing the occasion for recognizing significance. This would constitute action willed
in and for itself. Indeed, in taking the action itself as one’s object one can precisely
introduce the possibility of agreement with the world, of happiness, irrespectively of an
action achieving its aim or purpose. The ethical will has the action itself as its reward –
it does the action for its own sake. This dissociation from living through purposes is
linked in the Notebooks to what Wittgenstein calls “fulfilling the purpose of existence”:
And in this sense Dostoievsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is
fulfilling the purpose of existence. Or again we could say the man is fulfilling the
purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live.
That is to say, who is content. (NB, 73)

§10 The Place of the Other in Agreeing with the World

Before further developing this characterization of the ethical will, I want briefly
to consider how the primacy of agreement with the world in the consideration of the
ethical is compatible with the common intuitions about the place of the other in morality.
In particular I want to address the worry that Wittgenstein’s characterization is too self-
centered, as though, if the will were to be grounded in the world being my world, this
would imply being callously unconcerned with others.
That the ethical has to do with the possibility of internal agreement of subject
and world means that the world ‘in itself’ cannot be good or evil: “If I am right, then it is
not sufficient for the ethical that a world is given. Then the world in itself is neither good
nor evil. For it must be all one, as far as concerns the existence of ethics, whether there is
living matter in the world or not. And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead

  27  
matter can in itself be neither good or evil.” (NB, 77) But then, if value derives from the
very coming to agreement of subject and world, wouldn’t ethics be a solipsistic
endeavor? Wittgenstein asks himself in the Notebooks “Can there be an ethics if there is
no living being but myself? If ethics is supposed to be something fundamental, there
can.” (NB, 77) In other words, it would seem that the other does not enter inherently in
the characterization of the ethical will as such. It is as though only subject and world
(and the inner possibility of agreement) are of concern to ethics.
For sure, the idea of agreement with the world is not tantamount to affirming the
individual will as a form of mastering the alien world, but rather would be closer to what
we might call “reconciliation” with it, which is the expression of true independence. But,
even if we managed to distinguish the agreement with the world from egoistic self-
concern, there would still arise a question whether and how other human beings have a
privileged place in what I call “my world”. Indeed, if the ultimate attitude concerns my
agreement with the world, isn’t the proper ethical stance one of being indifferent
towards others, neither wanting good nor evil for them? What is the relation of my will
to the weal and woe of others?
Is it, according to common conceptions, good to want nothing for one’s neighbor,
neither good nor evil?
…
It is generally assumed that it is evil to want someone else to be unfortunate. Can
this be correct? Can it be worse than to want him to be fortunate? (NB, 77-78)

Arguably, common conceptions or moral intuitions would be to think that a

good person wants good for other persons. One might wonder indeed, whether the
sense of significance associated with agreement with the world can be sustained in the
face of the misfortune of others. Wouldn’t my very sense that another is misfortunate
call upon me to act? Shouldn’t my response to this misfortune count as an essential part
of my ethical will, i.e. it would characterize this will as good or evil? But then this would
imply that caring for the good of others (‘loving one’s neighbor’), has to be part of what
it is to have oneself a good will. Wouldn’t that define the ethical will in terms of one’s
relation to what is in the world, rather than as agreement with world, whatever its facts
and objects?
One way to dissolve the apparent conflict between our moral intuitions and
Wittgenstein’s formulations is to deny that others figure in my world. For this would

