Lo ético en la primera filosofía de Wittgenstein

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that there cannot be ethical propositions. However, in the Lecture on Ethics he tells us about his own ethical-religious experiences, which are described through statements like “I wonder at the existence of the world”, “I am safe whatever happens”, or “God disapproves of our conduct”. If ethics can find no adequate expression in language, then how could the author of the Lecture convey to us his ethical experiences? In this article, I propose an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s conception of the ethical which reconciles the ineffability of ethics with its apparent expressability in Wittgenstein’s early texts. I also show that this interpretation can account for the idea that the very writing and publication of the Tractatus was, for its author, an ethical act: his way towards the philosophical revelation that ethics belongs to the domain of paradox and nonsense because it is situated outside the space of the world’s possibilities.