Bruce Andrew Howes

It is generally considered the case that an authorial preface is an author’s opportunity to give the reader a hand in interpreting the work he or she is about to read. It is strange then that the Preface to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922) has often been overlooked. Max Black’s (1964) influential A Companion toWittgenstein’sTractatus, for example, passes over the Preface in silence. And even in the latest published edition of the so-called Prototractatus (1996), the Preface is the only part that appears in hand-written facsimile but is not reproduced in typescript form. Perhaps an argument for not so-reproducing the Preface of the Pro- totractatus in typescript is also an argument for the importance of the Preface: not one letter of this early hand-written text of the Preface is different from the final published edition (I will return to this later). Only of late has the Preface to the Tractatus been seen as having any kind of focal importance.This recent interest in the Preface has largely been spawned by Cora Diamond’s and James Conant’s “New” view of Wittgenstein. This New view (designated as such subsequent to the publication in 2000 of the volume entitled The New Wittgenstein) uses the Preface as a central interpretive tool that, according to this view, shows that the Tractatus takes “a strong anti-metaphysical stand” which is “most explicit in Wittgenstein’s statements in the book’s Preface and concluding remarks.1”The third and fourth paragraphs of the Preface are seen as especially revealing of Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical purpose

The metaphysical root of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represents a departure from a pervasive philosophical assumption found originally in Plato's Meno. This departure is directly inspired by a critique of the Meno found in the works by Soren Kierkegaard written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. ;The central implication of Kierkegaard's influence for Tractatus interpretation is that thought---or thinking---referred to in the Tractatus of necessity extends beyond the limits of language. ;There are at present two competing interpretative readings of the Tractatus in the literature. One reading---referred to as the "Standard" reading since it is propounded by almost all notable Wittgenstein scholars, e.g., Pears, Hacker, McGuinness, Anscombe, Rhees, Malcohn---has it that the "mystical" sections of the Tractatus must be, to some degree, taken seriously. The other reading---a "New" reading advocated most prominently by Winch, Diamond, and Conant---argues that the Standard reading is self-contradictory in that it maintains that the limits of language and those of thought are the same while it simultaneously maintains that there is a sort of Mystical residue left over even after the Tractatus has been "thrown away". The New reading sees Wittgenstein's point as being precisely that there is no such left-over residue and that we must accept this. ;Both readings are however incorrect in regard to Wittgenstein's view of limits in the Tractatus. While the New reading takes somewhat seriously the influence of Kierkegaard on the Tractatus, it asserts that a Kierkegaardian influence bolsters the New reading's view of the mystical as well as its view that language and thought share the same limits in the Tractatus. The opposite is in fact the case. Das Mystische corresponds to Kierkegaard's "absolutely unknown" that language---but not thought---runs up against as a limit. Wittgenstein himself alludes to this correspondence in conversation with members of the Vienna Circle in 1929. As such, if the influence of Kierkegaard is to be seen in its proper light, the problem is not with the Standard reading of Das Mystische, but rather with the view that the limits of thought and language in the Tractatus are the same. For Kierkegaard, unless thought extends beyond the limit of language there is no conceivable nexus for the subject or the divine. This is precisely his critique of Plato's Meno in Fragments. That this view is also the bedrock of the Tractatus' metaphysics is what the present thesis argues is the proper "Kierkegaardian reading" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus