The Fly, the Bottle, and the Looking-Glass

Wittgenstein asserts, in the Investigations, that his aim is to 'show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle'. This image implies that the fly is actually in the bottle, and that there is an actual means of escape. It leaves unexplained whether or not the escape route is blocked by a stopper, so it is unclear whether or not what Wittgenstein is trying to show the fly is a route, or a method of removing the stopper, or both. Furthermore, the image entails the possibility of an illusory escape--showing the fly how to make a new bottle while it remains trapped within the original. In any case, while the 'bottle' seems to represent for Wittgenstein Language, in general, his particular focus is on Mathematics and Logic. Thus, while the immediate target of his demonstrations is the kind of theory that he himself, in the Tractatus, and others, such as Russell, advance, his prototypical opponent is Pythagoras. For, insofar as the latter maintains that all reality has a fundamental Mathematical structure, that structure is a 'bottle' in which humans are trapped. But, if the counter-thesis to Pythagoreanism is, as Wittgenstein seems to propose, that Mathematics is merely one context of human activity, then it implies that humans are never in the 'bottle' to begin with, so that any notion of being trapped in one is itself illusory. Hence, a more accurate image of counter-Pythagoreanism is that Mathematical 'reality' is a 'looking-glass', with its potential concomitant illusion that everything, including oneself, exists only 'in' the looking-glass. Thus, the true pioneer of contemporary Philosophy of Language is, as perhaps Deleuze alone has realized, not Peirce, Frege, Russell, or even Heidegger or Wittgenstein, but Charles Dodgson.