7

THE POSSIBILITY OF A RESOLUTELY RESOLUTE READING OF THE TRACTATUS

Rupert Read and Rob Deans

Introduction

Oskari Kuusela has done a great service in his paper in this book. For he has tried (and with we believe some success) to do what too few try to do: to read the warring parties in relation to the Tractatus with genuine charity. To figure out what they might have to offer, and how one of them might lead in some respects to another. This offers some real hope, in turn, of leading a way beyond “the Tractatus Wars.”

Our ambition in the present paper, however, is rather different. It is to characterize, in the wake of some criticisms that have been made of anything like our version of the enterprise, how a “strong” or “severe” or “Jacobin” or “purely therapeutic”1 resolute reading of the Tractatus may be possible. We wish to do this, precisely because of our concern, directly symmetrical with Kuusela’s, to read the Tractatus with genuine charity. We believe that this has been done to date much too little, even by our fellow would-be resolute readers.

The perfect foil for this enterprise of ours therefore is Kuusela’s deeply thoughtful and sympathetic piece. For we wish to rebut his charge that, for all its philosophical attractions, “strong resolutism” cannot in the end be accepted as a reading2 of the Tractatus.

The Begriffsschrift-begriff

At the heart of Kuusela’s “dialectical synthesis” of the interpretations of the Tractatus that he considers is this:

Rather than putting forward a theory or a doctrine about logic, or gesturing at ineffable truths, Wittgenstein’s goal in the Tractatus is to introduce a particular logical notation, a concept-script—or at least an outline (some central principles governing) such a notation…. This notation, the principles of which the Tractatus’s purpose is to make understandable, is then the expression of the logical insights of the early Wittgenstein. This means that these logical insights don’t find their expression in (paradoxically nonsensical) theoretical true/false assertions. Rather, they are embodied or built into the notation.3

By our lights, this remains (as do similar moments in some “mild” would-be resolute readers) likely to constitute in at least one key respect irresolute taking of the Tractatus. There is to begin with a risk every time that Kuusela uses, as he often does, terms such as “logical insights,” “views,” etc., with regard to the Tractatus. The risk is quite simply of “chickening out”—of backsliding into ineffabilism.4

More crucially and specifically, we are suspicious of the “embodiedness” idea, which again is likely to lead into tacitly picturing unsayable propositions or assertions as standing or hiding within the structures of the Begriffsschrift. As Kuusela himself allows: “[B]y designing a notation of which it is characteristic that it treats propositions as (re)presentations of facts … one is not yet making any kind of a claim about the nature of propositions” (p. 134; italics in the original) But then where is the embodiedness?

In the end, it all depends, we shall suggest, on how one takes the status of the Begriffsschrift. But: let us try to find the symbol in the sign. That is, let us consider what Kuusela might mean (might want to mean and succeed in meaning) by embodiment here, if he does not mean that Wittgenstein was trying to whistle it.

We are pessimistic, then, that Kuusela can successfully unpack the terms that he uses in the crucial quotation from him, above. We provisionally conclude that his remarks are nonsense, “embodying” a covert irresolution.

Kuusela proceeds immediately (p. 134) to cite the following remark of Wittgenstein’s from 1929, in support of his would-be interpretation: “R[amsey] does not comprehend the value I place on a particular notation any more than the value I place on a particular word because he does not see that in it an entire way of looking at the object is expressed; the angle from which I now regard the thing. The notation is the last expression of a philosophical view.”

But this somewhat equivocal passage certainly need not pose difficulties for our proposed reading of the Tractatus, according to which that work does not insist upon a canonical notation, not even in outline—unless one reads terms such as “view” here in a way in which we think it would be most unwise to read them (e.g. reading “view” as something more or less true or false, would-be fact-like). If, rather, one reads “view” here literally as “way of looking” (manner of looking), then this passage is harmless for us. Philosophers too often mean or read “view” as a synonym for “position” or “statement of belief” or “theory.” We suggest that one reads it in this passage rather as it (we think) sounds here, as meaning way of looking. Thus: a notation can give us a way of looking. A way of looking at, for instance, a form of words that we want to use. An “angle” from which to look thereat. Kuusela proceeds to claim (p. 134) that his interpretation “allows one to maintain both that Wittgenstein tries to do something very different from putting forward a theory and at the same time that the book gives expression to certain very general views about the logic of language.” If “view” here is taken to mean roughly “position” or “belief,” then we categorically dispute this. Perhaps Kuusela does not want it to be taken thus. But then once more we are unsure what there is left for him to mean by this, unless he is to mean by it something like what we mean by “view,” namely way of looking or seeing, not position, no matter of what kind.

Here is our way of seeing things (for which, we hope, further support emerges in the remainder of the present paper): one ought to think of the role of a/the Begriffsschrift in the Tractatus as roughly what Wittgenstein later calls “an object of comparison” (cf. Philosophical Investigations §§130–132). It is to be placed beside forms of words that one has used or wants to use or has just heard others using. It may then shed light. Help one to see things aright. By similarity and by difference. One can look at a/the concept-script, and go back and forth between it and the form of words that is worrying one, and the concept-script’s degree of “fit” with those words may tell one something helpful.5

So; for us, the Begriffsschrift-begriff is indeed present in the Tractatus. But it does not have the “canonical” status assigned to it by Kuusela. Rather, it is a therapeutic device. It offers a powerful option for how to do the job intimated in the closing sections of the book: attaining clarity for oneself (and, most often most helpfully, via another) about what one oneself wants to mean and can succeed in meaning by words.

The concept-script-concept could not possibly play the canonical role attributed to it by Kuusela and others. For where does its authority derive from? It cannot derive from the “argument” of the Tractatus, which is no argument at all and proves nothing. It can derive only from being actually accepted. That is, from being seen to be of use, when set beside our actual or would-be use of words and reflected upon. (That is, roughly: from being an object of comparison.)

It is true that a certain canonical status can of course be given to a concept-script by human practice. It’s obviously the practice not the script considered in some narrow formalist sense that matters. And language-users or logicians can choose to regard some way of putting things as normal or even as compulsory.

