Wittgenstein's Ethics and Modern Warfare

Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare

Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare

NIL SANTIÁÑEZ

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Santiáñez-Tió, Nil, author

   Wittgenstein’s ethics and modern warfare / Nil Santiáñez.

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-383-9 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77112-384-6 (EPUB).—

ISBN 978-1-77112-385-3 (PDF)

    1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ethics. 3. World War, 1914–1918—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. I. Title: Ethics and modern warfare.

Front-cover image: Otto Dix, Sonnenaufgang, 1913. Öl auf Papier auf Pappe (oil on paper on cardboard). Bildmaβ (picture): 50.5 × 66cm; Rahmenmaβ (frame): 64.5 × 80.3 × 7.5 cm. Inv.-Nr. 2013/k 25, Städtische Galerie Dresden – Kunstsammlung (Municipal Gallery Dresden – Art Collection), Museen der Stadt Dresden (Museums of the City of Dresden). Acquired 2012 with the friendly assistance of Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, Kulturstiftung der Länder, Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung and the Rudolf-August Oetker Stiftung. Photo: Herbert Boswank. © Estate of Otto Dix / SODRAC (2018). Cover design by Lara Minja, Lime Design Inc. Interior design by Daiva Villa/Chris Rowat Design.

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In memoriam

Albert Freixa

With fraternal gratitude and love

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

PART ONE   THE GREAT WAR AND THE ETHICS OF SILENCE

1 A Wordless Battle

2 A Wordless Ethics

PART TWO   WITTGENSTEIN’S LADDERS AND ETHICAL LANDSCAPES

3 Landscapes of War

4 Landscapes of Peace

Coda: Unintelligibility and the Moral Imagination

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 British troops advancing through no-man’s-land

1.2 Burial of British soldiers

4.1 Otto Dix, Kriegskrüppel (War cripples)

4.2 Otto Dix, Transplantation (Skin graft)

4.3 The German Crown Prince

4.4 Disabled veteran

4.5 Disabled veteran

4.6 Disabled veteran

4.7 Disabled veteran

4.8 Disabled veteran

4.9 Disabled veteran

4.10 Disabled veteran

4.11 Disabled veteran

Preface

I have always been struck by the peculiar homology between Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics and the view of war held by veterans of the world war of 1914–18. On the one hand, Wittgenstein (himself a veteran of that war) conceived of ethics as both transcendental and inexpressible. On the other, a substantial number of veterans of the Great War claimed that war cannot be truly imagined, understood, or represented; to many former combatants, that military conflict was a sort of ineffable event. This homology is not, I presume, mere coincidence. After all, Wittgenstein’s moral philosophy arose from the war, specifically as a result of his own combat experience in the Eastern Front in the summer of 1916. Before his true baptism of fire, Wittgenstein was exclusively interested in matters concerning logic. The focus of his intellectual preoccupations radically shifted after he faced death in the battlefield: suddenly, after his first experience of combat Wittgenstein began to reflect on ethics, on God, on the meaning of life. War is a life-changing event for most of its participants, and Wittgenstein was no exception.

Taking as a point of departure the aforementioned homology, in this book I explore the links between Wittgenstein’s ethics and cultural representations of the Great War. Essentially, I make four claims. First, I contend that there is a relation of reciprocity between war and ethical thinking in Wittgenstein, and that such a relationship is philosophically meaningful. Probing the connections between war and ethics provides new insights into both the nature of the experience of war and Wittgenstein’s view of ethics. Second, I argue that Wittgenstein’s ethics, with its emphasis on unsayability, constitutes an excellent tool for reading certain silences embedded in cultural artifacts concerned with the Great War. Those silences are not only the outcome of an epistemological problem—a problem derived from the difficulty in expressing the experience of a war that many have considered practically unsayable. In addition to this, they are laden with ethical value. That is the case of works written by Mary Borden, Leonhard Frank, Ernst Friedrich, Andreas Latzko, Georges Duhamel, Ellen N. La Motte, and, in our own time, the great graphic author Joe Sacco. Third, I maintain that putting Wittgenstein’s ethical thinking into dialogue with works by those authors opens new avenues for a better knowledge of both the early philosophy of Wittgenstein and the cultural production of the Great War. Finally, working on the silences contained within literary and artistic objects devoted to depicting that military conflict has led me to conclude that both literature and the arts are more cogent than philosophy—at least as traditionally practised: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein himself would be exceptions to the norm—for showing what cannot be said.

