This is the presentation which accompanied my talk "Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept" I gave at the conference "The future of human dignity" in Utrecht, October 10-13, 2016.

1. Human Dignity as a Mythological
Concept
Thomas Wachtendorf
wachtendorf@akademiephilosophie.de
Research center Erkenntnis, University of Oldenburg, Germany
The future of human dignity
October 11-13, 2016
University of Utrecht,The Netherlands

2. Thomas Wachtendorf
Human dignity: Meaningful concept or empty
formula?
Opponents say:
• Human dignity has no meaning, because there is
no object it refers to
• It is a solely rhetorical concept
• It is a religious concept
Proponents state:
• Human dignity has a explicable meaning
• It is a regulative concept
• It is transcendental necessary and therefore
irreducible
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

3. Thomas Wachtendorf
The underlying question is:
Are ethical sentences empirical or merely
conventional?
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

4. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
„That I am a man and not a woman can be
verified […].“ (OC §79)
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

5. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
„Example: ‚Every rod has a length.‘ That means
something like: we call something (or this) ‚the
length of a rod‘—but nothing ‚the length of a
sphere.‘ […] But the picture attaching to the
grammatical proposition could only shew, say,
what is called ‚the length of a rod‘“. (PI, §251)
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

6. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
C: Regulative sentences
„The propositions presenting what Moore ‘knows’
are all of such a kind that it is difficult to imagine why
anyone should believe the contrary. E.g. the proposition that
Moore has spent his whole life in close proximity to the earth.
– Once more I can speak of myself here instead of speaking of
Moore.What could induce me to believe the opposite? Either
a memory, or having been told. – Everything that I have seen or
heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far
from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks
in favour of the opposite.“(OC §93)
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

7. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
C: Regulative sentences
D: Empirical, but not yet verified sentences
„As children we learn facts; e.g., that every human
being has a brain, and we take them on trust. I believe
that there is an island,Australia, of such–and–such a
shape, and so on and so on; I believe that I had great–
grandparents, that the people who gave themselves out
as my parents really were my parents, etc.This belief
may never have been expressed; even the thought that
it was so, never thought.“ (OC §159)
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

8. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
C: Regulative sentences
D: Empirical, but not yet verified sentences
{
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„The propositions describing this world–picture
might be part of a kind of mythology.And their role is like
that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely
practically, without learning any explicit rules.“ (OC §95)
„An entire mythology is stored within our language.“ (RGB
133)
➡Mythological sentences either can’t be doubted nor validated (A) or to
doubt them would be completely strange, because they are either not
used as empirical sentences or are self-evident (B, C) or they are
awaiting validation (D).
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

9. Thomas Wachtendorf
This mythology constitutes a world-picture
„That is to say, the questions that we raise and our
doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt
from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those
turn.“ (OC §341)
„At the foundation of well–founded belief lies belief that is
not founded.“ (OC §253)
„That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific
investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.“ (OC
§342)
„What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of
propositions.“ (OC §225)
„But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself
of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its
correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I
distinguish between true and false.“ (OC §94)
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

10. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
C: Regulative sentences
Where is the place for ethical sentences?
Ethical sentences:
•can be doubted (∉ B)
•are no empirical sentences (∉ A ∧ ∉ D)
D: Empirical, but not yet verified sentences
•are not self-evident (∉ C)
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

11. Thomas Wachtendorf
A: Empirical sentences
B: Grammatical sentences
C: Regulative sentences
Where is the place for ethical sentences?
In a subset of C!
Ethical sentences:
•can be doubted
•are no empirical sentences
D: Empirical, but not yet verified sentences
•are not self-evident
C1: Ethical sentences
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

12. Thomas Wachtendorf
Something more about mythology
Wittgenstein claims that mythology, in spite of itself
not being true or false is „the inherited background
against which I distinguish between true and false.“
This mythology has a certain structure which can –
in part – be described as metaphors.
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

13. Thomas Wachtendorf
Preliminary remark:
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson pointed out (in:
Metaphors we live by, 2003) that beyond their
rhetorical and poetical functions metaphors have
the ability to illustrate fundamental cognitive
structures.Those metaphors influence the way we
act and think.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

14. Thomas Wachtendorf
In this sense Hans Blumenberg claims that this
mythology is structured by metaphors which
influence the way one thinks:
„Metaphorology seeks to come on the
substructure of thinking, the underground, [...], but
metaphorology will also make comprehensible, by
which ‚courage’ the mind is ahead of itself when
using certain pictures and how by having courage to
make certain assumptions its own history
develops.“
(Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a metaphorology)
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

