Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism by Ben Ware

Author:Ben Ware [Ware, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’œil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.48

Here again we encounter the urge (on Zeuxis’s part) to go beyond the perceived limit (the painted veil) to something which is hidden. Alighting in his manuscripts on this desire for a beyond, Wittgenstein writes: ‘[I]n so far as people think they can see the “limits of human understanding”, they believe of course that they can see beyond these’ – this, he says, ‘satisfies a longing for the transcendent’.49 For Hegel, Lacan and Wittgenstein then, it is the perception of the limit which is itself the cause of one wanting to go beyond it; and this wanting to go beyond is a metaphysical urge which arises from a dissatisfaction with the reality of appearances (what the later Wittgenstein terms the ‘ordinary’). In the Tractatus, the perspective which the author encourages the reader to take up is, therefore, one where the very attachment to limits comes to be seen as an illusion of thought. The activity of throwing away the ladder requires one to reinterrogate remarks such as ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (5.6) and to ask oneself: what, precisely, is it about such pseudo-propositions which makes them so philosophically attractive?

Understood in this way, the Tractatus can be seen to have a dual character. On the one hand, it is a typical high modernist work – intellectually esoteric, ethically heroic, formally perfectionist; on the other hand, it takes up a position beyond a number of modernist authors who, in the parlance of the Investigations, are ‘held […] captive’ (PI, §115) by a particular picture of language. Where modernists like Eliot and Hofmannsthal see language as a cognitive prison-house which debars us from saying certain kinds of things, Wittgenstein sees no such finite boundaries to what can be said. On the contrary, his aim is to reveal how such pictures of limits and boundaries develop when we fail to understand ‘the logic of our language’ (4.003). Therefore, rather than simply placing the Tractatus in the stream of philosophical and literary modernism, I want to argue that we can also come to recognize it as a therapeutic tool which can assist us in diagnosing some of the problems of language, expression and communication that feature so centrally in modernist discourse.

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