I expound my ideas by mapping a varied set of cultural objects: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections on ethics in his Notebooks 1914–1916, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and A Lecture on Ethics that he delivered at Cambridge either in 1929 or in 1930; Joe Sacco’s fascinating graphic narrative The Great War; Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone together with fiction and personal diaries written by nurses and medical doctors who served in regimental aid posts or in field hospitals during the Great War; Leonhard Frank’s Expressionist novel Der Mensch ist gut (Men are good); and the grim, disturbing photographs selected by Ernst Friedrich for his remarkable collage Krieg dem Kriege! (War against war!). The tradition made up by those works is at once heterogeneous and coherent: their different approaches to ideological issues, expressed also in very different idioms, share nonetheless a significant number of what Wittgenstein called, in The Blue and Brown Books and in Philosophical Investigations, family resemblances. Precisely on account of the important differences existing among them, the family resemblances, as regards their tacit, unsaid concept of ethics, are all the more notable. In a way, the more different the works are (e.g., a philosophical treatise seemingly devoted to logic vis-à-vis a book based on the author’s nursing experiences in the Western Front), the clearer my elucidations will be—or so I hope. The undeniably sharp contrasts among them serve, therefore, a clarifying purpose. Placing those works together or setting them off in counterpoint brings out an important, if unexplored, strand in the treatment of ethical questions related to the war of 1914–18, while it also provides unexpected insights into each one of the selected works, including the much discussed Tractatus.

Ethics as conceived by Wittgenstein may well be beyond significant language, but one can approach it through the moral imagination, or, to put it in Tractarian terms, one may view ethical landscapes by climbing up the ladder built up by images or written language. Since war and silence are at the centre of attention, analytical pretenses could belie the theoretical presuppositions of this essay as well as of the works that I study, for analysis might easily lead me to say something that should remain in silence. Instead of critical analysis proper, I point out ethical silences, surround them as it were, let the texts speak for themselves (hence my inclination for quoting directly from them), and approach their silent core by means of the moral imagination while doing my best to leave those silences unuttered. This explains in part my decision to practise here a hybrid style—where the freer and more experimental style of an essay overlaps with the scholarly rigor of an academic monograph. I believe that this hybrid form is more apt than an academic one sensu stricto for surrounding ethical silences, for deploying the moral imagination, and for exploring the presence in written texts and visual material on the Great War of the kind of ethics suggested by Wittgenstein in his early philosophical work. The formal hybridity chosen for this book relates to the transdisciplinarity that articulates my study of ideas and cultural artifacts usually considered separately within different disciplines. This essay is not, I would like to emphasize, a book in Wittgenstein studies, moral philosophy, literary studies, war studies, or the history of the visual arts. Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare intertwines all those disciplines, and by so doing it transcends their boundaries in an attempt to shed new light on a cluster of interrelated moral and cultural issues that are still relevant today.

Given my emphasis on the ethics of cultural artifacts concerned with war, in this book-long essay I dialogue with the scholars who in the last twenty years have vindicated the inclusion of ethical reflection in the study of literature. Martha C. Nussbaum, Alice Crary, J. Hillis Miller, Adam Zachary Newton, Wayne C. Booth, Marshall Gregory, and Robert Eaglestone, to mention just a few names, have explored literary texts or theory through the lens of moral philosophy. They have attempted to supersede the traditional neglect of ethics in the practice of literary history, criticism, and theory. Their scholarly work has demonstrated that the exploration of ethical issues through literature is enriching for both moral philosophy and literary studies. To be sure, my reading of literature and visual material through ethics is circumscribed within cultural representations of modern warfare, but it does share with those and similar works on ethics and literary discourse an important aspiration, namely the aspiration to place ethical debate at the centre of discussions on literature and literary theory.

Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare concentrates on representations of one single military conflict—the world war of 1914–18. I believe, however, that my claims and conclusions, as well as the methodology that I have chosen for developing my ideas and demonstrating my theses, may be perfectly extrapolated to the study of representations of other modern military conflicts. After all, the Great War set, so to speak, the tone for future wars (including the Nazi extermination of the European Jews), and the same holds true for the cultural artifacts that arose as a response to the mass butchery of 1914–18. The literature produced today in the United States on the Iraq and the Afghan Wars by authors like Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, Matt Gallagher, and Brian Castner, for instance, ultimately stems from an ancestry initiated by Ernst Jünger, Siegfried Sassoon, Henri Barbusse, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Konstantin Fedin, John Dos Passos, Edlef Köppen, Erich Maria Remarque, and Ford Madox Ford, among other writers. In future studies, it might prove fruitful to use Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics in order to examine the moral dimension implied in certain silences contained in works on, say, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, or any other war of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I do not mean to claim that Wittgenstein’s ethics is valid for every single instance of war writing endowed with an ethical direction. But it is very useful, in my opinion, for exploring gaps and silences laden with ethical values.

PART ONE

The Great War and the Ethics of Silence

CHAPTER ONE

A Wordless Battle

In 2013 a new graphic narrative by Joe Sacco saw the light of day: The Great War. July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme.¹ A true milestone in the history of the cultural representation of war, this magnificent twenty-four-foot-long leporello deploys some of the narrative strategies that have intrigued me for quite some time. I am referring, specifically, to Sacco’s silent narration of modern warfare: in a tour de force remotely reminiscent of the representation of war sculpted in the Trajan’s and Adrian’s columns in Rome, as well as the portrayal of the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry, Sacco’s incredibly meticulous depiction of the failed British Big Push of summer 1916 does not contain a single word. Sacco had already represented or alluded to warfare in previous works: the stories of Safe Area Goražde (2000) and