Chapter 4 - Seeing Differently, Behaving Differently. Intercultural Understanding between Ethics and Aesthetics

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue that Wittgenstein’s morphological-comparative method could be an important epistemological tool for understanding different cultures and systems, thereby improving intercultural understanding. In particular, I argue that the acknowledgement of the contingent and ungrounded nature of our conceptual system prevents us from evaluating alternative systems as strange, or unnatural, and this observation encompasses both an epistemic concern and an ethical one.

As it is, my position stands on the following two points:

• i) There is, indeed, something similar to a morphological-comparative method which Wittgenstein explicitly expounds and employs.

• ii) There is an ethical tone to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and it should be understood in connection to aesthetics.

These points are not commonly accepted by scholars. Certainly, there is a tendency to emphasize the ethical tone of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, especially by the followers of the therapeutic reading of his philosophy and, more recently, by the New Wittgensteinians. For example, in his On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy, Conant states that for Wittgenstein ‘all philosophical thinking and writing has […] its ethical aspect’ and that learning to think better is an important means to becoming a better human being (Conant 2002, 85). Indeed, it might be tempting to give an ethical reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for both ideological and biographical reasons. On the one hand, it seems as though Wittgenstein always lived in a state of moral tension, a sort of stoic attitude towards life that influenced his conception of philosophical work (Monk 1990). On the other, Wittgenstein himself wrote to Ludwig von Ficker that his first work, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had an ethical point, for it refrained from talking about what is usually called ‘ethics’, as ethics ‘can only be delimitated from within, by being silent about it’ (Andronico 2013, 25). But these are not the ways in which the ethical tone is understood by advocates of the therapeutic reading, as they examine Cavell’s reflection on the rediscovery of the ordinary.