ABSTRACT
Upon finishing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a young Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that one throws away the ladder after having climbed its steps ([1922] 2002: 6.54). In other words, having understood Wittgenstein’s philosophy, one does not need to keep track of the steps that shaped it but can use it in its entirety. These optimistic and bold words came from Wittgenstein after he had concluded his first book. With an apparent lack of modesty, he believed he had solved the puzzles of philosophy and had left the solutions for the readers to discern. For most scholars in the humanities, such optimism on the part of their analytic skills and academic works is most likely on a more modest scale. The idea of having climbed a ladder only to get rid of it afterwards, however, still seems quite a telling metaphor. We scholars in the humanities that rely on qualitative methods and interpretive analytical tools climb the steps of ladders to arrive at our respective finalized analyses—be they then published in the form of papers, articles, books, or films—and, moreover, once in circulation tend to relate to our own and others’ works as if such a ladder had never existed. It seems that what steps we took and what the ladders we climbed actually looked like fall into oblivion. Instead, we apply reflexive techniques that we have been trained to include in our finalized works in order to create an idea of transparency. This is not least inspired by a widespread notion that creating transparency with regard to the entire analytical process, i.e., accounting for the path, constitutes a means of validity in the context of a reflexive turn (cf. Sanjek 1990: 400).
