A focal point can be identified in the system of L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus: the self-referentiality of language. This simultaneously establishes the possibility and the limits of language and philosophy. On the one hand, language must be self-sufficient, self-regulating, and thus implicitly self-referential: meaningful sentences are de-formalizations of possibilities of sense, which are formalizations of meaningful sentences—language is only possible within this cycle. On the other hand, language cannot be explicitly self-referential: a language system cannot represent its own possibilities of sense without running aground in the infinite regress of self-explication or becoming entangled in the paradox of self-cancellation—philosophical insights, possibilities of sense, rather "show themselves."
