Wittgenstein’s two shores

In this paper, I argue that the ethical significance of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigationscan be articulated through Stanley Cavell’s notion of moral perfectionism. Moral perfectionism defines, for Cavell, a register of the moral life thatdoesn’t focus on questions about actions but revolves instead around difficultiesof self-knowledge. While Wittgenstein’s Investigations notoriously don’t discusscanonical moral concepts such as the right, the good, and the virtues, I suggestthat Wittgenstein’s later work can be seen as addressing the perfectionist questionof self-knowledge. In order to show this, I focus on Wittgenstein’s notion of non-sense: nonsense, as I argue, should not be understood in terms of a violation ofgrammatical rules, but as a manifestation of an impulse to refuse our sharedforms of life. This refusal can be in turn interpreted, following Cavell, as an at-tempt to avoid an acknowledgement of one’s interests, desires, and needs: our attraction for philosophical nonsense is thus seen as depending ultimately on a deeper orientation of the self. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s attempt to dissolve philosophical illusions can be seen as delivering a form of self-knowledge, and as partaking, to that extent, of the aspirations of moral perfectionism.