It's common to divide Wittgenstein's philosophy into two phases: there is the Wittgenstein of the TLP and then there is the late Wittgenstein (and maybe also a middle one). There is some obvious justification for this division. When he published the TLP, Wittgenstein claimed to have dissolved all the problems of philosophy -- so that the very fact that he later returned to philosophy indicates that at least this assessment of his early career came under revision. Furthermore, it is a fact that Wittgenstein explicitly criticized aspects of the Tractatus. Besides, the reader of the Philosophical Investigations can hardly fail to gather that something radically different from the TLP is going on in this text.
Yet, it is not possible to account for the difference between the early and late Wittgenstein by saying that what earlier he maintained he later denied. Conversely, the important continuity will not be indicated by saying that he continued to assert certain propositions, e.g. that "The world is all that is the case." Part of the problem, I have been trying to say, is that it is not clear in what way Wittgenstein asserted anything at all even in the TLP, since the propositions therein are famously denied the status of propositions, and therefore the possibility of being asserted. But there is more than one way of not asserting non-propositions. The shift or shifts in Wittgenstein's thinking have most fundamentally to do not with what philosophy should say or not say, but how it should go about its task of keeping silence.
"...Darüber muss man schweigen" ...This very famous dictum of Wittgenstein is often appealed to in fashioning some sort of consensus between him and that other thinker whose constant effort to keep silent --and indeed to keep saying what he was keeping --resulted in over 100 volumes of gesamtausgabe. Jean Luc Marion, in his widely read "Dieu sans L'etre" has given good warning however, about drumming up a consensus between the two thinkers on precisely the matter of silence, saying: "such a consensus, however, does not restate, despite the evident similarity of the terms" the problem of silence in a univocal fashion: "silence is said in many ways." And before any direct consideration of Wittgenstein and Heidegger on precisely this matter whose unity remains unaddressed, I wonder how this πολλάχως λεγόμενον of silence finds itself articulated in the Gracklog comment I left many moons ago over at the now foresaken Grub Street Grackle. There, under the pretext of how poetry can keep silent in the face of the sublime, certain approaches to this problem in which Heidegger remained an unmentioned touchstone lead to "the problem of the possibility of speaking of the sublime in the absence of the sublime. Put more poignantly, can even the absence of the sublime be spoken of? Or is this absence itself already too sublime, since it, like a monument, testifies to that moment where once the sublime stood us speechless as a stone? When followed to this extreme, what we are really saying is that, in speaking of the sublime’s proper element as that of silence, we have not simply kept silent. And the paradoxical conclusion that follows from this is that all such talk of speechlessness is lacking, and is by no means the final word on the matter. Even the two critical conditions stipulated above, as limitiing as they are to the critic, are still too liberal, since they do not speak of silence properly. What is necessary then, is a saying that becomes what is silent, i.e. one that does not move forward –in the linear motion of being allured — unless it has been stirred beforehand to seek what has stirred it. In this case, what once made its visit in the form of the sublime is not merely a distant memory of the one now speaking; it is not something past at all but something still awaiting a proper arrival. Such a pursuit of the sublime through saying, i.e., through a word for silence that is still coming, does not move in a mere circular motion anymore than it is motivated by a blind or unfree force –though I like to your chosen illustration in the post above as an ample hint in this respect. The knot of the aforementioned conundrum is undone only by such a saying that becomes what is silent, undoing itself to say what was once unsaid. Thus do I hear Thomas’s song, “Once It Was the Colour of Saying”, when it closes with poetic dismay: “Now my saying shall be my undoing, and every stone I wind off like a reel.”
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