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Ethics as Style: Wittgenstein's Aesthetic Ethics and Ethical Aesthetics

Independent Scholar, New York

ABSTRACT

An inquiry into Wittgenstein's ethics and aesthetics has to start with the following questions: Can an aesthetics and/or ethics be extracted from his philosophical texts at all? If yes, what kind of aesthetics and/or ethics does Wittgenstein offer beyond his well-known aphoristic comments on the subject? Finally, how can we understand the meaning of his claim that "ethics and aesthetics are one"? This article responds to the above questions by presenting an account of Wittgenstein's ethical aesthetics and aesthetic ethics, elucidating both through the prism of his notion of style as "general necessity seen sub specie eterni." It explains how logical necessity implodes within the limits of propositional language to open onto the realm of style, within which ethical necessity is to be understood in terms of aesthetic life-form and aesthetic expression is to be understood in terms of ethical enactment.