'The presence of a noble nature'

 To my mind, no philosopher was clearer than Wittgenstein on why a science of ethics is impossible — why talking of ethics as if it were a feature of the natural world is nonsense.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

 

A science of ethics, a calculus of ethics, a logical system of ethics is nonsense, and Wittgenstein said not a word. However, our experience of ethical behavior is not nonsense at all. Those experiences might be the most serious things we humans encounter, and Wittgenstein said a lot about that.

If you’ve read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it might surprise you that Wittgenstein gave copies of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations to friends. He urged his students to read Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales and questioned them to see if they’d grasped the stories.

The praised Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He loved to talk about the character Father Zosima. Such people really exist in the world, Wittgenstein said. He hailed Dostoevsky as a master for capturing this natural — but almost miraculous — personality.

To me, George Eliot was even clearer in Middlemarch:

 

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us; we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

 

And this:

 

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us.

 

Such people do walk the earth.

• Sources: The first quotation is the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The quotations from George Eliot’s Middlemarch are from Chapters LXXVI and LXXVII.