Ethics and modernism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

The article is concerned with Wittgenstein’s teaching about ethics in the Tractatus and further connects it to Stanley Cavell’s notion of modernism. The Tractatus can be read as a modernist work as it elaborates on the experience of the crisis of the expressive medium, that is to say of its annihilation in relation to our expressive goals. It is within this experience of language which loses its power to signify and disintegrates in dead signs that we are brought back to the world and language that are now freed from our private grasp. Ethics in the Tractatus is concerned with this kind of transition and liberation. The article also offers clues about where to place this view in the history of ethics.