15. Thomas Wachtendorf
A specific kind of metaphor is called Absolute
Metaphor, a term invented by Hans Blumenberg in
1960 in his Paradigms of a metaphorology.
Absolute Metaphors while lying on the bottom of
our world picture thereby constitute reality,
because they make us see the world in a certain
way.
The other way around, metaphors inform us about
a human’s lifeworld (his reality).
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

16. Thomas Wachtendorf
What are Absolute Metaphors dealing with?
Absolute Metaphors aim at existential questions.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

17. Thomas Wachtendorf
Existential questions can not be answered by
science, because they reach beyond science’s
theoretically structured cognitive capacity (science and
theories are finite as well as humans are. Existential
questions aim at the infinite).
Absolute Metaphors say something about what
science can not explain.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

18. Thomas Wachtendorf
Absolute Metaphors answer:
• Questions of totality, e.g.:What is time? What
is the meaning of life?
• Questions of orientation, e.g.: How to deal
with murderers? How to find out what is true?
Absolute Metaphors "structure a world, they
represent the whole of reality, which neither can be
experienced nor overlooked.Their content
determines behaviour like a landmark one is guided
by." (Blumenberg)
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

19. Thomas Wachtendorf
Thus,Absolute Metaphors deliver answers where
science fails to do so.This is why they are a
sufficient pattern of explanation in an important
sense.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

20. Thomas Wachtendorf
Explanations come to an end somewhere – as
Wittgensteins says –, because all explanations must
rest on some ground, which itself cannot be
explained. Otherwise there would be another
explanation explaining this ground and so on.A
circulus vitiosus would be the consequence.
Absolute Metaphors take over the role of such a
ultimate grounding.They in this sense represent a
world picture.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

21. Thomas Wachtendorf
To be justified to call a concept an Absolute
Metaphor three conditions must be fulfilled:
1. The concept needs a content (intension)
2. This content must aim at a totality
3. The concept must be suitable to give
orientation
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

22. Thomas Wachtendorf
The concept of human dignity fulfills all of the three
conditions:
1. The concept has a content
2. The concept tries to say something about what
humans are (thus aiming at a totality)
3. The concept thereby works as a guideline how
to deal with people
Therefore, human dignity can be considered as an
Absolute Metaphor.Absolute Metaphors are
transcendentally necessary for organizing social
coexistence.They are necessary for pragmatic
reasons and they affect our attitude.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

23. Thomas Wachtendorf
Ethics as Attitude
„It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of
empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for
such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that
this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and
hard ones became fluid.“ (OC §96)
Accepting certain (ethical) sentences changes
one’s attitude and also one's world-picture:
„The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river–
bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of
the waters on the river–bed and the shift of the bed itself; though
there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.“ (OC §97)
„And the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject
to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which
now in one place now in another gets washed away, or
deposited.“ (OC §99)
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept

24. Thomas Wachtendorf
Attitude and Seeing-As
The world-picture influences the way we see the
world:
„You only ‚see the duck and
rabbit aspects‘ if you are already
conversant with the shapes of those
two animals.“ (PI II 207)
„The world of the happy man is a different one
from that of the unhappy man.“ (TLP 6.43)
This is why:
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

25. Thomas Wachtendorf
Attitude and Seeing-As
„The world of the happy man is a different one
from that of the unhappy man.“ (TLP 6.43)
This also leads to the conclusion that the world of
a man whose world-picture contains the concept
of human dignity is different from that of a man
whose does not.
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

26. Thomas Wachtendorf
Conclusion
A world-picture rests on mythology and because
of ethical sentences being part of this mythology,
each world-picture also has a ethical foundation.
To accept or to decline certain sentences,
influences this mythology.
Ethics, thus, is not just discussing ethical questions,
but rather changing one’s way of seeing the world
– as we go along.
To be ethical in this sense means to adopt a
certain attitude by taking ethical sentences into
consideration and to accept or decline them.
Arguing for human dignity helps keeping this
concept alive!
Human Dignity as a Mythological Concept
1. Empirical or conventional
2. Classification
3. Mythology
4. Metaphors
5. Dignity as Absolute
Metaphor

27. Human Dignity as a Mythological
Concept
Thomas Wachtendorf
wachtendorf@akademiephilosophie.de
Research center Erkenntnis, University of Oldenburg, Germany
The future of human dignity
October 11-13, 2016
University of Utrecht,The Netherlands