ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein scholarship and criticism is always faced by a problem arising both from Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice and the metaphors by which he tries to convey the modes and possibilities of that practice. Any attempt to offer a systematic account of his writings has to confront Wittgenstein’s own declaration that such coherence escaped him in the very process of conducting his investigations, and, crucially, that this arose from the nature of the subject itself. We should take Wittgenstein at his word from the very beginning, when he confesses in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, “after several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into…a whole” (where “the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order without breaks”) “I realized that I should never succeed.”2
