Ethics as Grammar

Brad J. Kallenberg

Description

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias-linguistic puzzles-as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein's method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas's thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la religion
• Moral Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Ethics

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 14 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159696
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

E THICS AS G RAMMAR
E THICS AS G RAMMAR

Changing the Postmodern Subject
B RAD J. K ALLENBERG
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
undpress.nd.edu
Designed by Wendy McMillen
Set in 11.3/13 Electra by Em Studio Inc.
Copyright 2001 University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kallenberg, Brad J.
Ethics as grammar : changing the postmodern subject / Brad Jeffrey Kallenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN : 978-0-268-15968-9
1. Christian ethics. 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 3. Hauerwas, Stanley, 1940- I. Title.
BJ 1251 . K 245 2001
241 .0404 092-dc21
2001001291
eISBN 9780268159696
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
T O J EANNE
In whose story I am happily and inextricably embedded
C ONTENTS
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
ONE Working on Oneself
TWO Ethics as Aesthetics
THREE This Complicated Form of Life
FOUR Ethics as Politics
FIVE Back to the Rough Ground
SIX Ethics as Grammar
Notes
Bibliography: Wittgenstein and Hauerwas
General Index
Index of Quotations
A BBREVIATIONS
WORKS OF WITTGENSTEIN
BB
The Blue and Brown Books
CE
Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness
CV
Culture and Value
LC
Lectures Conversations on Aesthetics , Psychology and Religious Belief
LE
A Lecture on Ethics
LW I
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology . Vol. 1. Preliminary Studies for Part II of the Philosophical Investigations
LW II
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology . Vol. 2. The Inner and the Outer , 1949-1951
NB
Notebooks , 1914-1916
NPL
Notes for the Philosophical Lecture
OC
On Certainty
PESD
Notes for Lectures on Private Experience and Sense Data
PG
Philosophical Grammar
PHIL
Philosophy
PI
Philosophical Investigations
PR
Philosophical Remarks
RC
Remarks on Colour
RFGB
Remarks on Frazer s Golden Bough
RFM
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
RPP
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology . Two Volumes
SRLF
Some Remarks on Logical Form
TLP
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
WL
Wittgenstein s Lectures: Cambridge , 1930-32
WVC
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann
Z
Zettel
OTHER WORKS
NASB
New American Standard Bible . La Habra, CA: Lockman Foundation, 1977.
NEB
New English Bible . Oxford and Cambridge: Delegates of the Oxford University Press and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1961.
NRSV
New Revised Standard Version Bible . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
P REFACE
Whenever I read Wittgenstein I cannot help but hear him speaking to me with a Welsh accent. Of course, this Austrian-born Cambridge scholar had mastered the language well enough to teach in English, but he never completely divested himself of a German accent and certainly preferred to write in his native tongue. Whether one reads him in German or in English, one is advised to pay attention to his instruction that his writings must be read at the right tempo . As a student I marveled how puzzling passages would suddenly become crystal clear when my teacher, the Welshman D. Z. Phillips, would read Wittgenstein aloud. I count myself fortunate to have never quite recovered from the urge to mimic Phillips s style when I read Wittgenstein for myself. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Phillips is that, when it comes to Wittgenstein, I think that he has gotten matters right.
But there is more to Wittgenstein than what he has said and written, and there were destinations he intended to reach beyond those at which he had arrived at life s end. For this reason I wish to bring Wittgenstein into conversation not with D. Z. Phillips-as ubiquitous as his voice may be for contemporary studies in Wittgenstein-but with another voice altogether: that of the theological ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas. The fact that I have brought these two thinkers together-an Austrian-born, Neo-Kantian Cambridge don and a Yale-educated, high-church Mennonite from Texas-requires some explaining. Perhaps the best way to introduce this study is simply to describe my methodology.
It is not uncommon to find in the great art museums of the western world aspiring artists meticulously copying the works of the masters as if to learn their style by rote. Yet some misguided students try to imitate abstract art in the same way-for instance, using a triple-aught brush to reproduce the detail of paint blobs originally left in the trail of a six-inch palette knife-not realizing that the point of abstract art is not the artifact-as-representation but a method, or skill, of expression. The goal of studying this kind of art is to master the method. Much the same could be said for Wittgenstein s artistry. His works do not state philosophical theses and, therefore, cannot be outlined for their cognitive content. Rather, they aim at changing the sensibilities and skills of the reader.
