The previous two chapters have adopted very different perspectives on the Tractatus. Chapter 2 took the global view by reconstructing its overarching philosophical thought experiment, the reductio ad absurdum. Chapter 3 treated each remark as a thought experiment on its own, the aphorism, as a miniature of the whole. And while chapter 2 focused on the logic of Wittgenstein's argument, chapter 3 looked at its “strictly philosophical and simultaneously literary” form of presentation. As they stand, each perspective represents one of the two aspects that were identified by Wittgenstein as making up the value of his book:

Are we really to believe, however, that these two aspects are quite unrelated to one another, or might there exist between them a kind of interdependence? Wittgenstein suggests the latter by writing of a single value that consists in two things.