A Case for a Roughly 'Levinasian' Understanding of Wittgenstein

The paper’s aim is to clarify how Wittgenstein’s appeal to absolute ethical values can be philosophically understood. Especially Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical program of treating contingent language-games as proto-phenomena in philosophy which can only be described, not judged from a classical metaphysical viewpoint, poses problems. Highlighting common movements of thought in Levinas and Wittgenstein, is intended to show how absolute ethical demands are encountered within language-games. Since the paper’s aim is not to overcome gaps in Wittgenstein’s texts by filling them with ideas by Levinas, only a roughly Levinasian understanding of Wittgenstein is intended, for which there is independent evidence in Wittgenstein’s own texts. Such an understanding stresses the following themes: (1) Traditional philosophical discourse is pushed to its limits, so it collapses and common aspects of everyday-life can be captured afresh. (2) There is attention towards the way in which the faces and bodies of singular human beings express an ethical demand. (3) The development of natural languages is seen as depending on a shared understanding of the ethical expressiveness of human faces and bodies. (4) The primacy of ethics is affirmed both in the sense that ethics plays a role in constituting linguistic meaning, and in the sense that it ought not be forgotten. Living coherently within existing language-games and the emergence of new decidedly ethical and religious language-games can thus be seen as attempts to do justice to absolute ethical demands which can be read in the faces and bodies of human beings.