Wittgenstein between the Protestant and the Pharaonic

Wittgenstein's Tractatus has the character of an intellectual tendency that is revealed, at the same time that it seems to be on the cutting edge of a new way of thinking, as actually reflecting the decadence of an old paradigm that needs to be replaced, which of course is exactly what Wittgenstein did in the aftermath. Modern philosophy begins with Descartes and ends with early Wittgenstein and Husserl, after which something new begins. It is perhaps most interesting to diagnose the sick man that the Tractatus may show European philosophy in the modern period to have been. This is always the case when we know that something doesn't work anymore but don't yet have its replacement. The Tractatus resembles the high modernism of minimalist architecture. But it fails to tell us what is an object, how propositions fit what they are said to picture (how does a sayable match a visible? Isn't this just an irresolvable conundrum? Surely what happens is a correlation, not a representation); the idea of world as totality of the referents of the sayable cannot be maintained; and his idea of the mystical is as Protestant and Kantian as the whole enterprise. It posits the visible as mysteriously outside the sayable. But world or positivity and silence is a false alternative, because worlds lack this totality and consistency he assigns them (Wittgenstein has not yet drawn the full consequences of Russell's paradoxes that refute Frege's idea of set and totalities), and so what is outside a world is more like an unnameable chaos that is also a name that, like that of God, has no qualities proper to it. The genius of the Tractatus was to exhaust a paradigm by taking it to the limits of what it was able to do.

Its mysticism is authoritarian, and so also Protestant more than Jewish or Catholic (it lacks all the complexity of the former, which is an intellectual system that explains Being's relationship to God, which means philosophy must be internal to it as in Hegel and not external as in some kind of Kantian objectivism or formalism; and it lacks the eroticism of the latter, which sees God in world via compelling objects and experiences of desiring love). It merely gazes in grateful awe at the sublime object of desire that figures servile acquiescence before the Master.

It is interesting that the Philosophical Investigations begins by making Augustine's school master who pedantically starts with alphabet or axioms and builds upon them, into a work master whose figure is borrowed from familial Biblical representations of the slavery of the Jews, though of course Wittgenstein is not only skeptical to Freud, but ignorant, evidently, of Marx, which is good enough as we expect of our philosophers a freedom from all received ideas. But: now instead of learning your grammar lessons, you start with practical tasks. Hand me another brick, slave! Arbeit macht Wissenschaft. Moral: philosophers should think also about history, even if it history plays no directly constitutive epistemic or logical role in philosophy just as it does not in mathematics. The logics of being and doing may well be an image of the way things are in what turns out to be a contingent and problematic sense.