LETTERBOX

To the Editors: In his essay "Unanswerable Questions" (Chicago Review 61.2), Joe Luna launches a spirited attack on Wittgenstein's philosophy, referring, with keen approval, to Adorno's critique of the Tractatus found in Hegel: Three Studies (1963)-a critique that I cite and discuss in my book Wittgenstein's Ladder: Wittgenstein's maxim, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" [T #7], in which the extreme of positivism spills over into the gesture of reverent authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reason exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. [...]Luna pays no attention to the particular context in which the Tractatus was produced, namely, that a book begun and intended as a treatise on logic became, in the course of Wittgenstein's military experience in World War I, something rather different, culminating in a set of quasimystical propositions, rejecting his hitherto accepted ethical and metaphysical principles. [...]there is a kind of recognition of a poetic language. Because poet-critic professors like Bernes assume any poet's role to involve, by definition, a display of elevated educational status, they automatically assume that any poem using "low" poetic language that doesn't reflect that kind of status must be some kind of mockery of it. [...]an editorial statement I drafted and published in response to the legitimate concern, hurt, and anger expressed by members of the poetry community did not offer a full apology and did not address the harm that I had caused.