Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31337/oz.81.4.1
A Poetic Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Swarup Pal
; Ravenshaw University, Cuttack–753003, Odisha, India
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* Corresponding author.
Abstract
Centenary scholarship on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus
remains entrenched in a tenacious stalemate between “resolute” and “standard”
readings. Recently, a number of scholars have identified both dominant interpretations
as failures because they treat the work as “self–repudiating” — effectively
suggesting that the Tractatus fails by its own standards. This paper proposes a
third interpretive framework to move beyond this impasse: an alternative reading
that could possibly be a “poetic” one. This framework, in some significant sense,
aligns with the strong internalist position in regard to the contemporary debate
on how to interpret Wittgenstein’s unusual texts — maintaining that his stylistic
choices are not merely peripheral but are internally related to his philosophical
insights. However, the paper addresses two arguments in support of this claim:
first, the substantive and conceptual evidence for a poetic intentionality within
the text, and second, the structural similarities between the Tractatus and the
modernist poetry of 1922. Furthermore, this paper offers a poetic re–reading of
the most debated aphorism 6.54. This view moves beyond the idea that the text is
“self–repudiating”. Instead, this proposed interpretative framework identifies the
work as a successful treatise in the sense that its efficacy is attainable through its
poetic insights — where its final call to “silence” functions aesthetically to “suggest”
to the readers to see the world “rightly”.
Keywords
Wittgenstein; modernism; Dichtung; mimesis; opaque literalism
Hrčak ID:
349802
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2026.
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