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1 throughout the following pages I argue that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (TLP) and Spinoza’s Ethics (E) both pursue the same end. We can profitably take each as aiming to establish that there cannot be any position outside the world, thought, and language, that there can be no overarching standpoint from which anyone or anything can encompass the world, thought, and language as wholes, can act on them, regiment them, know them, or make meaningful pronouncements on them. Borrowing Spinoza’s terminology, I call this philosophical perspective the perspective of radical immanence. Spinoza and Wittgenstein worked in very different times. In Spinoza’s time, it was almost impossible not to conceive God as occupying a position of overarching transcendence. Even Descartes, who had opened the philosophical vistas of modernity and arguably constitutes the principal influence on Spinoza, continued to conceive of God’s relation to the world in this way. Accordingly, Spinoza’s attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of such an overarching position has God as its main object: the burden of his work consists in trying to prove with the full rigor of geometry—and hence apodictically—that God can neither be nor be conceived as a supreme overarching entity who created the world and resides eternally outside it, overseeing its course with perfect freedom and benevolence. In Wittgenstein’s time God was of no prime concern to philosophers. If anything provided the intellectual focus for the environment in which Wittgenstein worked, it was logic in its relation to language. All sources attest that in his earlier years, Wittgenstein was consumed with such issues. But even if philosophical involvement with logic is not identical to philosophical involvement with God, there introduCtion Coordinates of a Conversation Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. —Friedrich Nietzsche, “Postcard to Overbeck” 2 coordinates of a conversation is a parallel: logic, as it was being radically rethought in the early twentieth century, mainly by Frege and Russell—whom Wittgenstein himself labeled his principal philosophical teachers—was being surreptitiously taken out of the world, as it were, to become elevated to the overarching position I have described. The young Wittgenstein , then, whether despite or because of his active participation in these developments , vehemently rejected such elevation and tried to demonstrate with the full rigor of logic—and hence apodictically—that logic is immanent in language, in thought, and in a sense, in the world. We might say, therefore, that independent of the enormous differences in historical circumstances and philosophical context and of the ways in which God and logic were conceived and discussed in each period, the principal philosophical influences on (and thus the main philosophical opponents of) both these authors had the same relationship to the world (and thought and language) in mind when thinking about God or logic, respectively. It was this position relative to the world (and thought and language) that concentrated the philosophical wrath of both Spinoza and Wittgenstein. Hence both set out to demonstrate, each in his own way, the impossibility of such a position. This is what I mean when I say that both Wittgenstein and Spinoza espouse the same philosophical perspective of radical immanence , and this is what I will cash out by reading the Ethics and the Tractatus in conjunction. The perspective of radical immanence as I define it has been espoused by others , too. Many philosophers share, in some way or other, the insight that there can be no position overarching the world (and thought and language). With respect to this insight, however, Spinoza and Wittgenstein are distinguished by two things. First, both focus their work on this insight as such and concentrate their efforts on working out what the perspective it defines amounts to and what it involves for the whole of philosophy. Spinoza and Wittgenstein make the perspective of radical immanence appear most perspicuously in all its presuppositions and in all its consequences. Second, both of them reason implacably, with a kind of singlemindedness rarely found in the history of philosophy, mustering for the purpose the highest standards of rigor their respective periods afforded. We might say that both distill the perspective of radical immanence and present only this concentrate and its implications. These characteristics make the Ethics and the Tractatus exemplary texts not just with respect to the perspective of radical immanence but for the whole history of philosophy. Consequently, any serious effort to read the two works in...

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