“The real philsophical discovery”:   
A reply to Jolley’s “Philosophical Investigations 133: Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy?”  

	Kelly Dean Jolley’s close reading of para.133 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI) performs several useful services. For instance, it highlights the connection of para.109 with para.133, and the precise ambiguity of the former (Is (ordinary) language what bewitches us or what enables us to escape bewitchment? Surely both). It makes a provocative and fairly compelling connection between Wittgenstein’s remark that “...series of examples can be broken off...” and his methodology particularly as declared in the Preface to PI (viz. that his thoughts had to proceed from one to another with some breaks). The reading amounts to an accenting in some detail of how to respond to the claim that Wittgenstein is an ‘end-of-philosophy philosopher’ by means of re-interpreting the passage in the Investigations that most plausibly may make that claim. And, most obviously, it achieves the latter end by rebutting J. Genova’s sub-Pragmatist reading of 133, which involves the almost-sophomoric exegesis of that paragraph as philosophically licensing one to stop philosophising when one pleases.
	But what of Jolley’s express point of agreement with Genova, on 133 being “...the concluding remark of...‘Investigation 1’, i.e. ... para.133 is the final remark in Wittgenstein’s explicit critique of the Tractatus”? Does Jolley believe, as possibly hinted in the opening paragraph of her paper, that Wittgenstein repudiated in the later work the conception of philosophy he had earlier developed? Such a belief may account for a blind spot in her reading, one potentially of enormous significance. I wish to contend that Jolley has missed the heart (‘the spirit’) of para.133, on what desire or hope we may reasonably have for philosophy, and thus that she has missed a signal element of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy throughout his life’s work.
	In explaining this, I follow and build upon the ground-breaking work of Cora Diamond and James Conant, writers who have most efficaciously shown  how the Tractatus is best read as not as stating or exposing or even gesturing at profound, unutterable truths, but rather as engaging our temptation(s) to utter nonsense, whether humdrum or philosophical (and whether profound or merely falsical); and as committed to there being no philosophically relevant difference between these purported types of nonsense. If this is right, the urgent question these writers raise is in what respects, if any, this conception was altered in Wittgenstein’s later work(s). Does he move to “the only strictly correct method” as recommended in Tractatus 6.53? Or does he break completely with the ‘Tractarian’ approach? Or do the committment and engagement just mentioned continue, in simply a more piecemeal (and consistent) and less grandiose form?
	A difficulty for the third possibility is presented by the apparent consideration (in PI 133) of this piecemeal method contiguously with the very ideas of “the real philosophical discovery”, and of the end of philosophy. Let us turn again to 133:

	   ...[T]he clarity that we are aiming at is certainly a complete clarity. But this just means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
	   The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of breaking off philosophising when I want to.--The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.--But now we demonstrate a method by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off.---Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single Problem. 

