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88 the difference in the philosophical spaces available to Spinoza and Wittgenstein gave Spinoza’s strategy a narrower range of possibilities for unfolding; the wider range Wittgenstein enjoyed let him pursue a more intricate strategy. For this reason, understanding Wittgenstein’s strategy may help in understanding the perspective of radical immanence overall and thus provides a useful starting point. And even if Spinoza’s strategy appears straightforward enough, a consideration of Wittgenstein might allow a second, more incisive look at that strategy, one that lies below the surface of the Ethics and thus provides additional means for situating the constraints that historical context imposed on its composition. Obviously, this second look must come not only after the first but also after the examination of Wittgenstein’s strategy. Spinoza’s Strategy: First Round Spinoza’s strategy was aimed at the composition of a true philosophical theory complete in all relevant respects, at least in the essentials thereof. To promote his strategy and compose his theory, Spinoza had to rely on his intellectual forces alone. Descartes had already shown the unlimited power of individual human reason and established that in principle everybody shares this power. Nonetheless, Cartesian philosophy had not prevented Spinoza’s contemporaries, Descartes included , from continuing to bathe in confusion, despite the extraordinary feats of the period. Hence, apart from borrowing from them whatever he thought necessary for bringing his strategy to fruition, Spinoza could not generally rely on the work of his contemporaries—and the same applies, a fortiori, to the work of his ChAPter four strategies It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §51 strategies 89 philosophical ancestors, for irrespective of their philosophical achievements, they were in no position to take into account the radically novel ways of understanding the world marking Spinoza’s times. If Spinoza was to conclusively attain his goal, the strategy leading to it would have to be deployed with the highest standard of intellectual rigor, which at the time was that of the geometrical order. This order could both safeguard the outcome of Spinoza’s toil from the predictable objections and misunderstandings and allow it to be taught systematically. The Ethics, the achieved goal of Spinoza’s strategy, displays all this openly, for everybody to see. Thus Spinoza provides definitions, axioms, postulates, lemmas, proofs, corollaries—all the works of pure deductive reasoning—as strictly interconnected by the geometrical order. Concomitantly, he disperses prefaces, appendices, scholia, and explications throughout the Ethics, clarifying in more colloquial terms what could well be hidden from view by the abstract character of deductive reasoning, as well as circumscribing the dominant confusions and dissipating them by bringing them down to their sources. On the face of it, Spinoza’s strategy appears to have resulted in the straightforward composition of a philosophical theory of the purest, most rigorous, and most complete kind. At least on a first round of examination, everything concerning this theory and the strategy leading to it comes out as it should, with no surprises lurking in its shadows. Wittgenstein’s Position Ironically in the present context, if there is anyone who could consistently dismiss Spinoza’s theory out of hand, it is Wittgenstein: given his view that philosophy aims merely at the clarification of thought, so that philosophical theories, which arise from the “misunderstanding of the logic of our language” (TLP Pr ¶2), boil down to nonsense, the Ethics’s candid self-presentation as a fully fledged philosophical theory appears sufficient to justify him in dismissing it. Here as elsewhere, however, things are less simple than they initially appear to be. Wittgenstein cannot proffer this dismissive charge, at least out of hand, for he openly pleads guilty to uttering nonsense in his own work;1 in fact, he thoroughly accepts the charge by admitting that he has been talking nonsense throughout the Tractatus. Here is the penultimate remark of that work: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount those propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (TLP 6.54) This remark summarizes the strategy Wittgenstein adopts to achieve his goal, that is, to reach the point...

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