The promise of real change was one I found worth investigating. I came to Wittgensteinian studies by way of theology rather than philosophy. As it turned out, my philosophical naivete was particularly fitting for the task. Wittgenstein himself did not consider his own lack of philosophical breadth as detrimental to his task. (On the contrary, much of his energy was directed at undoing the havoc modern philosophy had wreaked on his students minds.) Moreover, Wittgenstein himself once remarked to Maurice O C. Drury that he had done everything from a religious point of view. As this perspective is frequently passed over in Wittgenstein studies, I hoped that my theological fluency might pick up threads in Wittgenstein that otherwise would be overlooked.
One of my earliest desires in my graduate program in theology was to attempt a justification of narrative theology by appealing to what I was beginning to understand as postmodern philosophy. This hope was dashed very quickly. After a brief encounter with Wittgenstein, I realized that using his works to justify any philosophical thesis would be to miss the point of his entire project. The more I read of him, the more I was filled with a sort of terrifying fascination; I was intrigued by the vigor of his genius but was cut to the quick by the probings of his grammatical investigations, probings which threatened to leave none of my sacred stones unturned.
In the midst of this initial reading it began to dawn on me that Wittgenstein was more concerned with the manner (including attitudes, intentions, and stance) in which his students read him than with their grasp of any putative philosophical theses. Consequently, he deliberately crafted his writing, not for the purpose of explicating and defending tenets of a philosophical system, but with an eye toward effecting a change in the way his readers perceived the world.
I could not resist likening this hoped-for outcome to character transformation. Not surprisingly, I began to wonder about the possible relation between Wittgenstein and virtue ethics. Of course, when I inquired whether any attention had been paid to the impact of, say, Aristotle upon Wittgenstein s thought, my question was laughed down, for Wittgenstein had prided himself in the fact that he had never read a lick of Aristotle.
As I studied, and eventually came to teach, Christian ethics, I became increasingly familiar with the writings of Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas s concern to change the fundamental question of ethics from What ought X do? to What sort of people ought we to be? had more appeal to me than merely the relief it offered from tiresome case-book approaches to philosophical ethics. Hauerwas appeared to be a postmodernist of the good sort. Under the tutelage of philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy, I had begun to deliberately seek alternatives to epistemological foundationalism, metaphysical reductionism, and representational theories of language. And in this regard I found Hauerwas s works very promising. Moreover, Hauerwas turned out to be a self-proclaimed Aristotelian whose concern for shaping the character and outlook of his readers resembled that of Wittgenstein.
This book is my attempt to understand Christian theological ethics through the lens of Wittgenstein. In the reading of first Wittgenstein, then Hauerwas, I was unable to evade their meddling with my own way of thinking. As a result, I have become an unwitting interlocutor in a conversation that travels both through time (the corpus of each writer spans roughly three decades: Wittgenstein wrote from 1920-1951 and Hauerwas from 1968 to the present) and through conceptual space. Because their written works function as the roadmap of their conceptual travels, I hoped that by reading their works in chronological order, I might have duplicated these journeys.
Of course, I cannot pretend to begin my journey from no where. I cut my teeth on Wittgenstein under the tutelage of philosopher of science Nancey Murphy, analytic philosopher D. Z. Phillips, and the small b baptist theologian and ethicist, James Wm. McClendon, Jr. That I write as one rigorously trained to think in the manner of my teachers is a mark of bias in my study. But this bias cannot count against it, for, as Wittgenstein and Hauerwas both maintain, objectivity and comprehensiveness are always out of reach. For this reason, I did not trouble myself with endless debates between mostly conflicting schools over which of them gets Wittgenstein right. Sufficient for my purposes was that I master the language spoken by one of them in order that I might compare one particular language (namely, that exemplified by D. Z. Phillips, Rush Rhees, and Peter Winch) with my ot