How to Read the Tractatus: Traditionally, Resolutely, or Iconologically?

Abstract

My text contributes to the debate taking place in the current research on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and how to interpret his Tractatus logico-philosophicus appropriately. In contrast to the realist standard interpretation on the one hand, and as distinguished from the not only anti-realist but strictly anti-metaphysical approach of the resolute reading on the other, I want to suggest, or at least remind of its possibility, a third way of interpreting the text that takes Wittgenstein’s early philosophy closer to the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (again). More precisely, I want to show how the Tractatus can be read in a transcendental way in a Kantian sense of transcendentality, and how this approach enables the avoidance of those problems that seem to make the resolute reading problematic. The latter can be done under the following two conditions: first, one has to take into account in one’s transcendental approach that Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus under the impression of the general linguistic turn at the beginning of the twentieth century. Second, it is also necessary to consider Wittgenstein’s statements concerning the pictural nature of all our linguistic references of reality. I want to argue that both of these conditions are necessary for an appropriate transcendental understanding of the Tractatus, and that for this reason Wittgenstein’s philosophical method should be understood as a kind of transcendental philosophy that is not only coined linguistically, but also materialized in a pictural way. Because my interpretation is focused on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the pictural nature of all our linguistic references to reality, I want to call it the “iconological reading” of the Tractatus.