247. Language, nature and ethics

What do Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein have in common? A separation between on the one hand reason/science, in descriptions of the world, and on the other hand normative values/ethics. We can reason adequately about the phenomena in the exterior world, in theories or mathematical or logical models, even though we cannot know the noumena: the world as it is in itself.[i] Values/ethics, on the other hand, are of a different order. About them we can have subjective certainty, Schopenhauer claimed, in the realm of our will.

However, while Kant formed ethics according to reason, the others thought that in values/ethics there is a lack of reason and logic. There, we are in a realm of paradox where ordinary language does not apply. There, rational speech becomes nonsensical. In that realm we need art (Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein), or a leap of faith (Kierkegaard).

Are there other ways to ethics than art? For Schopenhauer it was music. For Wittgenstein it was Western movies. Earlier in this blog (92, 120) I proposed that reading literature may exercise ethics, may ‘make people better’. If ethics is not a matter of reason and legislation, it is more matter of practical wisdom, in an assessment of the contingencies of life, the vicissitudes of fortune, and ethics is a matter of storytelling. As in Greek tragedy, myths, and epics, and yes: literature.

I do not accept a radical separation of fact and value. Facts are cognitively moulded perceptions and the cognitive apparatus is value-laden. Moral prescriptions are not free from facts: rules that are at odds with capabilities and human nature are empty. But that is not what I want to discuss here.

Earlier, I proposed that language is deeply metaphorical rather than ‘truly’ descriptive. However, in descriptions of objects moving in time and space our categories, embodied in language, though not justifiable as correspondence with nature, are reasonably adequate, or else we would not have survived in evolution, where survival depends on adequate conceptualization of things (prey, predators, enemies) moving in time and space. However, in categorizing values and ethically relevant abstractions, such as freedom, democracy, happiness, identity, justice, culture, …. we may think we are producing ‘common sense’ but we are crafting metaphorical constructions from intuitions and concepts from time and space, yielding an ‘object bias’.

In this form the duality of nature and values/ethics, and the problem of language in the latter re-appears. But here a connection between the two orders is given. Poetry may help to twist the metaphors of common sense, and to produce new ones, breaking open our blindness, producing a new view also of the natural world. Modern physics, of the very small and the very large, also does not satisfy our intuitions of objects, and can only be captured adequately in mathematics.

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[i] In his earlier work (of the Tractatus), Wittgenstein still maintained a correspondence theory of truth, with the claim that logical or mathematical models can truly represent relations in the world. Later, he recognized that the Tractatus was a Platonic illusion.