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63 Almost 300 years of historical distance separates Spinoza from Wittgenstein . Hence the question inevitably surfaces: why are their works so strikingly similar? Were the associated historical changes not important enough, or is the relevant philosophical activity capable of ignoring—or eradicating—historical change? How does it take account, if it does at all, of historical context? I have noted some differences distinguishing the Ethics from the Tractatus, attributing these to disparities in historical context. But it is not enough merely to mark such differences while leaving the striking similarity unquestioned, and this can be understood only on the basis of an adequate answer to the questions just mentioned, questions boiling down to one big question with various horns: how is philosophical activity related to the overall historical process wherein it unfolds? Specifically, how does this overall process affect philosophical activity specifically, and how may it be affected in turn? What consitutes the identity of philosophical activity, and how might this identity evolve historically? What is philosophy properly so called, and what relations might it bear to the history of philosophy and to history in general? Not My Purpose . . . These interrelated questions raise broad and important issues—to begin with, about the adequacy of their formulation—which I cannot broach here in the seriousness they deserve. The questions inevitably crop up, however, which obliges me to draw a coarse outline of an answer bearing on what I am trying to do—and not trying to do—in the present work. ChAPter three Grammar What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to “know”—that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange and distant, as “outside us.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, §355 64 grammar To sketch this outline, I must start by declaring that I will not attempt to determine whether and to what extent either the Ethics or the Tractatus can stand up to contemporary criticism. I undertake simply to read each work through the other so as to help release part of the critical potential they both harbor and, by thus helping them, to help us all to profit from such release. My ambition is restricted to encouraging both these works to participate in the ongoing philosophical discussion more actively than they actually do and, by the same token, to allow them to shed their own light on this discussion. My reasons for embarking on this project are not different from those making anyone engage in philosophical activity. I believe that a vigorous critical power lies latent in the two works under discussion, which to an extent have long been left unexploited, with only a small exegetical push necessary to activate that power. If the final prepositional phrase marks the burden of the present work, the assertion in the relative clause is readily ascertainable. The Ethics seems to have long ago exhausted the critical energy with which it might have initially been endowed; it has lain ever since almost inert, consigned to the province where historians of philosophy continue to do their valuable work unobtrusively.1 Closer to us, the Tractatus seems to have consumed its own critical potential almost in one single spark within a brief period after it was published. In impressive contrast to Wittgenstein’s later work, it has been left standing almost on its own, an object of study for Wittgenstein scholars alone. In this sense, this work too tends to become dispatched, if it has not been already dispatched, to the exclusive care of historians of philosophy. That the history of philosophy thus appears as the dustbin of philosophical activity is no fault of its practitioners. A particular philosophical tradition, still dominant in many respects, has been imperiously disdaining most major issues regarding how philosophy proceeds historically and how a philosophically adequate history of philosophy should be conceived,2 turning “history of philosophy” into a quasi-autonomous discipline taken to be exercised by somewhat tedious children of a lesser god. For this tradition, work from the past (and on this view, the Tractatus belongs to the past) is interesting only to the extent that it can supply us with some particular, narrowly isolated, and almost never sufficient means for tackling our present problems, which are taken to be better situated, better delineated, better formulated, and better solved or dissolved. That some philosophical work of bygone days, be it one hundred or even four hundred years old, might prove not...

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