ABSTRACT
This passage tells a reader of the work what he must “eventually recognize” in order to understand its author. No understanding of the Tractatus is possible apart from an
understanding of what this passage asks of its reader-apart, that is, from an understanding of what the authorial strategy of the work as a whole is. Wittgenstein says of Carnap that he failed to understand this passage and therefore failed to understand “the fundamental conception of the whole book.”3 What did Carnap fail to understand, and how did that failure lead him to misunderstand the fundamental conception of the whole book? Two important terms occur in this passage. Not only Carnap, but several subsequent generations of commentators have paid insufficient heed to what the Tractatus itself has to say about how these terms (as deployed within the work) are to be understood. The two terms in question are:
(1) to elucidate [erläutern] (2) nonsense [Unsinn]
This paper is about how to understand these two words in the Tractatus. Only once we understand the specific valence these terms have in this work will we be in a position to understand what the Tractatus says (in §6.54) about its method.
