In the later philosophy, Wittgenstein seems to be accepting a robust, perhaps it deserves the name “Aristotelian,” notion of objectivity. The world is not only a collection of the dry objects of modern science—things that can apparently be specified and accounted for without mentioning, and in abstraction from, the ways in which they are taken up and weaved into a network of practice and interest. Such a world is an illusion, according to this latter Wittgensteinian view. This comes out in the fact that there is no way of accounting for such a world, or even entertaining thoughts about it. There is no ‘it’; we don’t have any ‘it’ in mind. For we have deprived ourselves of the possibility of having any such idea in mind by severing its connections to any network of practice and interest; and we have thus undermined the possibility of any such idea of ever having any substance. For an object to be what it is just is for it to be the kind of thing that is taken up and weaved into certain networks of practice and interest. For an object to have an identity is for it to have a form (in the Aristotelian sense, where form is distinguished from matter); and for something to have a form is for it to be intelligible—to be permeated by logos, to have a place in a network of practice and interest. And thus, logically there is no such thing as an object—being what it is—apart from its being intelligible. What it is is visible in how—all myriad of ways—it is taken up into our life (perhaps theoretical life, but also practical life) with it.
As opposed to that, in the early philosophy, in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics for instance, Wittgenstein seems to be making a distinction—I want to call it “Platonist”—between the world as it appears from a moral standpoint, and the world of “facts, fact, and facts but no Ethics.” This can seem to be the world that in his later philosophy he thought was an illusion: world without soul, world without room for any real meaning, world without room for any value that really has value. Or at least, it seems, although this world may be able to accommodate many sorts of logos, many forms, it cannot accommodate the ethical. Ethics, in this view, is not another form; it is not a language game or a family of such games. Ethics is not containable in any network of practice and interest. Moral value is absolute, and ethics is otherworldly. Trying to push ethics into the world destroys ethics; or rather, if we could do such a thing, the world would explode.
Both points are valuable, and worth preserving. But it is hard to hold on to both—the Aristotelian and the Platonist views—to be impressed by both intuitions in a way that does not make one come at the expense of the other. It is easy to be impressed by the latter Wittgensteinian point, and rejoice when we find in this notion of form, or in this wider conception of objectivity, all the philosophical resources that we need in order to repopulate the world, and account for its richness and abundance of meaning and significance: “There is more in heaven and earth than science can see—not only atoms, but ordinary objects too; not only movements, but actions too; not only chains of causes and events, but stories and adventures too. Room,” we trust, “will also be found for ethics. Facts fact and facts, and ethics too!” It is also easy to be impressed by the early Wittgensteinian point and adopt a cold attitude towards all this variety—or rather an attitude of suspension and silence, which finds all that richness unsatisfying, and always strives, waits, for something higher.