To both ways of thinking, whether we can reach it or not, there is something out there: the way things are, which language is meant to designate. But ‘the great difficulty here’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is not to represent the matter as if there were something that one couldn’t do.’ For him, it is the divide itself, which places language on one side and the world on the other, that needs to be questioned, not whether the divide can be bridged.
This is not to say that the divide should be regarded as a fiction. It is, rather, an achievement, but one with certain limits that are easily forgotten. Wittgenstein’s later writing takes on the aspect of therapy because it tries to draw attention to the moments, in philosophy especially, where removing language from the contexts in which it has a use, lends that language a kind of magical power and leads to confusion. We begin to puzzle about what the word refers to out there in the world, instead of attending to what it actually does in particular linguistic practices – what it tells us.
Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise?
