Thoughts on stuff and nonsense

At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , Wittgenstein declares that the reader who understands him will - finally - come to recognise the propositions of which his book consists as nonsensical. Having surmounted his propositions, Wittgenstein says, such a reader will thus throw them away. Alfred Nordmann's book is an interesting if unconvincing contribution to the debate on how this paradoxical injunction is to be understood.

What it is not, however, is an introduction to the Tractatus . We are told on the cover (and within) that each book in the new series Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts "guides the reader through the main themes and arguments of the work in question". Well, the large majority of the Tractatus addresses a cluster of interrelated concerns familiar from the work of Wittgenstein's "analytic" predecessors (pre-eminently, Frege and Russell): the nature of judgment, of the proposition, of truth, inference, reference, negation, generality, number and so on. Very little of this receives anything more than a passing reference from Nordmann, and none of it is explained in a manner appropriate for a book claiming to be "suited to introductory university-level courses".

Conversely, Nordmann's suggestion is bizarre that "only scholars of Wittgenstein's work" will be concerned to know how his novel proposal for understanding the nonsensicality of the Tractarian propositions contrasts with previous interpretations. (Non-scholars, we are told, may "safely skip" the relevant section.) A philosophical problem is rarely felt fully other than by consideration of a variety of possible responses. Are we really to suppose that an undergraduate can satisfactorily both find and dispose of the difficulty at which Nordmann's book is targeted solely through reflection on Nordmann's contentious conclusion on the matter?

If its major proposal is implausible, this does not mean that Nordmann's book is of little interest. Passing by the manifest connections with the analytic work of Frege and Russell, Nordmann emphasises instead Wittgenstein's place in a more Kantian line of "critical" thinkers concerned, in various ways, to "scope the limits of language from within".

And, while it is not clear that Frege should have been excluded from this latter tradition, it is here that Nordmann comes into his own. Rare and useful discussion is given of such important influences as the aphorist Georg Lichtenberg and the philosophically minded physicist Heinrich Hertz, and in this context there is also a very welcome examination of Wittgenstein's highly unusual literary style. The narrowness of Nordmann's attention does, however, remain apparent throughout; in particular, that section of the Tractatus that is perhaps most obviously inspired by the critical tradition - Wittgenstein's Schopenhauerian discussion of the "truth in solipsism" - is wholly ignored.

Nordmann takes there to be such a thing as "the argument of the Tractatus ". While this is not immediately implausible, Wittgenstein's later work certainly does not offer us argumentation of any readily delineable or circumscribable kind. That this is so provides reason to be suspicious of a textbook presentation of short passages taken from across Wittgenstein's oeuvre, such as Anthony Kenny's The Wittgenstein Reader . No matter how judicious the selection - and it would be hard to fault Kenny's choices - the richly interweaving nature of much of Wittgenstein's writing, particularly of his later masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations , means that the isolation from original context of a variety of short passages cannot make for a basis for serious study. Indeed, in not including Wittgenstein's section numbers or the original page numbers within the reproduced passages, thereby making citation impossible from his book, Kenny would appear to embrace this limitation.

Kenny's thematically grouped extracts (including for this second edition a new set on "Sense, nonsense and philosophy") do nonetheless provide an excellent means for readers with a general interest to introduce themselves to the breadth of Wittgenstein's work. And, despite its necessary limitations, his book will offer useful direction for a student expecting to write on Wittgenstein (although a simple list of passages would serve this latter purpose equally well, and perhaps better). It is therefore a shame that Kenny offers no commentary on the extracts. If the task of summing up Wittgenstein's complex life and work in a single introductory essay was considered too fraught with difficulty to be pursued, one might reasonably still have hoped for some words of individual introduction to each of the themed selections.

For differing reasons, then, neither of these books can be considered a key text for the undergraduate students who would appear to constitute the core of their target audience. While both books may be of some value to the undergraduate as a supplementary resource, Nordmann's will be of interest predominantly to the more specialised reader, and Kenny's to the more general.

Colin Johnston is a research fellow, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.