Now, Jolley claims that “Wittgenstein ...seems to have had an idea of what it would be like to have reached philosophy’s end. Wittgenstein thought he could accomplish this feat simply by making what he called ‘the real philosophical discovery.’”  However, surprisingly, she imperturbably leaves entirely open what “the real philosophical discovery” is or could possibly be, only claiming that “...Wittgenstein did not think he had made the real philosophical discovery.”  But, not having been given an idea of what the content of such a discovery would be (as opposed to merely considering in the abstract its role in ‘ending philosophy’), why ought we think that (according to Wittgenstein) there is or could be any such thing, any more than there is one singular philosophical problem? The possibility opened up for us by Diamond et al is that even here, at what others have called the close of the ‘chapter’ of PI on Philosophy, or of ‘Investigations 1’, Wittgenstein is still dealing with a logical temptation. That is, is it at all clear that the implied author of PI is counselling us unreservedly to aim at complete clarity and so forth? Might it not be rather that one’s right aim can best -- or even only -- be realized by means of appreciating that a third way is possible, one that does not simply buy into the ‘correct’, ‘conceptual clarificatory’ mode of proceeding; even as it sees clearly the errors of interlocutorial voices that would counsel scientism, or counsel deliberate unclarity? For, after all, most of the preceding 50 paragraphs or more clearly engage critically such temptations both away from and toward clarity, logic. Why not here too? That is to say, if we can agree that the “sublimity” and non-vagueness of logic, the “hidden essence” of language, the ideal of “crystalline purity”; if we can agree that these conceptions are never allowed to masquerade as well-formed by the implied author of PI, even when they seem absolutely to press themselves upon one, should we not be similarly willing to entertain the thought that the conceptions of “complete clarity”, of the complete disappearance of philosophical problems, of “the real discovery”, even of “[giving] philosophy peace”, may well themselves be similarly - thoroughly - problematic? As it were, the best that one can say for the content of Jolley’s 133 is that “we should yield to the temptation to use this picture, but then investigate how the application of the picture goes” (PI para.374; and cf. para.424).
	To argue thus is not to be committed to a totalistically dialogical/dialectical model of PI in the sense of holding that there are no moments or passages in the text that we can provisionally identify as being closer to Wittgenstein’s implied ‘view’ than any others. But this is only because, roughly speaking, the ‘correct’ voice would as it were be fully correct, would in all probability be Wittgenstein’s view, were that all there is to it, were we still able simply to engage in old-fashioned philosophical debate with more or less misguided interlocutors. We might call this the “conditional correctness of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical position”. We want to say that it would be correct (that e.g. we could hope to make “the real philosophical discovery”) were it statable  (But this is not to imply that there actually is something which is not statable which it ideally would be). The problem is, that once we have perhaps grasped the highly unconventional (and even ‘anti-philosophical’) philosophical position that Wittgenstein can be read as putting forth, we must -- to elucidate Wittgenstein -- go beyond this ‘correct’ view, the ‘correct’ voice, too, and not keep seeking for a philsophical position, of whatever kind. We must seek to understand where we already are, and what is “in plain view”, while appreciating that even these very terms exert a problematic hold on us, and at best serve to point up their own perniciousness along with that of the philosophical pictures they were seemingly designed directly to combat.
	Let us back up a little. For it might be objected that there are conceivable candidates for the content of “the real philosophical discovery”, which Jolley could have considered had she been so minded. And surely there are: there are the kinds of discoveries made by Russell, Gödel, ‘the author of the Tractatus’. But these, Wittgenstein repudiated; according to the Diamondian reading, the possibility of making fundamental philosophic discoveries was actually repudiated by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus itself, by 6.53.  
 	Are there any candidates that for “the real philosophical discovery” that  Wittgenstein did not repudiate? Hilmy tries to put some flesh on Jolleyian bones: in his paper on PI para.133 he argues that the discovery in question is how ordinary language operates. This is at least a substantive contention that we can assess, the only such proposal for the content of “the real philsophical discovery” that I am aware of; however, assessing it doesn’t take very long. For one cannot accurately be said to discover the nature of some particular linguistic terrain; and even if one could, this would still not amount to there being such a thing as “the [singular] real philosophical discovery”, only lots of little such ‘discoveries’ (and again, we should note that it is the dissolution of various particular confusions and problems that Wittgenstein mentions with approval at the close of para.133).
	Here is my central contention in a nutshell: that there is no indication in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre that he thought the notion of the “real discovery” mentioned in 133 to be other than chimerical. If one reads PI after the fashion of Diamond et al, then one thinks that Wittgenstein not only did not think he had made or could make “the real philosophical discovery”, but wanted us thoroughgoingly to question why such conceptions and apparent aims hold any attraction for us, while understanding that they do. I would issue this challenge to Jolley: show us a textual source for the thesis that there could possibly be such a thing as making “the real philosophical discovery.” Otherwise, we shall be licensed to conclude that -- here, just as (more demonstratively) in the preceding paragraphs of PI (and elsewhere) -- Wittgenstein is engaging our latent desire to mire ourselves in nonsense.
	An objection might be made at this point: that a reading of PI after the fashion of Diamond et al has not with any completeness been given. And this is true. Despite scattered fragments and hints as to how it would go from the likes of Cavell (particularly), Diamond, Conant, Winch, Putnam, Minar, Guetti, Rorty, and von Savigny, no-one has yet more than begun to develop such a (practicable way of) reading. That is, (of) the Investigations in earnest, in toto, from such an angle  (Whereas e.g. Baker and Hacker have at least given a very complete reading of the ‘correct voice’ beating down its interlocutor(s) throughout PI. They take about as far as one can the project of demonstrating the philosophical correctness and virtuousity of ‘Wittgenstein’s position’; only they necessarily make Wittgenstein sound sometimes much like any other philosopher with theses to support and an over-arching position to argue for).
	So there is much work to be done to substantively form such an interpretation of (‘the later’) Wittgenstein. But what I hope to have shown is this: that one of the passages in Wittgenstein’s work that can appear most strongly to resist the Diamond/Cavell manner of availing oneself of Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be read without difficulty as explicating or, better, exemplifying it. One problem that surely remains is this: 
	Consider PI para.133 one more time: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy ... [t]he one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.” If “the real discovery” is chimerical, then, despite the importance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the not-necessarily-problematic character of philosophising about philosophy (there being no need for a “second-order philosophy”), there remains not only a sense in which Wittgenstein’s later work must run the same risks as the Tractatus  (philosophy will always be bringing itself in question ); there is also scope for the serious Pragmatist question to be raised: is this kind of activity worth the time and effort? What makes it so vital (and in what sense “vital”; or “signal”, or “urgent”, or “of enormous significance”?) to get Wittgenstein right, if the ethical point of his philosophy (or life) or of ours is probably achievable with more facility through other means than through pursuing philosophy?