LANGUAGE expressions of insights into the forms in which genuine scientific propositions can be cast (TLP 6.32 ff.) In ethics and aesthetics, likewise, there are no genuine propositions No proposition can express the meaning of the world or of life, because all propositions are contingent—they have true–false poles—and no genuine value can be a contingent matter (TLP 6.41) Finally, the propositions of philosophy itself fall under the axe Philosophy is not a corpus of propositions but an activity, the activity of analysis Applied to the propositions of everyday life, philosophy gives them a clear meaning; applied to pseudopropositions it reveals them as nonsensical The propositions of the Tractatus itself are meaningless because they are attempts to say what can only be shown This, however, does not make them useless, because their very failure is instructive My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright (TLP 6.54) Language-Games and Private Languages When he returned to philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s, Wittgenstein retained the idea that philosophy was an activity, not a theory, and that philosophical pronouncements were not propositions in the same sense as statements of everyday language But he came to have a very different view of how ordinary propositions had meaning Early and late, he believed that ordinary language was in order just as it stood At the time of the Tractatus, however, he believed this because he thought ordinary language was underpinned by a perfect language articulated into logical atoms From the Philosophische Grammatik onwards he believed this because he thought ordinary language was embedded in the social activities and structures that he called ‘language-games’ What is it, he asked in the Grammatik, that gives significance to the sounds and marks on paper that make up language? By themselves the symbols 137