But: the justification of the concept-script is the disappearance of logical/ philosophical problems, e.g. contradictions. Their dissolution is something recognized on the basis of our linguistic capacity, which is pre-theoretical. At times, Kuusela seems to accept exactly this; but then we think that he must backtrack on what he also wishes to do: to ascribe a pivotal and determinative—canonical—position to the concept-script-concept in the Tractatus’s schema. To see it as “embodying” “logical insights.” As somehow “expressing” them in a different way from how logicians have traditionally expressed them (in statements). He must accept rather that its role is in effect the role of what Wittgenstein later comes to call “objects of comparison.” (We might, then, say this: the only “logical” insight that is “embodied” in any Begriffsschrift is whatever fruits it bears, its actual usefulness.)

For us, the possibility of a “strong” resolute reading is the possibility of being able to say that Wittgenstein’s writing is through and through transitional (transitional back to the ordinary). It cannot stand and dictate6 anything—including a concept-script—and nor can any concept-script that it eventuates in. Our ordinary language has to speak for itself. Language must look after itself; propositions must look after themselves.

Overcoming the Frame–Body Dualism

OK; but do we really want to say that the frame of the Tractatus too is through and through transitional? Doesn’t the frame, at least, stand? Conant has argued that philosophy consists essentially of elucidations, but not entirely of elucidations. Mustn’t we allow that the frame is more ordinary, and not elucidatory?

Consider, by way of response, this that we want to say:

Wittgenstein remarks in the Tractatus that philosophy consists essentially of elucidations. Ergo, whatever is not an elucidation is inessential to a philosophical work. The frame is essential to the philosophical work done by the Tractatus. Ergo, the frame must consist of elucidations….

Now, one might respond that this argument of ours is not sound, because the frame is not absolutely essential to the philosophical work done by the Tractatus. One could read the “body” of the text, and by a brilliant feat of imagination manage to figure out for oneself how to work it through, in a broadly “Kierkegaardian” fashion, etc. But, even if this is true (and it seems slightly far-fetched—even Kierkegaard had to write ‘The point of view for my work as an author’, after all), it depends upon a strict separation of frame and body. Which is just what one finds slipping through one’s fingers, unavailable, as one actually works on the Tractatus. That is the story of the last twenty years of Diamond’s and Conant’s work—the gradual “expansion” of the frame, the crucial allowance that what the frame is depends upon one’s level of “dialectical” progress through the text (compare the latter parts of n.102 of Conant’s piece in TNW; this is for us a relatively “strong” moment in Conant). The bloating of the frame is a sign of a degenerating research programme … unless one takes the radical way out of this recession, the way that we would intimate: and allows that, in principle, it can all be frame—or none of it be frame (it doesn’t much matter which way one puts this). And then, whether something is being temporarily, transitionally held onto as frame (or not) depends upon one’s progress through the text, depends through and through upon what moment in the dialectic one is at, at any given moment, depends upon what one is doing with the “prop” in question at the time.

Inasmuch as one can “never say for sure” that what one is handling is now and forever frame, then one has to admit the essential moral of the argument laid out above. The ‘frame’ too is open to being treated as elucidatory, and cannot be closed off definitively from being so treated. This is enough to make a severist reading of the Tractatus (both) possible and (moreover) attractive.

Let us reframe what we just said condensedly, for it is important: The separation of “frame” and “body” is just what one finds slipping through one’s fingers as one continues to “work through” the Tractatus. The question must arise, and the text itself invites it, whether these remarks (those most often called “framing” remarks) are not themselves expressions of a desire to want to say something metaphysical, something that will stand firm, but that actually stands in need of being overcome through elucidation. In our view, to hold (as “mild” resolute readers typically do) onto a strict separation of “frame” and “body” stymies the liberating potential of the dialectic at work within the Tractatus. That work, under such a strict methodological (metaphysical?!) maneuver, is prematurely halted. There is more that the Tractatus can elucidate if the reader has the will to continue to work with the text. We hold open the possibility that the Tractatus might be read as consisting entirely of elucidations, a possibility that Wittgenstein’s words in fact hold open too.

Overcoming the Ladder

Given the above section, what then does the “strong” programme of resolutism make of the ladder?

This: it’s a very strange sort of ladder that one is being invited to climb when what would count as a rung is systematically elusive and when its very existence turns out to depend upon the person climbing it and even then involves “rungs” that cannot be seen until actually climbed, and that shape-shift thereafter. And if the goal of climbing the ladder is to have overcome all philosophical propositions and attained complete clarity in our thinking—how would we ever know we had done that, or even what it means?7

Is Wittgenstein really holding this out as a genuine possibility, as something to be attained as opposed to something ultimately to be overcome? Does truly to throw away the ladder not also require that one overcomes the idea of the ladder, too—and the idea of reaching a place by means of it? … Is the problem just that we are trying to take the metaphor too literally or are pushing it beyond its application? Or perhaps is the very notion being questioned (implicitly, by Wittgenstein) that the logical structure of the propositions of our language and the inferential relations that exist between them can always be fully analyzed simply by using a notational device (a “concept-script”), such that we attain complete clarity as to their use and meaning?8 Isn’t Wittgenstein drawing our attention to the seductive allure of logical analysis and to its limitations? Our severe mono reading wants to explore just this and we think it is entirely warranted by the very dialectic that Wittgenstein evidently intends the reader to employ in reading the text.9

Climbing the ladder is then (a concept) itself in need of overcoming if one thinks that there is some linear and progressive dissolving of philosophical problems such that one eventually potentially attains a state of complete clarity. We submit that the suggestion that the reader can ascend the ladder to the point of finally dissolving all philosophical problems and attaining complete clarity in their thinking is a tempting picture and one to which we can become captive and which the Tractatus is an attempt to free us from. Wittgenstein’s ladder then is a queer sort of ladder indeed. If it exists anywhere it is in a non-Euclidean (or, if you prefer, Escherian) space, for it probably never ends—and if ascending it could ever be said to get its climbers anywhere it would only be to return them to where they had “begun,” and for them then in a certain sense to know the place (the only place that could really have interested them anyway) for the first time…. However, if it has done its elucidatory work it “returns” them/one there with the realization that one is prone to confusion and needs to continually subject one’s thoughts and words to scrutiny. This ultimately entails once more that no part of the Tractatus can be ring-fenced—one might see in some of its propositions a “frame” giving instructions as to how to read the “body” of the text, but as one climbs the ladder one eventually (if one keeps climbing) even calls this or them into question—all of its propositions are potentially to be overcome. Our severe mono-Wittgensteinianism reading of the Tractatus wants to take this possibility seriously—as a possibility, at least.

