1. Wittgenstein's choice of the quotation from Nestroy as the motto for the PI signals his work's critical relation to contemporary Western thought, which he suggests is characterized by the word ‘progress’ (CV 9). One reading of the motto – ‘It is in the nature of all progress that it looks much greater than it really is’ – is that it is intended to alert us to the danger of our almost exclusive concern with progress, which, Wittgenstein remarks, ‘typically […] constructs’ (CV 9). The spirit of progress, which is characteristic of our age, expresses itself in, among other things, our attitude to science. The method of science ‘elbows all others aside’ (CV 69), and we ‘are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does’ (BB 18). We have the idea in philosophy that we need to arrive at ‘new, unheard of elucidations’ (BT 309). The clear implication of the motto is that this is not the spirit in which PI itself is written; the kind of enquiry Wittgenstein is concerned with is undertaken in a quite different spirit from the one which finds expression in the novel, constructive, explanatory goals of science.

Wittgenstein's repudiation of the methods and aims of science as a model for his philosophy is not, however, a rejection of the central importance of the concept of nature for his philosophical enquiry. Appeals to nature, and an emphasis on describing what is there before our eyes, are a recurring theme of Wittgenstein's remarks from 1930 onwards. The concept of nature which Wittgenstein has in mind is clearly not the one associated with what is described using the conceptual resources of the special sciences. It is implicitly a more open conception of nature as something that we encounter: ‘Just let nature speak’ (CV 3); ‘Things are right before our eyes, not covered by any veil’ (CV 8), remarks from 1929 and 1930, respectively. This conception of nature is one that Wittgenstein finds in the works of Goethe, and it is no doubt significant that he considered taking a quotation from a Goethe poem as his motto for PI: ‘Nature has neither core nor husk.’