  28  
parallel the mistaken attempt to locate myself, the subject, in the world (rather than as a
limit of the world). Just as there can be a problematic conception of the subject, there
would be a problematic conception of the other. This would imply that certain ways of
relating to others (i.e. taking one’s relation to them to be determined by facts) would be
problematic. We should further do away with various pictures of what it means for the
other not to be a ‘part’ of the world. For instance we should not conceive this as though
each person is in his own ‘bubble world’ (for this would be just reproducing the parallel
mistaken picture of my world being identified as a circumference of all the facts that I
encounter, as in the caricature of the limits of the visual field that Wittgenstein brings up
in the discussion of solipsism). But how then, could there be a relation to another at all if
the other is not “in the world”? If uniqueness is always a matter of the character of the
articulated world, of the limits of the world, we must ask whether the very possibility of
fulfilling willing concretely can, or even must, involve another.
Maybe the first context that comes to mind here, so as to exemplify this co-
delimitation of reality, is love. The locus of uniqueness accessible to me in love should
not be taken as the other person as such (as though uniqueness is some intractable
quality they have to them, or in them). Thinking of uniqueness this way would lead to
seeking the ground of love in what is special and unlike anyone else in the loved person.
Uniqueness, even in the context of love, is rather brought out in the character of the
reality willed in common. It would be against the deficiency of desire, passion, fantasy,
or even affection to characterize love, that it would be possible to flesh out what the
concretization of “wanting” into “willing” in love comes to. Indeed, one could speak
here of stages of the erotic or of the wanting that becomes the will manifesting itself in
love20: One can conceive of one such stage, in which potentially, every attractive person
of the appropriate sex provides an indeterminate occasion for love. This is the condition
in which another person is perceived as one among many others, that is a condition in
which all are equally significant and equally insignificant. Living that standpoint would
be immersion in an abstract fantasy and its paralyzing enchantment. Devotion demands
the determination of the will and makes the attachment to a particular other into an

                                                                                                               
20  The following discussion might appear less peculiar if we remember the deep

admiration that Wittgenstein had for Kierkegaard at the time of the composition of the
Tractatus.

  29  
occasion for being in agreement with the world. It is in that particular life with another
that the world is concretized or becomes a limit with which I strive to agree, only
thereby is it a limited whole for me.21
But doesn’t that imply ultimately that agreement with the world cannot be
achieved on one’s own? Does the fulfillment of a finite being essentially demand
another, as though one cannot address the imperfections of one’s own existence by
oneself? Addressing this issue at the most fundamental level, that is for Wittgenstein, at
a religious level, would require asking whether the articulation of agreement with the
world is not ultimately one that derives from a personal sense of that with which one
comes to agree. In other words, the question is whether the articulation of what it means
to be in agreement with the world is already to be understood as involving the sense of
otherness that can be taken as subject as well as substance. To suggest that this is indeed
a dimension of Wittgenstein’s account, consider that when Wittgenstein lays out the
essential dimensions of the ethical in the Notebooks he writes: “The meaning of life, i.e.
the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of
God to a father.” (NB, 73) The comparison of God to a father means that it is only on the
basis of the sense of the divine as personal that one can characterize the fundamental
nature of agreement with the world. This is also why the relation to the finite other will
be central to the ethical sphere. It is in this context that we will have to interpret such a
remark as: “‘To love one’s neighbor’ would mean to will!” (NB, 77) Yet, the religious
character of love of one’s neighbor would raise a question how the concretization of the
world in willing can be brought together with love of mankind and does not express
itself necessarily in a life concretized with a particular other. A fuller consideration of
this matter cannot be elaborated apart from the investigation of Wittgenstein’s
conception of the character of finitude. For the purpose of the present paper, the
preceding discussion is sufficient to suggest how the question of the other would be
introduced into Wittgenstein’s ethical standpoint.

§11 The Ethical Will

                                                                                                               
21  I take it that the emphasis on the concretization of the will in a common reality is what

will make this account different from considerations of mutual recognition that pertains to
the logic of self-consciousness.  

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 So as to bring this paper to a close, it would be helpful to gradually bring back
the character of the ethical we have elaborated to our starting point with the
unquestionable. I note that we can recognize the theme of questioning in Wittgenstein’s
treatment of the attempt to characterize the ethical through the idea of universal law.
Wittgenstein considers something like the possibility of raising a question with regard to
the performance of one’s duty:
The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt …” is: And
what if I do not do it? But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with
punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the
consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these
consequences will not be events. For, there must be something right in that
formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and
ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (TLP, 6.422)

