The Tractatus was the simultaneous expression of two kinds of anguish: that of the solitary explorer of the world propelled into ‘cosmic exile’ and finding himself in total solitude, and that of the Man Without Qualities, without any attributes imposed on him by his roots: lacking roots, and so lacking any genuine identity, he is doomed to opportunist volatility, superficial emulation of others, and self-hatred. The distinctive trait of Viennese individualist empiricism of the terminal decades of the Habsburg Empire was the intensity with which it combined these two elements. But there is another duality which can also be discerned in the Tractatus: alienation through the solitude of the self, and alienation through the inert superficiality of language. Let us turn to the latter, because the former has already been discussed above.

The Tractatus is a squeal of pessimistic woe, an expression of despair. What, strangely enough, the so very numerous commentators have failed to spot is that it contains two totally independent paths to despair. Either would be quite sufficient on its own, neither needs the other, though possibly they reinforce each other. This dualism, as we are stressing, is crucial when we examine the manner in which the ‘later’ Wittgenstein escaped the gloom of his earlier position.

One of the two paths leads through the nature of language. Speech, being bounded by the range of logical forms available to it (and revealed to us through modern logical notation), is only capable of echoing, mirroring, the structure of inert, pointless, meaningless and isolated ‘facts’.