“What was Wittgenstein?” is a question emerging from a flurry of scholarly publications in recent years. Beyond the difficulties of sorting out the Wittgenstein of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from that of his later Philosophical Investigations, there is the question of what was Wittgenstein trying to do in his later work? After years of study and thought over this issue the author has come to the conclusion that much of Wittgensteinian scholarship fails to take his own accounts of his philosophical struggles seriously enough.
Wittgenstein was trying to understand the implications of his own discoveries that emerged from his battle to reconcile the nature of language and meaning with his central philosophical concerns. It is possible to trace this struggle, especially in the early pages of the Philosophical Investigations. He was searching for a voice to express his central understanding of the relation between language, thought, and reality. His key, if inchoate, insight was that by means of language we seek, not primarily to describe reality but to transform it. I believe that this was the nature of his philosophical quest.
