Matthew Ostrow

Wittgenstein once wrote that 'The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up until now has intangibly weighed down our consciousness'. Would Wittgenstein have been willing to describe the Tractatus as an attempt to find 'the liberating word'? This is the basic contention of this strikingly innovative study of the Tractatus. Matthew Ostrow argues that, far from seeking to offer a new theory in logic in the tradition of Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein from the very beginning viewed all such endeavors as the ensnarement of thought. Providing a lucid and systematic analysis of the Tractatus, he argues that Wittgenstein's ultimate aim is to put an end to philosophy itself. He also highlights the intrinsic obstacles to any kind of interpretation that claims to summarize Wittgenstein's thought.

This study argues that Plato and the early Wittgenstein are united in the view that philosophy, or philosophical claims, are in a certain sense empty of content. I first show how, in the Parmenides, Plato's criticism of the young Socrates' account of the forms is really an attempt to expose the vacuity of that conception as an explanation of physical or moral phenomena. This difficulty is exposed not in order to cast doubt on the forms' existence, but to clear a space for the possibility of their non-theoretical appropriation. The central books of the Republic further elaborate this point, emphasizing our necessary reliance on images in our understanding of the Good, and hence the unavailability of a straightforwardly meaningful language in which philosophy's proper objects can be communicated. At the same time, we are meant to see that in the very possibility of recognizing the inadequate, "imagistic" nature of Socrates' discourse, his account's real purpose is achieved: the forms are manifest precisely in and through the ongoing dialectic of grasping the limitations in our understanding. ;I then turn to the Tractatus and argue that it attempts to effect a complete liberation from philosophy itself. Through a detailed consideration of Wittgenstein's picture theory, discussion of analysis, and notion of the general form of the proposition, the dialectical means by which this liberation is accomplished becomes evident. We see, on the one hand, how the text's accounts can be conceived as a thorough representation of the problems of philosophy and, on the other hand, how they ultimately collapse--not because of an appeal to supposed a priori criteria of sense, but rather under their own weight. Wittgenstein's ultimate declaration of the "nonsensicality" of philosophical claims thus does not follow as the conclusion of a standard argument. Instead, just like Plato's appeal to the overriding value of the philosophical endeavor, it represents a shift in our way of looking at the vagaries of sense. The deep divide that finally separates Plato and Wittgenstein emanates from two different attitudes toward the same insight and must therefore be understood as solely ethical in nature