Overcoming the “Correct Method of Philosophy”

Kuusela writes (p. 140): “The back door through which metaphysics enters Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is his methodological commitment to analysis in terms of the concept-script introduced in the book (or some canonical notation). The back door is the assumption that there should be something like the correct method of philosophy, and the dogmatic imposition of a particular framework of analysis onto language as the one to be adopted.” Kuusela is very close to the mark here. It is true that it is in the general area of Wittgenstein’s methodological commitments that he runs into problems in the Tractatus, as we enlarge upon below. But in terms of the specifics of this claim of Kuusela’s: it should already be reasonably clear from what we wrote near the start of this paper how we would respond to this. For, if a concept-script is (roughly) an “object of comparison,” then Wittgenstein can potentially quite escape this charge.

But now consider this quotation that Kuusela uses in support of his remarks here, from Wittgenstein in 1931, and that he (Kuusela) thinks poses a problem for a resolute reader who wishes to resist his interpretation:

In my book I still proceeded dogmatically. Such a procedure is legitimate only if it is a matter of capturing the features of the physiognomy, as it were, of what is only just discernible—and that is my excuse. I saw something from far away and in a very indefinite manner, and I wanted to elicit from it as much as possible. But a rehash of such theses is no longer justified. I once wrote, the only correct method consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to.

This is one of those moments in middle Wittgenstein where the right thing to say, we believe, is: here, Wittgenstein himself is being insufficiently charitable toward his earlier self.10 (Hardly surprising, for a man always and notoriously fanatically hard on himself.) For the method of the Tractatus involves self-conscious nonsense (as does Wittgenstein’s later method—some of his middle period by contrast involves explorations which don’t always amount to real progress, and which involve in some respects a backsliding from this method of Wittgenstein’s two masterpieces: see below for development of this point). It is highly misleading to imply otherwise, as Wittgenstein himself does here.

Of course, talk of self-conscious nonsense will be helpful to a resolute reader only if one can convince one’s interlocutor that nonsense really is nonsense. Irresolute readers tend tacitly or explicitly to rely on the presumption that nonsense is something(s). The resolute or New Wittgensteinian approach is to suggest that using nonsense as a term of philosophical criticism commits one to regarding nonsense as a “place-holder,” i.e. as (a) nothing that masquerades as (a) something. “Nonsense” as a term of criticism does not commit one to thinking that nonsense has an essence, a positive existence: on the contrary.

But this means we need to move beyond thinking of nonsense as one kind of thing, as Diamond taught us to think. (One of the earliest resolute slogans was, “There’s only one kind of nonsense.”) Rather, we ought perhaps to think it is no kind of thing at all.

After all, the saying, that, logically, there is only one kind of nonsense, has to be recognized as itself a transitional, nonsensical remark. For it is of course directly analogous to the wonderful remark of Wittgenstein’s (6.375) that “There is only logical necessity,” the remark that Diamond uses as a paradigm of transitional nonsense, in her epochal (her canonical) “Throwing away the ladder.”11

This is a prototypical illustration of what “strong” resolutism amounts to. Allowing the natural continuation of the therapeutic method of the Tractatus, applied to any dogmas that appear to emerge from resolute attempts to orient readers toward the Tractatus—and to any metaphysical dogmas that appear to lurk hidden in the Tractatus’s own commitments.

Just how normative then is the “correct method in philosophy” of Tractatus 6.53? How universally applicable is it to dissolving “the problems of philosophy”? It does seem to dogmatically assert12 that all philosophical problems can be straightforwardly dealt with by its application—by demonstrating to a speaker who wanted to say something metaphysical that there is equivocation and indeterminacy in their particular would-be use of signs as symbols. If this is just accepted without question then it might seem a short step to concluding that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is after all making proposals for a concept script13 that will enable the “correct method in philosophy” to be implemented and in making those proposals has made unwitting commitments of a theoretical nature as to what propositions must be and how a logical investigation must proceed and what its results must determine.14

We accept of course that at points in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is engaging with the logical systems of Frege and Russell and is doing so to highlight errors and inadequacies in their systems. But: is Wittgenstein as he does so a “normal” or a “revolutionary” scientist (to use Kuhn’s terms)? Our view is: that he is categorically a revolutionary figure, here. He is initiating a different game. We don’t find a full sense of this, in Kuusela’s piece.

Now, to be fair to Kuusela, it is quite true that the move away from the idea of logic as expressible in true statements is itself a revolutionary development in logic. For, once it is accomplished, there are no longer, e.g., proofs for logical systems. (If Wittgenstein’s position was accepted by contemporary logicians a big part of logic would just disappear into thin air or be seen as “castles of air” (cf. Philosophical Investigations §118).) But: this alone would leave intact the idea that logic has results, that logic is stable, that what would previously have been called true logical statements are to be “expressed” in another way (i.e. in the concept-script, etc.). This is what Kuusela’s Wittgenstein is committed to, in the degree and nature of his commitment to what we have called the Begriffsschrift-begriff; and from where we stand it seems to involve a covert ineffabilism.

In Wittgenstein’s proto-concept script what could possibly constitute or “express” a “logical insight” that would amount to anything of the sort that cryptoineffabilists want? For it’s only in its actual application to a string of words or word-like signs that puzzle us that such a script begins to get any traction, but such traction is always parasitic upon parsing of sentences the meaning of which we are already agreed upon. As we have already made clear then, the “rules” that govern the concept-script’s application presuppose that we already understand the language. In that crucial sense it shows us nothing we do not already know. And in so far as it “shows” “logical form”, what sort of insight is that?—an empty husk waiting to be filled by application, a vacant place-holder that can say nothing, and “embodies” nothing about which anything can be said, no thing.

We believe that Wittgenstein is well aware of the metaphysical and theoretical requirements that underwrite some kind of Frege/Russell conception of logical analysis15 and that the Tractatus is specifically designed such that we might overcome fully our attraction and attachment to such ways of thinking. He does this in a number of ways by showing that there is no universally applicable framework that ranges over all that we would call language and that within the “paradigm case” of the bi-polar fact-stating proposition not only is the determinate set of categorical distinctions introduced by Frege and Russell misleading, but any set of determinate categorical distinctions may be misleading, including his own.

The categorical distinctions introduced by Wittgenstein are not therefore to be considered as the formal terms of an ideal logical language or script, for no general and universally applicable framework is given in which such distinctions find a fixed use. The reader of the Tractatus has therefore to be aware of the potential for the use of what have been taken as determinate categorical distinctions to shift according to context16 and of how this undermines the widespread belief that the piecemeal logical investigations that Wittgenstein is undertaking in the Tractatus are to be construed as forming part of a wider project of analyzing something that could usefully be called the logic of our language.17

It is our contention that Wittgenstein intends the reader of the Tractatus to come to realize that all of what we in our ordinary lives accept without difficulty as thinking cannot be fully captured nor be fully expressed by anything that we are likely to be content to call a logical calculus operating to precise rules, whether it be the logical systems of Frege or Russell, or even the notational devices that Wittgenstein himself introduces in the Tractatus.18 What is more, he intends the reader of the Tractatus to come to realize that even with regard to the “paradigm case” of the bi-polar fact-stating proposition sense may well be indeterminate.19 In neither case does Wittgenstein consider this to be a deficiency of our natural language about which we need worry.20

Wherefore then the “correct method in philosophy” in 6.53? Does it too need to be overcome? Potentially, yes—if one is inclined to think that (Wittgenstein thinks that) there actually is an ideal notational device that could fully capture and represent all the possibilities of linguistic expression and that only thinking which can be so captured and represented constitutes thought. Or if one thinks that a notational device could be used to characterize all philosophical confusions and is the normative means of dissolving them.21 Perhaps if we were not creatures who were so deeply susceptible to delusion, then the correct method of philosophy for us would be simply what Wittgenstein describes in Tractatus 6.53. However, creatures who were not so susceptible would be very very different from us and would probably not have anything much like our language.22 The utility of a notational device is in being able to help elucidate particular philosophical confusions; it is not necessarily the means to elucidate all philosophical confusions. The correct method spoken of in 6.53 is itself the manifestation of a philosophical impulse that needs to be overcome.23

Of course, nonsense can be determined by showing that as yet no determinate meaning has been given to all the signs in a proposition, but this is a very general way (and not the only way) of characterizing how nonsense arises.24 The idea that a definition of nonsense can be given as 6.53 might suggest (not what it means—for it means nothing at all—but how it must arise) is again another manifestation of a philosophical impulse that needs to be overcome, as it implies that there are hidden necessities and possibilities that determine the limits of the application of signs. And in overcoming this temptation we come to realize that the determination of sense and nonsense is not in any way to be regarded as a philosophical problem requiring a technical solution, but is, in the main, determined quite adequately using our ordinary non-philosophical ways of speaking.

And isn’t this implicitly suggested by Wittgenstein in 6.54 when he invites us to see the nonsensicality of the Tractatus not just in terms of the propositions that are used to elucidate particular philosophical problems, but also in terms of the nonsensicality of the very project undertaken in the Tractatus (of carrying out a logical investigation into the propositions of our language and the inferential relations between them), with its insistence as to what propositions must be in order to make such a logical investigation possible, its insistence as to how such a logical investigation must proceed and its insistence that the results of such a logical investigation must provide a complete analysis of the logical structure of our language such that sense is fully determinate…. All this, we submit, is among (not, as Conant would have it, Wittgenstein’s unwitting resource, but rather) Wittgenstein’s topic and target, once the dialectic of the Tractatus becomes far enough advanced.

Wittgenstein’s Unwitting Commitments in the Tractatus

What then on this severe mono-Wittgensteinian reading could possibly be wrong with the Tractatus? Have we left any room for Wittgenstein’s subsequent criticism of this work? How are we to explain his evident later dissatisfaction with it (on those occasions when he was not himself uncharitably misinterpreting it)?

Our approach is to look for unwitting commitments that still enable the text to achieve its immediate purpose, but commitments that Wittgenstein later realized did not give him the focus and/or the multiplicity that he subsequently saw was necessary to achieve his therapeutic objectives.

In other words, it is not that the Tractatus fails to hit its intended target—it does and continues to do so. Because one finds what target it is aiming at by endless open-ended work within and from it. The Tractatus as a therapeutic work is a work that works with you to determine the target (within your own temptations etc.) that you are aiming at.

There is, as Kuusela says, for resolute readers such as ourselves and Floyd, no neat set of pre-existing stable philosophical problems. All such problems are piecemeal. As Kuusela writes, directly after considering briefly our approach, the effort to develop a “strong” or “severe” resolute reading (p. 131):

Which type of a resolute reading should one endorse, if one were to adopt one? If clarification is always … a piecemeal activity, then strong resolutism seems more consistent. For it is unclear how offering piecemeal clarifications could ever commit Wittgenstein to such general views about language that Conant and Diamond attribute to him.

Naturally, we think this quite right. We are delighted that Kuusela recognizes here the risk of irresolution in mild mono-Wittgensteinianism. And for us, besides indexing the superb “strong” work on the Tractatus etc. of Juliet Floyd, it brings to mind nothing less than the rendition of Wittgenstein’s later method that the later Gordon Baker, Kuusela’s great teacher, fomented. We like this. As this:

[I]f the Tractatus can be described as making a claim about what philosophy and its method must be, or what kind of form logical analysis must always take, then there are grounds for saying that it did fail to abandon philosophical doctrines.

For our line of thinking, “following” if you like Baker,25 is precisely that the Tractatus does not undertake such absolutist commitments, about what philosophy and its method must be. As we shall explain shortly: while we do believe (as Kuusela does) that it is in the arena of philosophical method that there is a lacuna in the Tractatus, that lacuna is not to our minds of the form of a dogmatic (and thus covertly metaphysical) commitment to how method must be. (It is rather in the form simply of too narrow a vision and practice of method. That is very close to what Kuusela is saying, but still subtly different.) Wittgenstein in the Tractatus explored some possibilities. That is all.

The problem with the Tractatus then, we might say, is fundamentally one of expression,26 for it embodies a kind of commitment to a particular way(s) of doing philosophy. And here we are again not that far from Kuusela. This commitment, a commitment methodological in character, affected how philosophy conceived of as an elucidatory activity should be practiced. It is this (over-)idealization that lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later dissatisfaction with the Tractatus as he came to realize that this approach did not give him the focus or the multiplicity he wanted—what the Tractatus was trying and mostly failed to achieve and what the Philosophical Investigations later did achieve: perspicuity as to the nature and use of particular sentences and of the functioning of many particular aspects of language.

