97. Thought is surrounded by a halo. --Its essence, logic, present
an order, in fact the a priori order of the world:
that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must
be utterly simple. It is prior to a experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or
uncertainty can be allowed to affect it --It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an
abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No. 5.5563).
Wittgenstein is saying that we are mystified when we see thought as being surrounded by this halo of essences, logic and so forth. To me this mystified vision of things amounts to our having bought into Plato's theory of language. This is so woven into our culture that we do not notice. One doesn't have to have read Plato to have inherited this illusion. That is, the Platonic writings we have inherited include beautiful but mystifying tales about how we build this metaphysical picture out of our myths about langauge. In the Platonic dialogue, The Phaedrus, for example, Plato has Socrates saying, "[t]here abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul." Many postmoderns refer to this "writing in the soul" that Plato talked about as a kind of mystification.
Plato created such a beautiful and captivating story that we have bought it even though we do not notice and even if we have not read Plato.See Nietzsche and Derrida, for example, as well as Wittgenstein. Also, see my writing describing how postmodern philosophies have seen this mystification to have emerged out of the writing of Plato. (I describe this in the first part of my paper, "Postmodernizing the Unconscious.) http://www.california.com/~rathbone/shawver.htm
I believe that this is where Wittgenstein and Derrida begin to come together. This notion that we are mystified by langauge like this is behind Derrida's concept of our "logocentrism." Derrida talks about this quite explicitly in Of Grammaology, and I go over that, as I recall, in my paper that I cite above as well as others that I reference on that link.