Wittgenstein once posited a famous thought experiment which involved each communicator in a system, in this case humans using language, to possess a box with something inside. Each box contained a different creature or thing that only the owner was allowed to see. Everyone referred to this thing as a beetle.
Because every box contained something different, the funxional use of the word ‘beetle’ no longer existed, its sense, as each person using it referred to a different significat with the sign. A private language.
From the clarity and usage perspective Wittgenstein studied the world from, the word no longer had any right to exist. It may have a personal affiliation but the ultimate use-value to co-opt economics ceased. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. This is such an example of needed silence.
Necessarily, this observation creates a problem for relativists and poststructuralists. If all signs are arbitrary in any language system then they represent a myriad of different signifiers in themselves and a multitude of significats. Because of this arbitrary assignment which differs from observer, all language is rendered meaningless, that is exorcised of its sense. Instead of freeing an individual speaker, further use of language constrains thoughts and views into a singular direxion and magnitude rather than the planar multiplicity a sign naturally entails. An apple, exempli gratia, can no longer represent an object which is superpositionally red, yellow, green, hard, soft, round, crushed, et cetera. It must now be observed in its context and concretised into the definitive form, the one which has use in current connotation: ‘that apple which I point to’, a specific reference located contextually within the system.
This is what never allows Wittgenstein’s beetle to obtain meaning. Because it is forbidden to see what someone else has in their box, there is never a context where the semiotic web can be confirmed into a contextual reference, thus the word is meaningless, or rather, senseless. This is also what gives language games power. Each sign must be used in the rules of the context, the game, to obtain any coherent meaning. If they are removed from the system, a stop sign taken from the road and placed at the bottom of the ocean, they lose use.
However, this is not only a linguist analysis. Afterall, language is the true metaphysics. Instead, all things fall into this contextual usage to find individual sense. Each of us carries infinite beetles, concepts and things constrained to a personal meaning through language though divergent from separate observers. Language both forces use to define bounds of meaning and disperses endless meaning among users. Our conceptual schemes.
This was not always true. Previous civilisations, and to extent our own, try to universalise signs through institutions, but as the 21st century sees the decay of these, the rotting corpses of meaning no longer feed the masses.
Morals, ethics, have long been institutional signs, defined in the West by Christianity, and as Nietzsche would say, built on the ideals of the weak. Like the previous ore-based monetary systems of the USA, there was a definitive value behind each individual usage. Though humans could define the bounds, having eaten from the fruit, ‘good’ was still set by God, by that which followed in his vision and his image, while ‘evil’ remained its antithesis. It was a binary dichotomy used to enforce human rules without having to question the semiotic web.
Since then, this moral fibre has dissolved with the death of God and rise of scientific secularism as a pagan replacement, and much in the same way fiat currency became simulacra, morals too were placed in a beetle box. Ethical absolutes are varied between reference frames, and subjective, variable in each context, consequentialist based rather than deontological.
It’s important to note this isn’t new. In fact, ethics have always funxioned this way. The only difference was institutional enforcement to concretise signs into absolutes, but the essence of ethics remained individual. It is perfectly justifiable to operate ethics as a simulacrum, for each beetle is distinct. There is just no sense in building a definition with concrete bounds when the box’s inside cannot be gleaned.
Every time an individual makes a moral judgement, completes a circuit which feeds back an ethical stance, their conceptual scheme is revised, slightly refined, maybe even completely bound into a hardened stance. The next time a similar process is completed with comparable or exact stimuli fed in, the output has preexisting data. So, when confronted with another beetle, able to be shown, or hinted at with description, the former view is constrained by outside pressure, individual institutions, and the previous data becomes ambiguous. Through language, the potentials of the future, already in-part erased by the data collected in the first process and the following definition, become voyd. Not all potentials, but the paths contract into more binary choices.
There is now a dichotomy between good and evil. One choice can either be good, an exact signifier, or evil/bad, an exact sign. There is no ambiguity in the sense of the language. One is opposite the other. There is no room for coexistence. If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.
An implicature of the fallacy of origination! To view morals as an absolute binary suggests there is a start and a failure to address ethics (I use the two interchangeably) as a synthetic process defined by contextual stimuli and geschichte-verfolgt, not with a singular point, but a web which splits and diverts through time. To kill and eat animals was a moral necessity for homo-erectus, now it is a moral choice, one with ambiguity, which obfuscates the struggle between survival and lordship over factory murder. Like all signs, all beetles, meaning is derived from the user, but forced upon equally by environment. The same fact which sees the West view other cultures as ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, or ‘uncivilised’. All that is meant in those pejoratives is a condemnation of ethical freedom (in the Western reference frame), less trapped in language, and suffering instead by other institutional ascriptions.
Language forces the binary of good and evil. Bonum et malum. Καλό και κακό. It's a historical web of shifting allegiances. Should it not seem strange that moral absolutes change year to year? New facts reveal the biases behind previous opinions. Are the facts not subject to investigation also? Each time a sign is concretised, its reference becomes more absolute, its potentials are eroded. There is a singular apple. One form of good. And unsurprisingly, this good is institutional, defined by dominant ideology, and indebted to bourgeois taste. Grammar is too bourgeois anyhow.
Instead, ethics should be understood as its basis, as the beetle or conceptual scheme. Each moral decision is the output of a process, one which defines moral value and character at a given input and which shares no exact resemblance to any other moral process, neither mine nor yours. Ethics, as a binary of institutional good and evil, is language enfrramement, the eroding of potential through absolute meaning, one grafted onto reality by non-native stimuli to the system, forcibly entered into the environment. Private language is exchanged for the safety of a public sphere. But we are not public entities.
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