Despite its innovative criticism of all metaphysics—of idealism as well as realism—and despite its concern to fundamentally question the nature of philosophical logic and to demonstrate the limitations of logical analysis, the Tractatus too readily falls prey to the methodological assumption that the sentences of our language and the confusions that our ways of speaking can generate are made perspicuous by a logical investigation into the proposition and the inferential relations that exist between them—the “paradigm case” being the bi-polar fact-stating proposition. (Yet even so, this is an entirely deflationary quest as the investigation undertaken by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus reveals that philosophical logic is not a maximal general science of the laws of truth with universal applicability and also that no complete analysis can be given of even the “paradigm case” of the bi-polar fact-stating proposition.) Moreover, whilst the logical investigation that Wittgenstein undertook in the Tractatus did recognize the importance of context of use in establishing the meaning of a proposition and therefore the need for careful sign–symbol correlation to ensure that there was no equivocation and indeterminacy in the use of the signs that made up a given proposition, the abstraction involved largely precluded the examination of how the particular contexts of use of our spoken sentences can mislead us and also how different kinds of language-use can also mislead us. (One can say that this is a matter of being held captive by a picture. But there is a grave danger of being “Whiggish,” of being retrospectively unfair to what the Tractatus is committed to (assuming that its author is/was necessarily committed to a covert dogmatic metaphysical assumption about method), in asserting what Kuusela, following it seems moments in the middle and later Wittgenstein, asserts.)

Moreover: none of this is to say that the author of the Tractatus was unaware of these wider considerations, for he does consider the peculiarities raised by other forms of proposition and language use in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein not only introduces the general “classification” of propositions (uses) into sensical, senseless, and nonsensical, but also discusses for instance how different kinds of propositional “nets” can be used to describe the world scientifically, and the problematic nature of mathematical, aesthetical, and ethical propositions (or “propositions”). What Wittgenstein did not yet fully appreciate was the importance of paying detailed particular attention to these differences and more besides, to investigating how particular kinds of proposition and their particular contexts of use in everyday life contribute to their meaning and their philosophical treatment. By overly concentrating on the “paradigm case” of the bi-polar fact-stating proposition—even with a deflationary intent—Wittgenstein’s treatment of other types of proposition is insufficiently developed.27

One can therefore see in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus writings an increasing recognition that his initial treatment of the “paradigm case” of the bi-polar fact-stating proposition cannot express adequately the complexities of actual sentenceuse and language-use and one can therefore also understand his continuing struggle with “the proposition” as he attempts to meet these difficulties. However, there is also a broadening and changing conception of just what language is and a corresponding and growing realization as to the unsuitability in certain respects and contexts of the method employed by the Tractatus.

Does this Tractarian idealization betray a metaphysical commitment? Does it have theoretical underpinnings? No, not in the sense that underlying it is a commitment to either realist or idealist metaphysics or indeed to any theoretical commitment as to “how language and thought must stand in relation to the world.” Nor is there any metaphysical or theoretical commitment concerning logical analysis itself, in the sense of it being driven by any insistence or requirement as to what it must be, how it must proceed and what it must achieve. It is precisely such commitments that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus thoroughgoingly wants to expose as confused and to wean his reader from.

Whilst the Tractatus may not have achieved all that Wittgenstein hoped for, that does not mean that it has lost any ability it had to help one dissolve philosophical problems. Those who are at times (and this means all of us; or at least, for certain, all reading these words at this moment) puzzled by our apparent ability to think intelligibly and to use language meaningfully about the world, who want to understand just how it is that our thoughts and our words are able to represent (or misrepresent) the world in the way(s) that they do, who believe that there is a philosophical discovery waiting to be made and a philosophical explanation needing to be given, would still do well to engage with its text. However, the Tractatus does tend to ask too much of the reader by requiring that they work on their own self-reflexively with the text, leaving them to do too much by themselves. The way in which it expresses itself and the way in which it seeks to elucidate philosophical problems are furthermore too prone to misunderstanding; and so as therapy it is often not very effective.

Some of Wittgenstein’s methodological commitments and absences are then the key problem with the Tractatus. We do not agree with Conant and Kuusela that these are tantamount to tacit metaphysical commitments in the text that cause problems. All such seeming-commitments can be eliminated by this self-retooling machine (the Tractatus) working in tandem with a reflective reader. But there are methodological absences that later get filled in, and there are methodological commitments that prove to be insufficiently helpful. This is what leads later Wittgenstein sometimes to call his earlier self “dogmatic”: but we believe that that term is quite often uncharitable. We see it as springing from an over-harsh selfcriticism and from a backsliding away from taking sufficiently seriously the Tractatus’s willingness and indeed requirement for one to keep doing the work that needs doing in order to attain clarity, keep true to its vision of philosophy as an activity, keep from resting content with any reified conception of its subject-matter (and of itself). In short: later Wittgenstein did not keep in view enough what was already in play in early Wittgenstein under the umbrella of “throwing away the ladder” or “das Überwinden”.

Let us explain, and summarize then what we actually do take to be the unwitting—strictly methodological and stylistic (not metaphysical) etc.—commitments of the Tractatus.28

Let us do so, by means first of indexing Conant’s characterization of the burden on the mono-Wittgensteinian vis-à-vis needing to account for the point that (“Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life, p. 41, bold added):

critics of the resolute reading hold that a mere framing of the basic initial question [Does the bare existence of putative ‘evidence’ drawn from the later work suffice to show that the resolute approach to reading the Tractatus must be misguided?] (supplemented, of course, with textual exhibits that indicate that later Wittgenstein was concerned to criticize something in the Tractatus), in effect, clinches the debate. This line of criticism can only have the sort of immediate bearing on the dispute that these critics imagine it does if resolute readers are obliged to hold, not only that the author of the early work aimed to prosecute a program of philosophical clarification that rested on no substantive philosophical doctrines, but also that he succeeded in that aim.

But the latter claim surely can’t be right, if the question against (some, at least) severe mono-Wittgnsteinians is not to be begged. For, one of course has to admit that, in an unprejudiced sense of the word “something,” Wittgenstein was concerned to criticize something in the Tractatus. But Conant moves straight on to the substantive assumption that that “something” must be a “substantive philosophical doctrine” of some kind. But there are various other candidates for that “something.” Here are some of those candidates (they overlap):

Various of Wittgenstein’s famous Later remarks, such as the one that each remark in the Tractatus should really have been the title of a chapter, can we think be made sense of fairly easily along the lines we have just “sketched.” Conant’s text leaves no room for these possibilities at all. It is imperative—it is only fair—to avoid begging the question against “severists” such as ourselves in this way. We think that Wittgenstein’s intention, for instance, to publish the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations together is thrown into a fairly clear light by the points we have just sketched—one cannot assume otherwise.

