wittgenstein and heidegger 267Art, though, plays no role in the new reading of theTractatus, and this
is puzzling, given theTractatus’ references to aesthetics. James Conant
sums up his idea of the result of reading theTractatusas follows: ‘I
grasp that there has been no “it” in my grasp all along’ (Crary and Read
2000 : 196 ) because this ‘it’ cannot be thought, and so is nonsense.
The idea is that the ‘illusion that theTractatusseeks to explode, above
all, is that we can run up against the limits of language’ (ibid.: 197 ).
Wecan’t do this because it entails the metaphysical assumption that
there is anything intelligible to be thought about what lies beyond such
limits. This idea has no sense, insofar as it demands that language, the
condition of thoughts, itself occupy a position beyond or external to
language.^3 This can seem a plausible reading, but it tells too restrictive
a story.
The dissenting voice inThe New Wittgenstein, Hacker, offers important
contextual, biographical, and historical evidence against the austere
reading. Part of the problem here is, though, again whether the issue
is establishing what Wittgenstein meant, or assessing the validity of the
approach per se. The question that concerns us becomes apparent in
one of Hacker’s pieces of evidence. This is a letter by Wittgenstein to
Russell in 1919 ,inwhich he says that his main concern in theTractatus
‘is the theory of what can be expressed (‘gesagt’) by prop[osition]s –
(and, which comes to the same, what can bethought) and what can
not be expressed by prop[osition]s, but can only be shown (‘gezeigt’);
which I believe is the cardinal problem of philosophy’ (ibid.: 373 ). Inter-
preting this contrast between the sayable and the showable brings out
some instructive philosophical differences. Conant contrasts the ‘sub-
stantial’ conception of nonsense, in which ‘the task of elucidation’ –
which Wittgenstein sees as a key task of theTractatus– ‘is to “show”
something which cannot be said’, with his own austere conception, in
which the task ‘is to show that we are prone to an illusion of meaning
something when we mean nothing’ (ibid.: 177 ). He therefore thinks
that the core sense of showing does not involve gesturing towards some-
thing unsayable, but is evident instead when the ‘apparently constative
use of language (one which offers an appearance of representing a state
of affairs) is revealed as illusory’ (ibid.: 179 ). Once we have realised this
we are supposedly free of a certain approach to philosophical founda-
tions, and this links the austere reading to Wittgenstein’s later work.
3 The reading is therefore in some ways analogous to the kind of anti-metaphysical reading
of Hegel we encountered in Brandom.