The sphere of action is delineated in terms of a certain type of “why?” questions,

for insofar as something to count as my action I must be able to give reasons for it. But
Wittgenstein interestingly takes with regard to actions that are supposedly demanded as
duty or as ethical command, the ‘defiant’ question - form: “And what if I do not do it?”
This is close to “Why should I do it?” and yet expresses more clearly a skeptical attitude
than seeking, in myself, reasons to do what is commanded. Which is to say: A skeptical
question has a place to be raised when ethics is formulated by laying out a contentful
law. Ethics rather has to do with locating the ground of the will in what we called the
concrete uniqueness in agreement with the world. “Ethics does not treat of the world.
Ethics must be the condition of the world, like logic.” (NB, 77) Just as logic is ultimately
not a realm of contentful laws but in pervading the world is the medium of the
concretization of content, so ethics would not be understood on the basis of contentful
ethical laws but rather in the concretization of the will that makes the world my world.
Just as “logic pervades the world” [Die Logik erfüllt die welt] (TLP, 5.61, translation
modified) so “my will permeates the world” [mein Wille die Welt durchdringt] (NB, 73
translation modified).
The ethical will cannot be grounded in a contentful response to a why question
which will not ultimately refer itself to the very action itself. I did such and such because
such and such is the thing to do. The ethical action is willed in itself and can also be said
to be its own reward. This may be made more intuitive if we start not with the good
action but rather with the bad deed, and ask, in what sense is it its own punishment. In

  31  
explaining this we would no doubt need to turn to such a phenomenon as the call of
conscience to which Wittgenstein refers in the Notebooks: “When my conscience upsets my
balance [Gleichgewicht], then I am no in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it
the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” (NB, 75) But the
call of conscience is not itself the punishment of the evildoer, at least if we mean by such
punishment the mental torture of guilt feelings. The call of conscience is rather that
which allows one to recognize that one’s action was, in view of what is most one’s own,
already punishment. Similarly, we should not say that there is satisfaction in the
consciousness of having acted ethically and this feeling of satisfaction is the reward of
the one who has done good (for this is just the arrogant hubris of the moralist). The
reward is the having acted itself.
For example – someone acts in such a way as to hurt a loved one. This action is
its punishment not insofar as it might cause guilt feelings and self –recrimination, which
are obviously unpleasant. Rather it is punishment insofar as that person withdraws
himself from the kind of significant life in which there is, say, a community of love (and
more generally it is that which draws back from the possibility of agreement with the
world). Unless I redeem myself through willing, my punishment will be to live a life in
which I have denied myself human fulfillment. This is the sense in which, even on our
common conceptions of morality, we can feel that a bad deed can affect everything in
one’s life. That is, we find it meaningful to say that someone could be suffering from
what he did all of his life, or, that someone’s life is made tasteless by what he has done.
This is not to say that we need to seek a causal connection in space and time between the
deed and the rest of the life, or that the deed has innumerable effects or consequences
extending to the rest of one’s life. It further does not mean that the deed has left a
particularly strong impression in memory. (The call of conscience does not depend on
how good a memory you have. And its being unforgettable does not imply that it is not
possible to repress or ignore it.) For, if the punishment is in the character of the life of
the person who acts badly, it is something that person can be aware of or oblivious to.
The call of conscience is that which directs us to will a transformation of that state. This
is why Wittgenstein appears to identify “Act according to your conscience whatever it
may be” with “Live happy!” (NB, 75)

