The ethical residue of language in Levinas and early Wittgenstein

Abstract

Using the later Levinas as a point of departure, this article tries to provide an account of the ethics of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Although there has not been written much on this topic, there seems to be an increasing awareness among philosophers that there are interesting points of convergence between Levinas and the early Wittgenstein. In contrast to most (if not all) other accounts of the relation, however, this article argues that the truly significant convergence emerges only when one abandons the received interpretation of the early Wittgenstein, and instead opts for something more akin to the ‘new Wittgenstein’ interpretation introduced by Cora Diamond and James Conant, among others. On the received interpretation, Wittgenstein places ethics in a realm of ineffable being and truth, and thus remains within what Levinas calls ontology. But on Conant's and Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein, there really are no profound ethical truths that we cannot state, but only ‘show’; all the sentences of the Tractatus that appear to claim otherwise are ultimately completely nonsensical. This article argues that the Tractatus has an ‘ethical point’ in a quite Levinasian sense, precisely because of the way it unveils its sentences as utterly nonsensical; for this can be seen as a Wittgensteinian attempt to ‘unsay’ the ‘said’, in order to let the ‘saying’ itself be heard.