Achieving such acceptance [manifested by saying only what can be said] in any and every aspect of one’s life is precisely the way in which ‘the ethical problem’ is solved—or rather it is the way in which the appearance of such a problem is entirely dissolved, leaving behind the only genuine problems there are.
(From Stephen Mulhall’s “Words, Waxing and Waning: Ethics in/and/of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.” To be fair to Mulhall, he also mentions that ethics might be able to enter through a kind of ‘figurative register of language.’ He doesn’t say much about this, though, or about the philosophical tensions with the other way he elaborates in which ethics enters our life.) On such a reading, what it is for something to have an ethical point is essentially explained in the same terms that describe the intellectual achievement involved in the dissolution of metaphysics. (This also often goes with not taking as too important that there is a distinction between the 6.4s and the 6.5s—taking the two sets of remarks as a single unit.)
The discarding of metaphysics in the Tractatus is impressive. I always go back to this post of Kelly Joley to remind myself; to get a fix. Anyway, it is so impressive, that once we experience it, we might want to model all philosophical achievements on it—to understand even moral success just as a variation on it. Ethics thus piggybacks on the dissolution of metaphysics. It is thought of as an elaboration of the same theme. I want to resist this.
In opposition, I want to suggest, there is ethics in the Tractatus apart from the dissolution of metaphysics. I do not want to deny that something ethical can be seen in the particular orientation achieved when metaphysics dissolves; that is, philosophical clarification has an ethical aspect. Which means we can look at philosophy this way. (Wittgenstein is hardly the first to have thought that there is something ethical in philosophizing.) But other things have similar, ethical, aspects. And so, the ethical aspect of the dissolution of metaphysics does not yet capture the whole of ethics. Furthermore, we don’t have to look at the dissolution of metaphysics this way; it is not the only aspect it has. In any case, ethics should first be understood separately from the dissolution of metaphysics if we are to see how it can be an aspect of it.
Seeing the ethical achievement through the dissolution of metaphysics imposes the structure of the latter on the former. Or better, it gives ethics the face of something else. It biases us in a certain way regarding the reality of ethics—regarding what it is for a proposition to have ethical life. It is also less than helpful in clarifying what is ethical in the philosophical achievement—what point there is in saying it is also an ethical achievement, that it lives ethically. It lumps the two things together--the ethical life of propositions and the freedom that comes with the dissolution of metaphysics --and ends up blurring them both.
Alternatively, to understand how philosophical clarification has an ethical aspect I suggest that we first understand ethics apart from the dissolution of metaphysics. Or rather, through an investigation of logic and meaning, we can understand the grammar, or lack thereof, of moral discourse. In particular, I suggest, we need an understanding of how moral propositions clarify, and what type of clarity they seek. And this will give us a sense of the reality of moral discourse—its point, its life. We will then be able to bring this to bear on philosophy itself: see clearly how philosophy can have this point, this life; i.e. see the moral aspect of philosophy, and see that it is an aspect.
In resisting the line of thought above, I am also resisting a kind of tendency among commentators—especially commentators about ethics in the Tractatus—to lump together issues that come up towards the end of the Tractatus: solipsism, the dissolution of metaphysics, skepticism, the riddle of life in space and time, the supposed ethical point of the book, and so on. This tendency turns all connections between issues into identities, and everything is discussed through everything else. We get a single scrambled discussion, where we should have had many separate ones. – In truth, everything is thus obscured. One thing that creates that tendency is the (not entirely false) idea that the Tractatus is committed to a kind of unity of intellectual problems, and to a kind of unity of method. It deals with everything all at once: metaphysics is dissolved, the problem of life disappears, happiness is secured, the ladder is thrown, and the world is finally seen aright.
I do not want to deny that there are deep, internal, connections between the issues. But I do want to insist that there is a question how they are connected. Lumping the issues together—which seems to happen often—simply viewing them through one another, and especially using the overcoming of metaphysics as a template for what happens in ethics, is not yet making the connections clear.