  32  
 But even though the bad deed can ‘affect’ all of life, it is only the good act for
which there is a world. To be in agreement with the world is to have in view that unique
consistency which is a world. The bad will veils the inner relation of life and world,
whereas the good will opens that dimension. Put differently, the good action is one,
which disappears in the agreement with the world. The good life is unique but at the
same time impersonal and not ruled by extraordinary events. For the fulfilled space of
significance is one and there is, so to speak, no contrast in it.22 Bad deeds leave one with
an existence that does not bring out the impersonal uniqueness of the person, but one in
which the events remain isolated and obtruding. Bad deeds so to speak stick out in life.
It is because of its isolation in the world that the bad deed is essentially countering the
possibility of significance pertaining to agreement with the world. In disagreement with
the world, one loses the sense of being in a world.
I take such considerations to be at the basis of one of the famous remarks of the
Tractatus: “If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only
the limits of the world, not the facts – not what can be expressed by means of language.
In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to
speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from
that of the unhappy man.” (TLP, 6.43) The world of the happy is that of a person having
a world altogether (by agreeing with it). It is having the dimension of uniqueness or
significance in one’s life. Indeed, an important variation of this statement appears in the
Notebooks where Wittgenstein writes: “The world must, so to speak, wax or wane as a
whole. As if by accession or loss of meaning (Sinnes).” (NB, 73) The waxing and waning
of the world is to be understood as the acquiring or losing of significance, depending on
the nature of one’s will. The good will has a world and is thereby lifted out of the o srder
of fate whereas the bad will is lost in what is in the world, at the mercy of events.

§12. Limits and Death

In further seeking to specify what would pertain to leading a life toward the
concretization of will in meaning, we can turn to the last remark of the Notebooks from
10.1.17:
                                                                                                               
22This doesn’t imply that viewed as a whole, as it were from outside, such a virtuous yet
ordinary life would not appear extraordinary. See in this context (Friedlander, 2017: 118-
121).

  33  
 If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed.
If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed.
This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is so to speak, the
elementary sin [elementare Sünde].
And when one investigates it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to
comprehend the nature of vapors.
Or is even suicide in itself neither good nor evil?
One could very generally argue that insofar as the fundamental ethical
‘commitment’ is concretizing the uniqueness of my life in meaning, then there is a sense
that suicide would be attacking the very ground of the will. More specifically, we have
characterized above the bad will as being determined through, or being at the mercy of,
events in the world. The consideration of suicide might be motivated by the sense that
an event or state is so terrible that it stands for the lack of possibility as such, nothing is
possible anymore. It would be as if an event is made to stand for a limit condition. It’s
happening would appear to preclude that delimitation of meaning, which is a matter of
life as a whole. But, a limit condition, that is agreement or disagreement with the world
as such, cannot be decided by something having happened or such and such being the
case. This does not mean that one could change the course of the world so that the event
would be avoided. Nor would it imply, that we need to find ways to forget or repress it.
One must rather meaningfully will so that the contingencies of life are seen not to
ultimately affect the capacity to bring oneself in agreement with the world. It is always
possible to find ways to “dissolve” the sense of irrevocable limit that appears to attach to
events, that is to reconcile oneself with the world.
The consideration of the elementary sin of suicide thus would bring out a
broader issue of one’s relation to the horizon of one’s own death, as something that can
permeate the character of one’s actions. The propositions on death as the limit of life in
the Tractatus follow, in the order of the text, after the characterization of the good will in
terms of being in a happy world: Wittgenstein adds after “The world of the happy man
is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” (TLP, 6.43) the commenting
proposition: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” (TLP,
6.431). This suggests establishing a parallel between a bad life and having a problematic
sense of one’s relation to one’s own death. It would be as though the relation to his own
death is fundamental to the character of the unhappy world of the bad man. It is in that
sense that Wittgenstein argues that acting out of fear of death would be a manifestation

