Abstract
Among the beliefs Wittgenstein holds that cannot be taken to be true or false, but rather appear to him as certain, are “all human beings have parents “(On Certainty §240): “I believe that I have forebears and that every human being has them” (OC §240) and “I have a father and a mother” (OC §282). I ask what moral questions are entailed in thinking of the changes that our current Western conceptual landscape has undergone in relation to parenthood and family life in the light of the growing rights and recognition of sexual and gendered minorities.
What is changing when we start to think of sentences such as “Everyone has a father and a mother” as not expressing an indubitable truth, a fundamental fact of our existence, but as constituting an oppressive social norm? What has already changed in our ways of conceiving of ourselves when we stop regarding such ways of expressing ourselves as a necessary aspect of our natural history but start thinking of them as one possibility among others in finding good and meaningful forms of life? What aspects remain unquestionable in Wittgenstein’s beliefs throughout these changes, and what aspects of our family ties would we do best not to let slide?
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Notes
- 1.
In this way it can be read in relation to Wittgenstein’s remarks about “very general facts of nature” (Wittgenstein 2009, 56n).
- 2.
Another possibility is to think of Mollenhauer’s sentence as a synthetic a priori, similar to metaphysical statements such as “every event has a cause”.
- 3.
The picture of a riverbed can be read together with the picture of the “rough ground” (Wittgenstein 2009, §107) Wittgenstein wishes to return us to in philosophy. Both these pictures create a contrast to the “requirement” for “the crystalline purity of logic” (Wittgenstein 2009, §107) that he identifies in his earlier view of logic in the Tractatus.
- 4.
In this picture of language there is no absolute dividing line between the empirical and the logical. Rather this picture suggests that this distinction becomes a meaningful contrast in some contexts to clarify certain kinds of mistakes and doubts. It also points to the kinds of reassurance and certainty that can be meaningful in certain situations and relationships.
- 5.
- 6.
The disagreement between me and Greenaway is perhaps the disagreement between those who, after Freud, say “It’s all about sex” and the ones who, with Plato, say “It’s all about love.” To the lovers, the ones who only think of sex have not considered how love, as well as sexual desire, is transformed by contemplation of the good.
- 7.
Cf. only the quite different attitudes to biological determinism that are given by the ones who regard biology as destiny, and the kind of existentialism exemplified by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex who regards women’s being bound by biology, menstruation and childbearing as a burden preventing them from realising the freedom constitutive of the human being. Immanence forcing itself on the transcendent subject.
- 8.
This raises part of my concern about the direction discussions about moral certainty often take. The sense in which “Murder is wrong” (see Pleasants 2009) seems to me not to be truth-apt in the way metaethicists have desired is not because it is akin to a certainty but because it is a command: “Thou shalt not kill.” And commands call for obedience, not for verification. The sense in which the sentence may appear unassailable is rather in the necessity experienced in following this command, in so far as I recognise the ethical demand it articulates in my relation to the other. Furthermore, there is nothing apparently odd in voicing a moral command. We continually say, “Don’t do that”, to our children. We have, however, a tendency to question the command. As Wittgenstein writes, “The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form ‘thou shalt ...’ is: And what if I do not do it” (Wittgenstein 1922, 6.422). In these ways, moral commands seldom have the character of meaningless but indubitable truths that sentences such as “These are my hands” have. We are also mostly well aware of what it would mean to go against them. This is what we call a moral temptation.
- 9.
As Wittgensteinians, we should in that way not be blinded by the character of specific forms of language use but be able to consider what that language does, beyond giving expression to metaphysical images of language.
- 10.
This can be read alongside Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that educators “stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, an even though they may, secretly or openly wish it were other than it is” (Arendt 2006, 186).
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Kronqvist, C. (2022). What Is Changing and What Has Already Changed: Parenthood and Certainty in Moral Discourse. In: Aldrin Salskov, S., Beran, O., Hämäläinen, N. (eds) Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_13
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