ABSTRACT
The Tractatus, then, if I am right, is a glorious failure. It is also, I am deeply convinced, an achievement of the first rank. Nor is that paradoxical. None of our predecessors achieved more. No one among us and our successors will do better. The fundamental metaphysical problems are too difficult for this to be otherwise. Fortunately, their number is small. Even the secondary ones, though quite a few, are not too many. Good philosophers therefore do not pursue many questions. Rather, they are pursued by a few which they articulate ever more richly and explore ever more deeply, down toward the fundamental ones. The few great among the good can
rethink a fundamental problem on their own. Such a problem always consists of a group of dialectically connected questions. To rethink it is either to discover a new dialectical connection within the group or, at the very highest, to affect these connections even more radically by discovering a new question to be added to the group. The new question permits and requires new answers. The glorious failures are those who knew how to ask the new question but did not find the new answer.
