Abstract

Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. … But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics could not be made manifest; and indeed I will suggest that Wittgenstein took the best manifestation of ethics to be in aesthetics, and more specifically literature. Literature uses words in such a way as to allow ethics to show itself. It does this, I suggest, through perspicuous presentations, though of a different kind than those of philosophy. Wittgenstein takes us some way toward fleshing out the literary nature of perspicuous presentations, but not far enough. To do this, I will...