  34  
of a problem with the will: “Fear in the face of death is the best sign of a false [falschen],
i.e. a bad [schlechten], life” (NB, 75))
While bearing in mind that these remarks where written as Wittgenstein was a
soldier in the front, I assume that in his reference to “fear in the face of death” he is not
concerned solely with situations in which something like an immediate danger to one’s
life is present. It is rather a question of how a certain way of ‘being towards death’
introduces falsity into one’s life. Falsity in that case would be identified in forms of
avoidance or inactivity. This avoidance of recognizing reality in one’s action is
correlative with a reification of the limit of life. For one might say that the false relation
to death is that which constitutes it as an external limit to life (so to speak as a
circumference of life). This is why Wittgenstein refers back to the caricature of limits of
the limits of the visual field he introduced in the propositions about solipsism at that
moment: “Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
(TLP, 6.4311). This reification of the limit, could manifest itself in a variety of ‘bad ways’
to live (for while there is uniqueness to the good will, there are many variations of the
bad will): for example, attempting to live by the principle of “making the best” of the
time one predicts one might have until that event to end all events.
We might add to these considerations important remarks from 1931 that are part
of the material gathered in Culture and Value. These refer to another, more subtle, way of
reifying the end of possibilities as such, namely what we conceive of as tragedy.
Wittgenstein writes: “When I “have done with the world” I shall have created an
amorphous (transparent) mass and the world in all its variety will be left on one side
like an uninteresting lumber room…In the world (mine) there is no tragedy… It is as
though everything were soluble in the aether of the world; there are no hard surfaces.”
(CV, 9) To be “done with the world” suggests a way of departing this life in the right
way. Arguably, it is one of the teachings of philosophy. Importantly this is described
using the formulation that Wittgenstein adopts for characterizing the subject as limit,
(that is Wittgenstein adds after “the world”, in parentheses, “mine”). What Wittgenstein
envisages here is departing a life lived from the fundamental ‘imperative’ of being in
agreement with the world. Such a life does not acknowledge the tragic.
Tragedy would at first be characterized as the condition in which something
happening becomes decisive for the character of one’s life as a whole. In another remark

  35  
from the same period he writes: “Every tragedy could really start with the words:
“Nothing would have happened had it not been that …” (Had he not got caught in the
machine by the tip of his clothing?)” (CV, 12) For sure, it is not the mere event, the
encounter, that provides the form of the tragic, but rather one’s will, that is taking the
event to stand in life, for the very limit of life. The event thus bears the weight of one’s
very being as a subject, that is it bears on the very possibility of being in agreement with
the world.
Wittgenstein is aware that there is another way of understanding what the tragic
comes to: “But surely this is a one-sided view of tragedy, to think of it merely as
showing that an encounter can decide one’s whole life.” (CV, 12) Indeed, couldn’t we
conceive of the tragic as a form through which we most starkly become aware of the
possibility of agreement with the world no matter what. Tragedy, at least if its meaning is
brought out in art by the Greek tragedies, would be the paradigmatic locus of an
affirmation of the subject’s agreement with the world. It is in this sense that one speaks
of the hero of tragedy as taking upon himself what was not a matter of his intention. To
do away with the world, or to refuse tragedy is to refuse as it were this scheme of
meaning as fundamental to what counts as agreement with the world.23

§16 An Aesthetics of the Unquestionable

Through this last consideration of tragedy, we can engage the question what the
aesthetic dimension in having a happy world is for Wittgenstein. For sure, the character
of feeling would be essential to characterize what happiness comes to. The dimension of
feeling is not lacking from Wittgenstein’s propositions devoted to the ethical. It is
explicitly invoked as Wittgenstein conceives of the religious, or mystical dimension of
the ethical: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited
whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.” (TLP, 6.45 - 6.5
                                                                                                               
23  Tragedy is an important context in part because it is central to the very questions of

how to express the standpoint of identity of subject and world, or the identity of
criticism and dogmatism in German Idealism. Thus for instance in Schelling’s early
writings, the question of the tragic and the possibility of expressing the ‘independence’
of the subject that brings it to agree with the world even when fate concentrates on his
person, is the subject of the final letter. This is probably something that Wittgenstein
reflects on in relation to similar issues that arise in Schopenhauer’s account of the tragic
character of the relation of the individual will and the world will.
 