On top of these, there is also the more speculative but we think quite interesting argument gestured at earlier, that Read has previously made in print at a little greater length,29 to the effect that some of Later’s criticisms of the Tractatus are offtarget: that Later sometimes read Early uncharitably, through his excessive hardness on himself, also through wishing to have something new and “uninfluenced” to “say”; that Later occasionally used Early as a “stalking horse” for stalking common and deep philosophical illusions that actually Early need not have been regarded as committed to; and so forth… . In short, one needs, crucially, to avoid repeating the mistake that Wittgenstein himself tends fairly consistently (almost throughout his career) to make as an interpreter of his own work: uncharitable reading.30 That is part of our purpose, in endeavoring to offer the outlines of what one might call a resolutely resolute reading of the Tractatus, a reading that stays true to 4.112, “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity” and to 4.0031, “All philosophy is ‘Critique of language’.”

Furthermore, there are other aspects of Wittgenstein’s later practice which have different targets again—e.g. the criticisms made in Philosophical Investigations §§90–91 f. are we believe not directed at the Tractatus at all, but rather at the “backsliding” that Wittgenstein underwent in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as he sought for a sound way of putting his developing ideas. (Compare also the later Baker, who (we think rightly) thought that many of Later’s apparent criticisms of Early are actually criticisms of various kind of “stock” or student-like figures, of more or less inchoate temptations that many of us including Wittgenstein (i.e. including Later Wittgenstein himself, quite contemporarily, at times) were exposed to or inclined toward.)

This is of course only a sketch. But it is a sketch that we believe can in future be filled in through a more in-depth project of reading Wittgenstein. Filling it in would amount to showing what Wittgenstein’s dubious unwitting commitments were in the Tractatus, how they were not metaphysical, and how the residue of Wittgenstein’s apparent later criticisms can be neutralized, such that we need not, as Kuusela does, say that Wittgenstein’s seeming later criticisms of the Tractatus are a fatal blow to “strong” resolutism as a reading.

Severe Mono-Wittgensteinianism

The great advantage of severe mono-Wittgensteinianism—one might even rename it, now, as austere mono-Wittgensteinianism—as a reading is that it does not put any limit on the liberating potential of the dialectical process that the reader begins when engaging the text. It does not limit the philosophical problems that it treats, as if it were possible to have an overview of the text that is divorced from one’s own involvement with it. The overcoming goes on and on; there’s nowhere stable to stand and utter theses, no words that settle things.

For as a reading it proceeds (we proceed) on the basis that is not possible to know when the dialectic at work in the Tractatus is finally exhausted, such that therefore it remains (we remain) open to the possibility that the Tractatus can continue to reveal that and how the reader remains in the grip of confusions generated by other philosophical problems. (Philosophical progress is the movement away from illusions and delusions that continually settle in upon one, not a movement toward Truth. In this sense, it is quasi-evolutionary, and somewhat similar to Thomas Kuhn’s picture of the development or progress of scientific knowledge.) Thus severe mono-Wittgensteinianism contends that it is never possible for readers to know or even rationally to believe that they have been completely cured (for all time) from the confusions that philosophical problems generate. The Tractatus just achieves what it achieves according to the reader’s willingness (and need) to keep on working with it. What then matters is what the reader does with the text (or what the text does to and with the reader). Consequently, it remains very possible to continue to use the Tractatus for therapeutic purposes. As and when it is appropriate to the philosophical problem at hand one can simply engage with its text without apology or qualification. (This is why in our recent philosophical work we sometimes use and interleave quotes or moments from early and later Wittgenstein interchangeably, without special pleading.) Severe mono-Wittgensteinianism does not therefore see the liberating potential of the Tractatus as in any way being limited by metaphysical or theoretical commitments, covert or otherwise, but only by its mode of expression: its style, its method, and its breadth of view.

According to Conant, severe mono-Wittgensteinianism overly minimizes the fundamental discontinuity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.31 But there is a fundamental discontinuity only if one accepts the metaphysical and theoretical nature of the candidates he or others (such as Kuusela) put forward for consideration as unwitting commitments.32 On our reading, as indicated above, the Tractatus is designed and meant to overcome even these. It is possible to reject the candidates that Conant and Kuusela put forward and, without seeking to minimize the discontinuity (or better, the progress) in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, maintain that he had other unwitting commitments that were the source of his later criticism of himself. We too think that the “zealots”—if there really is such a category of resolute reader (a reader who thinks that there is nothing wrong with the Tractatus)—are quite wrong.

What is of more interest to us, once more, is how severe mono-Wittgensteinianism, in comparison and contrast to its mild cousin, enables you to move more easily from the mere exegesis of texts to the actual philosophical work of applying Wittgenstein to oneself and one’s (the) world.33 In our view severe mono-Wittgensteinianism returns one to the world, as Wittgenstein intended, and liberates one to use whatever may be useful in his corpus to deal with the philosophical problems that one might be confronting. Resolute “resolutism” is what philosophy needs.

Conclusion

We are in many respects close to Kuusela. Some may even find the difference between Kuusela’s diagnosis (which is closely identified with Wittgenstein’s own later diagnosis, of a hidden dogmatic-metaphysical commitment to the concept-script method) and our diagnosis (of an unduly narrow but purely methodological commitment that doesn’t tie the author of the Tractatus down definitively) to be a distinction without a difference.

But there is still a difference. In his Conclusion, Kuusela writes the following (p. 143):

From the point of view of considerations pertaining to the methodology of interpretation, it seems important to distinguish between two potentially conflicting motivational bases or aspirations that an interpretation of the Tractatus may be informed by: (1) the aspiration to provide an exegetically faithful interpretation; (2) the aspiration to attribute to the Tractatus the philosophically most viable view. Apparently, given the principle of charity, any interpretation of a philosophical text should be informed by the latter aspiration. I’ve tried in this essay to give equal weight to the former aspiration which emerges as a constraint to the fulfillment of the latter one. Ultimately, this is why I reject the strong resolute reading, even though it might be philosophically more viable than the mild resolute reading. For, while the strongly resolute Wittgenstein’s method doesn’t suffer from the same problems as that of the mildly resolute Wittgenstein (since the former doesn’t involve a commitment to a canonical notation), the strong resolute reading seems to have difficulty in explaining Wittgenstein’s later reactions to the Tractatus, and his later critique of the book.

