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PARTISAN REVIEW
work. One, by Norman Malcolm in
Philosophical investigations,
rejected
McGuinness's exposition of the main lines of the
Tractatus,
to which the final
chapter is devoted. The other, first voiced (with such vehemence as to
question McGuinness's integrity) by George Steiner in
The London Review of
Books,
is born of a prurient intellectual petulance that supposes revelations
about sexual relationships to be indispensable for understanding character.
Both of these complaints were seconded by William Gass in
The New
Republic.
About the second of these complaints we need note only how aptly
it illustrates why Wittgenstein assimilated theories to superstitions and myths:
they constrain our seeing and our thinking, and make us miss alternatives
that are there in life and in the world.
The first complaint is voiced more gently but rests on more substantial
philosophical disagreements. Although McGuinness avoids exegetical details,
he does have a perspective, one that is comprehensive, detailed, articulate,
and controversial. This perspective emphasizes three unvarying and ever–
present pillars of early Wittgensteinian wisdom: the inseparability oflogic and
ethics; the inevitability of mysticism (showing rather than saying) with re–
spect to everything important, including logic and ethics; and the impossibility
that philosophy (including these statements) should ever make rational sense.
This point of view is anathema not only to those who assimilate Wittgenstein
to Frege and Russell or to the Vienna Circle, but also to those (Norman
Malcolm, David Pears) who view the later work as correcting an early
metaphysical error. Yet I find McGuinness more convincing than the tradition
which these critics represent.
The chapter on the
Tractatus
is not an exegesis.
It
begins with the
history of its publication and is devoted mainly to a general account of its
principal themes. Here McGuinness's controversial perspective is evident–
and thoroughly justified. He begins, as no commentator has, by noting the
"quasi-biblical" tone: "The work begins with a sort of creation myth ... and
ends with a mystical adjuration to silence in the face of the ineffable, as it
were a form of negative theology...." He thereby unabashedly stresses the
"hidden content" to which Wittgenstein referred in his famous letter
to
Ficker: "My work consists in two parts: the one presented here plus all that
I have not written." After commenting on the literary style this entails
(including a suggestive parallel with Plato), he then explains the design of the
work by focusing on the entries with whole numbers or only one or two
decimals. This useful approach leads him to downplay both the famous
"picture theory" of meaning and the so-called "logical atomism." The focus is
instead on Proposition 4: "A thought is a proposition with a sense." The
central question is how propositions are possible, and the details concern the
prerequisites and consequences ofthis central question: "The work is a kind