  36  
my emphasis) In considering these issues, we are engaging the identity that
Wittgenstein asserts: “Ethics and Aesthetics are one” [Ethik und Ästhetik sind eins]” (TLP,
6.421).
The identity of ethics and aesthetics suggests that the work of art can give one
the standpoint of agreement with the world. This capacity of the work of art to present
us with the kind of concrete actuality or fulfilled delimitation in agreement with what
there is, is suggested in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks. Given our starting point, it is
significant that it is identified, there, aesthetically speaking, yet again with an experience
of existence: “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there
is.” (NB, 86) So, is it given to us, ultimately, to recognize the impossible experience of
existence in feeling? The term ‘miracle’ should not be taken to refer to an occurrence that
appears to contradict the order of nature, the laws of nature. This is something that is
emphasized in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the miraculous in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’. For
thinking of the miraculous as contradicting the laws of nature would be thinking of it in
terms of the space of facts, even if as a negation of its order. It would only afford us with
something exceptional relative to that order discovered by science. The absolutely,
rather than relatively, miraculous must belong to an order that is neither that of facts nor
of objects, but rather to that of existence: “… I will now describe the experience of
wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the
world as a miracle.”24
The feeling at issue is further specified by Wittgenstein in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’
as feeling wonder:25 “I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I
wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as
'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or 'how extraordinary that the world
should exist.'” The specific character of wonder in expressing the affective dimension of

                                                                                                               
24  Importantly, in the same context Wittgenstein further expresses the same feeling by

reference to the existence of language: “Now I am tempted to say that the right
expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any
proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.”
 
25For another elaboration of wonder as the ground of questioning, see Heidegger’s
‘What is Metaphysics’. It is against the background of the understanding of the ethical in
the Tractatus presented here, that Wittgenstein’s short remark on Heidegger should be
assessed.

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the experience of existence suggests its connection to what we have called at the
beginning of this paper “the unquestionable”. Wonder, affectively speaking, would be
an identity of question and answer. Consider that we use term “wonder” as a verb in “I
wonder” which would be one way of expressing the force of questioning. But then we
also speak of a wonder as a manifestation. Think here for instance of the use of the term
to speak of a wonder of nature such as the rainbow. Here the manifestation would so to
speak be the response of the world to the wondering. Or better put we have a
manifestation that is of itself both enigmatic and fulfilling our seeking. This affective
identity of question and answer would be the sense in which Wittgenstein speaks of the
miraculous. For sure, the miraculous cannot be explained, but it is not something that is
associated thereby with an unanswerable question, enigma or riddle, for it is supposed
to be at the same time the manifestation that answers all doubt or questioning. The unity
of question and response, of which wonder is the aesthetic dimension, is agreement with
the world, or what I have called “the unquestionable”. What I have attempted to
establish in different ways throughout this paper is that the correlate of the ‘experience’
of existence of language, or the existence of world is the uniqueness of concrete
individuality constituting itself in willing agreement with the world.26
When Wittgenstein speaks of wonder as related to existence “that there is what
there is”, he points to the possibility inherent to the work of art of being a locus of
agreement with the world. In the work of art, what there is most concretely, is totally
affirmable. (One could also say that the work of art is the paradigmatic locus of
significance, of total permeation of what is given by meaning.) The work of art translates
the so-called experience of existence by its capacity to have one agree with what there is.
It is a symbol of happiness or pleasure taken that there is what there is.
Wittgenstein, indeed relates the happy world of the good will to the work of art:
“It is the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a
happy eye?” And he further quotes a phrase from Schiller’s prologue to Wallenstein:
“Life is grave, art is gay”. This reference to happiness does not replace the identification
of the essence of art through the beautiful, but rather establishes an identity of beauty

                                                                                                               
26The essential dimension of individuality is further evident in the way in which
Wittgenstein describes his lecture to the members of the Vienna Circle and emphasizes
the importance of speaking in the first person.

