Showing, the Medium Voice, and the Unity of the Tractatus

Abstract

In this essay, I take up James Conant and Cora Diamond’s suggestion that “to take the difference between saying and showing deeply enough is not to give up on showing but to give up on picturing it as a ‘what’” (Conant and Diamond 2004, 63). I try to establish that the Tractatus’s talk of “showing” (zeigen) is more coherent than is usually appreciated, that it is indeed a key to the internal unity of the book (as its author claimed), and that it positively helps us to work our way into the practice of philosophy, which its author understood as a practice of logical clarification. Thus, it is not a stretch of latent nonsense whose sole function is to conjure up an illusion of sense for the sake of displaying its disintegration. While Wittgenstein’s concept of showing is not meant to “make up for” the impossibility of saying certain things, neither does it stand in need of being “redeemed.” Whether or not it is to prove ultimately (or even wholly) coherent, the Tractatus’s talk of “showing,” I shall argue, is certainly not to be “thrown away” in the name of the Tractarian conception of logic (we cannot make mistakes in [on behalf of] logic), for the simple reason that it essentially belongs with it.