ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein’s struggle with the exigencies of prosaic expression and the threat of conceptual confusion that he found such expression to entail is motivated by a pronounced desire to attain clarity. As charted in Chapter One, Wittgenstein’s perception of what makes for clarity clearly changes from the Tractatus to his later writings. Early on, philosophical language in the proper, logical form is entrusted with clarifying thoughts, and thus with separating sense from non-sense: “Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen” [Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct; its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries] (4.112). The notion of such sharp boundaries that would lend a maximally clear outline to philosophical concepts is subsequently challenged by the focus on language games whose most important feature is to not be determined by necessary and sufficient conditions of class membership. It is only consistent, then, that the clarification undertaken in the later writings would no longer be beholden to the previous ideal of a singular, self-generated precision (PU, §88), but instead proposes similes (Gleichnisse) that are inspired by the thought of others: “Ich glaube, ich habe nie eine Gedankenbewegung erfunden, sondern sie wurde mir immer von jemand anderem gegeben. Ich habe sie nur sogleich leidenschaftlich zu meinem Klärungswerk aufgegriffen” [I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else, and I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification] (Vermischte Bemerkungen [W VIII], 476; CV, 16). This comment of Wittgenstein’s on the reproductive nature of his own work has often been read as a self-reproach, especially since it forms part of a reflection on his own Jewishness. 1 Later on in the same remark, Wittgenstein notes, however, that he considers reproductivity not at all a vice; rather, “es ist alles in Ordnung, solange das nur völlig klar bleibt” [everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear] (Vermischte Bemerkungen, 476; CV, 17). The conception of similes and language games, thus, aspires to a different kind of clarity than the Tractatus: to be, or become, utterly clear about the impossibility of being clear by oneself. The Klärungswerk must work on the language and thought of others, and must as a result incorporate the realm of the inexact, and its possible difference and interpretative indeterminacy, that would not arise in the case of a self-sufficient calculus. Establishing similarity relations with explanatory value requires the creation of new contexts, rather than the restitution of a particular logical structure.
