The Enchantment of Words

Abstract

AbstractThis book is a study of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It argues that Wittgenstein’s aim in that deeply puzzling work is to show that the ‘intelligibility of thought’ and the ‘meaningfulness of language’, which logical truths would delimit, and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would explain are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways in which we happen to think, talk, and act as reasons why we ought to think, talk, and act as we do. The root of that misperception is our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we enchant and are enchanted by words, colluding in a confusion that transposes on to them and the world which we then see them as ‘fitting’, responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such words promise to spare us the trouble not only of thinking, but of living. In presenting this view, the book offers readings of all of the major themes of the Tractatus, including its discussion of logical truth, objects, names, inferential relations, subjectivity, solipsism, and the inexpressible. It offers novel explanations of what is at stake in Wittgenstein’s comparison of propositions with pictures, of why Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of how a book — which infamously declares itself to be nonsensical— can clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.