Between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment: The historical-philosophical meaning of Wittgenstein’s tractatus

Abstract

From a canonical writing of the analytic philosophy to an existentialist diversion inside the scientific worldview - not many major works of the contemporary philosophy have become a subject of so divergent interpretations as Wittgenstein?s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This paper attempts to elucidate the meaning of the Tractatus from the perspective of the insight that the modern conflict in the ways of seeing the world between scientific Enlightenment and aesthetic Counter-Enlightement has informed the historical context of the book?s emergence, as well as its interpretative history. It is argued that Wittgenstein resorts to modernist irony so as to show by the example of the Tractatus itself the irrationality of the Enlightenment?s core belief that both sides in the aforesaid historical, ideological and exegetical dispute share, which is that scientific method exhaustes human rationality.