Abstract

Wittgenstein famously maintains, in the Tractatus, that “[e]thics is transcendental”. On the other hand, ethics also seems to invoke, for Wittgenstein, an otherworldly or even supernatural transcendence, a mystical harmony with the world. There are no ethical propositions that could describe worldly states of affairs. Therefore, the investigation of the relation between transcendence and the transcendental is in this chapter continued by means of an extended study on the ethical thinking of the early Wittgenstein. Again, the idea that a discourse of transcendence can itself play a transcendental role will be examined, now in a more explicitly ethical context.