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This lengthy statement is the famous “Joker”, which is a well known defense move used by skeptics. I literally quote the English translation of Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism”.
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
And again, just as it is not impossible for the man who has ascended to a high place by a ladder to overthrow the ladder with his foot after his ascent, so also it is not unlikely that the Sceptic after he has arrived at the demonstration of his thesis by means of the argument proving the non-existence of proof, as it were by a step ladder, should then abolish this very argument.
- Sextus Empiricus: Adversus Mathematicos