We hope to have done enough in the short space of this paper to have somewhat undermined this worry, and so to have outlined why we believe our reading potentially capable of both (1) and (2). We have thereby, we hope, securely and ongoingly established at least the possibility of a resolutely resolute reading.

But: if our reading turns out to be wrong—if it is too charitable, as Kuusela suspects, and as he has powerfully argued in his paper in this book and in his brilliant book—then in the end this is not that important. For what is more important is: to be on the path to doing philosophy aright. And that path is what “severism”—the resolute (as opposed to irresolute) application of “the resolute reading”—does for us. (2) trumps (1).34 In the end, whether or not this was Wittgenstein in the Tractatus—whether or not he was a resolute resolutist—it is where philosophy needs to go.35 And that is where we want to be.36

Notes

1  See pp. 61–62 of Kuusela’s The Struggle Against Dogmatism, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008, for explication.

2  Although to avoid confusion we should make clear at the outset that, for “strong” readers (and, we would hope, for all resolute readers), there is and can be no such thing as a settled reading of the Tractatus, as there is (at least potentially) of many philosophical works. The Tractatus endlessly shape-shifts, flickers—that is its point. It is a therapeutic device, and could not possibly succeed if it issued in anything stable, and in particular in any set of propositions, no matter of what kind. Even something like 4.0312, which might seem something stable that the Tractatus wants to hold onto, is for us a ladderstatement. When it threatens to become a new orthodoxy, or a fulcrum or Archimedean point, we see the Tractatus as working again to “destabilize” it or “disembody” it. To resist its reification …

3  P. 16. Any talk of a “fragment” of the concept-script as being developed in the Tractatus risks of course being prejudicial, and in the end no less problematic than talk of a canonical concept-script: because the term “fragment” apparently implies that it is or ought to be part of a greater whole.

4  There might seem an obvious counter-example to our point here in the Tractatus: 4.122 f., wherein it is said that we can talk in a certain sense about formal properties. Is this not a way of preserving a sense for talk of “logical insights,” “views,” etc. that Wittgenstein himself urges upon us? We believe not, for reasons that are made manifest in Denis McManus’s brilliant detailed resolute treatment of these passages, in his The Enchantment of Words, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. See also Read’s Review thereof in Philosophy, 2007, vol. 82, pp. 657–661.

5  Someone might retort to us: “But this was not the purpose that Wittgenstein envisaged for the concept-script!” We reply: You are begging the question. What you really mean is: This is not the purpose that you envisaged for the/a concept-script. And likewise not the purpose that Frege envisaged for it. And here one is put in mind of a lovely remark in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, a remark we believe Wittgenstein would already have been “up for,” at the time of the Tractatus (p. 378; VII:16): “‘But didn’t the contradiction make Frege’s logic useless for giving a foundation to arithmetic?’ Yes, it did. But then, who said that it had to be useful for this purpose?” (italics added). For discussion, see Read’s “Logicism and Anti-Logicism Are Equally Bankrupt and Unnecessary”, in Rudolf Haller and Klaus Puhl, eds., Wittgenstein and the future of philosophy, Proceedings of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 380–388. It will be countered against us now that by this point we are reading too much later Wittgenstein back into the Tractatus. And that we will face an impassable obstacle to making our interpretation plausible: for we will have somehow to neutralize the many remarks where later Wittgenstein criticizes early Wittgenstein for dogmatism, the remarks so impressively marshalled by Kuusela in his The Struggle Against Dogmatism. We address this objection in the section “Wittgenstein’s Unwitting Commitments in the Tractatus,” below.

6  For there’s no dictating in logic. The introduction of the concept-script is already an act of clarification. Here, we share some important common ground with Kuusela—see p. 61 of The Struggle Against Dogmatism.

7  For explication, see Read’s “The Real Philosophical Discovery,” Philosophical Investigations, 1995, vol. 18:4, pp. 362–370.

8  Again, this has a direct bearing on the (problematic) commitments that we would want to attribute to Wittgenstein when writing the Tractatus: see below.

9  Cf. M.B. Ostrow, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ostrow’s approach and reading is we believe fairly closely allied to ours; his is a genuinely dialectical interpretation, as opposed to merely a dialectical approach to the extant interpretations (as in Kuusela).

10  Does this commit us to saying to saying that Wittgenstein is always later uncharitable to the Tractatus, because he says the same thing in many different ways and many times? No; as we explain below, we think that Wittgenstein later rightly identified a number of crucial limitations to and unhelpful aspects of the Tractatus, even when one reads the Tractatus as charitably as one possibly can and allows it to continue to work on itself and upon its reader as much as possible. But as we shortly explain, we think that Wittgenstein was often later uncharitable in his diagnosis of the Tractatus’s failures. In this respect, we are in alliance with Erik Stenius (and, though to a more limited degree, with Anthony Kenny).

11  Most of Conant’s alleged unwitting metaphysical commitments of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (see p. 85 of “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” in Alice Crary (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007) are like this. Are we really expected to believe that Wittgenstein was unsubtle enough to believe, simply (unwittingly) to believe and not to overcome this belief anywhere in or through the Tractatus, things such as “There is a general form of proposition and all propositions have this form,” “A logically perspicuous notation is the essential tool of philosophical clarification,” etc. Just look at these propositions. One good look at most of the items in this “Actual List” (of unwitting metaphysical commitments) that Conant proposes would I think be enough for the author of the Tractatus to spot the resemblance with 6.375, or to see (more generally) that any such commitment would be self-defeating or in need of overcoming. (And: contrast to the items on this list the nuanced presentation for example of 6.1232.)

12  Again, we would suggest that this apparent dogmatism should set alarm bells ringing -that there may be a metaphysical or theoretical underpinning to what is being said that is in need of being overcome, especially as the very method used in the Tractatus to make such an assertion ignores the “correct method.” Given the creative complexity of the Tractatus it is difficult to accept that Wittgenstein just did not notice this apparent contradiction.