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and happiness: “For there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is
the beautiful. And the beautiful is what makes happy.” The work of art would then be
paradigmatic in allowing us to experience in feeling this fundamental form of
agreement.
To speak of the manifestation of agreement in feeling, is not to give up on
meaning. For the only possibility of recognizing agreement is through a dimension of
meaning. We therefore need to bring together the idea of the work of art as a locus of
agreement with what there is, with the characterization of the work of art as
“expression”: “Art is a kind of expression. Good art is fulfilled expression.” (N. 83) This
remark is important insofar as it underscores that the kind of agreement that is achieved
with the world in the work of art is an agreement in meaning. Indeed, the term
“expression” here should be taken in the same way in which it appears, say when
Wittgenstein discusses in the Tractatus the nature of a symbol in language. In other
words the relation of expression to aesthetics is not to be read as though the beautiful is
mere expression of feeling, but rather as identifying feeling that belongs to fulfilled
expression in meaning.
In the quote above, I have modified Anscombe’s translation, which has
“complete” rather than “fulfilled” for vollendete. For complete might suggest that the
work of art ‘in itself’ would express its subject matter completely, and the subject is just
pleased by being given to contemplate such completeness of expression. But what we
consider here is how art allows fulfillment of my agreement with the world. The
understanding of what fulfilled meaning in art comes to, must make clear that what is at
stake here is the standpoint of identity of subject and world. Fulfillment in meaning
cannot be recognized apart from the agreement of a subject with what there is.
Conversely, Wittgenstein’s reference to the “happy eye” might tempt one to speak here
of an “attitude”, that is to place all the emphasis on the side of the subject. But the
relation of the happiness in art and the striving of the will for agreement with the world
in life must be understood precisely in such a way that the happy eye is that eye for
which there is no more striving, but rather a place of repose in agreement with what
there is.
We might say, that when art fulfills expression, it reveals me in my movement
towards unique intelligibility and allows a resting place in what it concretely presents. It

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is in that sense, I take it, that Wittgenstein uses the term sub specie aeternitatis to
characterize both the ethical standpoint and the work of art: “The work of art is the
object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.
This is the connection between art and ethics.”(NB, 83)
One might object to the identification suggested between the happiness in art
and the ethical as agreement with the world by pointing to an essential difference
between them that is apparently implied in Wittgenstein’s own formulation. For
Wittgenstein speaks in respect to the artwork of the object, rather than of the world, seen
sub specie aeternitatis. This is an important point insofar as we sought, earlier to
distinguish the standpoint of the form of objects from that of the existence of world. But,
it brings out even more clearly that the standpoint of world is not to be understood in
extensive terms, as so to speak out there. Just as one’s life is not part of the world, but
the capacity for agreement with the world so, in art we do not experience an object in the
world, but the object as world. This is what the view sub specie aeternitatis comes to: “The
usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view
sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as
background.” (NB, 83). To have the whole world as background, precisely does not
mean that something is seen in a surrounding, but rather with the surroundings: “Is this
it perhaps – in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space
and time?” The invocation of space and time here is, I take it, suggesting the form of the
finite consciousness of things. But distinguishing the object “in space and time” from the
object “together with space and time” is meant to suggest a standpoint that the work of
art allows which would be that sense of the finite thing as the fulfilled and in that sense
infinite. This reference to space and time and the possible incorporation of the
conditions of finite existence is further taken as a figure to speak of the kind of unity of
logical space, or of what Wittgenstein calls the logical world that can be recognized in a
thing: “Each thing [Ding] modifies [bedingt] the whole logical world, the whole of logical
space, so to speak. (The thought forces itself upon one): The thing seen sub specie
aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space.” (NB, 83). (I take it
that there is an intentional play of word here in the phrase “Jedes Ding bedingt” which
expresses the monadic character of the thing allowing fulfilled expression of agreement
with the world)

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 This implies the possibility of having the object as a locus of, what I earlier called
“significance”: “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world
each one equally significant.” (NB, 83) Wittgenstein gives an example that dramatizes
the kind of ‘concentration’ of world in thing: “If I have been contemplating the stove,
and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial.
For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things
in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world and everything else
paled against it.” (NB 83, translation modified).
Let me end with a question bearing on Wittgenstein’s reference to Schiller: In
what sense is life serious and art gay? Is the happy eye an eye that is relieved from the
seriousness of willing? Or, is it opened to art to prefigure the fulfillment of will? Should
we say, then, that it is only in art that we can have a taste of, or as it were glimpse, in a
delimited thing or work, of what is only a task of the will in relation to life as a whole?
Addressing these questions would most probably require a more sustained exploration
of Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of the work of art. It might also lead to ask
about the character of the Tractatus itself, that is, of how it’s being a work that is “wholly
philosophical and at the same time literary” is essential to the possibility to “see the
world aright” (TLP, 6.54).

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