ABSTRACT

The unexpected parenthetical remark “Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins” in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has long mystified philosophers. The first thing to be said about the mysterious sentence “Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins” is that a close reading of the text yields a much less mysterious interpretation than philosophers have been inclined to see there. Trakl’s poetry, by constructing imagery only to transform the significance of that imagery, radically builds into itself something very similar to what lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, that is, what has been described as the Abnehmen and Zunehmen of the world. In short, Trakl’s peculiar tone is tied to a particular way of evoking and transforming an image of the world usually such that what we have previously found charming becomes disturbing. So vivid and distinctive is Trakl’s power of evocation and transformation that the Trakl “world” and “tone” have become expressions with a well-established place in the literature on Trakl.