13  Cf. Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism and of course his “The Dialectic of Interpretations” in this book. On our reading, this does not necessarily follow, because it is entirely possible to envisage proceeding à la 6.53 without any such Begriffsschrift. But we shall not pursue this point here.

14  Now, it might seem that Wittgenstein can only claim with any semblance of justification in the Preface that he’s solved philosophical problems in their essentials if he has a universally applicable method, i.e. one that applies to any philosophical problem whatsoever. But everything depends here on one’s reading of the Preface in the light of the rest of the book. We would therefore once more suggest a different reading. We would suggest if one is to take seriously that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is engaging in a form of elucidatory philosophy, then eventually one must question the apparent dogmatism of these remarks in the Preface. That is, we would suggest that this apparent dogmatism should set alarm bells ringing—that the reader should keep open the possibility that these thoughts might not turn out to be so unassailable and definitive after all. This ladder too may need to be overcome …

15  This is in effect the basis of the unwitting commitments that Conant (“Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” pp85–86) attributes to Wittgenstein.

16  As much is admitted by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus 4.123 where he talks about the shifting use of the word “object,” “property,” and “relation.” See McManus’s sparkling analysis of this in The Enchantment of Words.

17  Cf. Floyd’s powerful argument, in her “Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible,” in A. Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honour of Cora Diamond , Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 177–234.

18  However, in objecting to a particular conception of the correctness of philosophic logic, Wittgenstein is not of course entirely rejecting a utility of logical analysis in particular cases.

19  Thus not all of language is expressible as thought within a logical framework using categorical distinctions and not all thought that can be expressed within a logical framework is fully analyzable.

20  And, of course, this is directly contrary to what is “stated” in the Tractatus, but then it is the very nature of the Tractatus to call into question the certainties and necessities that it so boldly pronounces.

21  Cf. Floyd, “Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible.” We continue (we hope) to be profoundly influenced by the ways in which Floyd continues to open up the text of the Tractatus, especially perhaps her insight that there can be “thinking without thoughts” that does not end up falling into a form of ineffabilism. Our debt to Floyd is and always has been therefore too deep to allow of referencing individual moments in her text as an adequate expression thereof. (This is not to try to say that she and we agree on everything; we don’t. And we have our own way of expressing things, which coincides with hers only sometimes.)

22  See Read and Jon Cook, “Wittgenstein and Literary Language,” in Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Oxford, Blackwell, 2010.

23  The primary means for elucidating philosophical problems remains our natural language and in this sense it too can be thought of, in a certain sense, as an object of comparison. By which we mean: we might say that, on our reading of early Wittgenstein, our natural language is itself already a concept-script. (This idea can in a certain sense be compared with—set alongside—particular forms of words.)

24  To think otherwise is to have a technical conception of what nonsense is and how it arises.

25  Though Baker himself unfortunately never came to have anything like this view of the Tractatus, and considered the “New” reading of it—as opposed to the later Wittgenstein—something of a waste of time. We regard this as unfortunate principally because, like all resolute readers, we think that one will struggle to understand what was greatest and new in later Wittgenstein, what therapeutic philosophy is all about, if one doesn’t understand how far Wittgenstein had already got in the Tractatus.

26  Cf. his remark, “My difficulty is only an—enormous—difficulty of expression.” From the Notebooks 1914–16; March 18, 1915.

27  Just how the Tractatus tries to make these different kinds of propositions perspicuous is both overambitious and ineffective as more subtle methods of investigation are necessary that recognize the full extent of the linguistic diversity of these propositions. What Wittgenstein sought to do as a logical investigation in the end must become a grammatical investigation using particular cases in order to achieve his therapeutic aim. In short: a richer diet is needed, and a slower digestion. But: all that development can be seen as nothing more (nor less) than an unfolding and detailed respecification of the task begun in the Tractatus by means of the differentiation of a bunch of systemically different cases. (We think that insufficient attention for instance has been paid to the “net” concept near the end of the Tractatus, which can be read as anticipating Popper and Kuhn.)

28  Borrowing loosely from John Rawls, one might say that to do justice to the Tractatus is to try out seriously the slogan: The Tractatus as having commitments—Methodological, not Metaphysical.

29  See especially the last footnote of Read’s paper, “Is Forgiveness Possible? The Cases of Thoreau and Rushdie (on)(Writing) the Unforgivable,” Reason Papers, Fall 1996, vol. 21, pp. 15–35; see also Read’s “Book Review: D. Stern’s Wittgenstein: Mind and Language”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1997, vol. 35:1, p. 151.

30  What if one of the first people to be inclined at times and in some respects to read the Tractatus standardly, as opposed to resolutely, were … Wittgenstein himself? Middle (and perhaps also later) Wittgenstein errs, in never speaking of “the ladder,” of das Überwinden, etc. One cannot trust middle and later Wittgenstein on early Wittgenstein. Where later Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations I.§§89–116 is criticizing the Tractatus (and most of the time, we believe that his target of criticism is rather middle Wittgenstein, or certain self-consciously questionable ways of taking early Wittgenstein, or a stock figure, or simply himself and inclinations he still has), he typically fails to take charitably into account the full resources that the Tractatus has at its disposal.

31  Conant, “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism.”

32  To be fair to Kuusela: he probably wouldn’t speak of discontinuity here. For if one (i.e. Wittgenstein) tries to achieve something and in the process (at least at first) fails then that doesn’t mean that the attempts to achieve that thing are discontinuous. A goal unites them. Our inclination, extrapolating from Kremer, is to see the closest thing to a break or discontinuity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy as being between the Proto-Tractatus and the Tractatus.

33  Cf. e.g. R. Read, Applying Wittgenstein, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007. We severists, we relatively austere mono-Wittgensteinians, find mild-mono-Wittgenstein’s early work philosophically too disappointing, unworthy of this great philosophical mind. See e.g. note 7 above.

34  And this of course is the most effective way, ultimately, beyond the “Tractatus Wars”. To acknowledge that in the end it matters very little what one wise or clever man wrote or thought. What matters is what one takes to be philosophically right, and how one goes on.

35  If it wasn’t what he said and meant (as we believe it was), then it is what he ought to have said. If it wasn’t his point of view as and for his work as the implied author of the Tractatus, then it is at least ours now.

36  Many thanks to all those who have helped us get this far—you know who you are. And especially to Oskari Kuusela, for deeply helpful comments and generous discussion on a previous draft of this paper.