The Fifth Station: Over the Deep end, or the Ethical Reading

Abstract

We hesitate when separating the fourth and fifth stations; we hesitate even more in the ascription of overinterpretation to either station. Just as the move from the second station to the third involved us in imprecise musings about nuances and atmosphere, emphasis and meta-looks, so now the move from the fourth to the fifth station complicates our decisive map-drawing predilections. For it is not that a group of interpreters — called the fifth station — disagrees sharply with those of the fourth station about this or that statement or argument in the Tractatus or the Investigations;, rather it is that they continue in the vein of nonsense, of doing philosophy, of therapeutic activity, and take it to what some would call its logical end. Where Diamond had accused interpreters of earlier stations, even elegant interpreters, of chickening out, she herself has been charged with a glaring, even if implicit, inconsistency: for how could that deep nonsense which pervades everything ineffably said in the Tractatus still mean so much to us? We can view the interpreters of the fifth station as those who purport to answer this question. And they do this by underscoring a different perspective from which to view Wittgenstein: the ethical viewpoint.

It’ by htinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. (Culture and Value 75 )