Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
In his first masterpiece, the young Wittgenstein argues that language pictures the world, that the limits of language are the limits of thought and world, and that most philosophy is nonsense - the attempt to say what can only be shown. The book ends in a famous silence about everything that matters most.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is the rare philosopher who produced two distinct, world-shaking philosophies - and spent the second half of his life refuting the first. The first is contained in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the only book he published in his lifetime: a short, austere, numbered series of cryptic propositions, written partly in the trenches of the First World War, in which he believed he had solved, in their essentials, all the problems of philosophy. The book is structured around seven main propositions, each elaborated by decimal-numbered sub-propositions (1, 1.1, 1.11 …), building a single connected argument of crystalline severity. Its ambition is breathtaking: to determine, once and for all, the limits of what can be meaningfully said - and in doing so, to dissolve the traditional problems of philosophy by showing that they arise from violations of those limits, from trying to say what cannot be said.
The governing idea is that philosophy’s problems are not deep mysteries to be solved but confusions to be cleared away, and that they arise from a misunderstanding of the logic of language. Once we understand how language works - how it connects to the world and where its limits lie - the traditional questions of metaphysics will be revealed not as false but as nonsensical: literally without sense, attempts to put into words what language by its nature cannot express. The Tractatus is thus, in its author’s intention, a book to end philosophy: a final clarification after which the great questions will not be answered but seen to be confusions. Yet - and this is the strange heart of the book - Wittgenstein does not conclude that what lies beyond language is unimportant. On the contrary, he holds that the most important things of all lie beyond what can be said; the silence the book ends in is not a dismissal but a reverence. To understand this paradox, we must begin with his account of how language pictures the world.
At the core of the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning: the idea that a meaningful proposition is a picture of a possible state of affairs. Wittgenstein reportedly hit on this while reading about a Paris courtroom that used model cars and dolls to represent a traffic accident - the little models could represent the real cars and people because the model and the reality shared a structure, the same arrangement of elements. A proposition, he argues, works the same way. The world is the totality not of things but of facts - of objects arranged in states of affairs. A proposition is a combination of names, and it pictures a possible fact by sharing its logical form: the names in the proposition stand for objects, and the way the names are arranged in the proposition pictures the way the objects would be arranged in the world if the proposition were true. The proposition ‘the cat is on the mat’ pictures a possible arrangement of cat and mat; it is true if the objects are so arranged, false if they are not, but either way it has sense because it depicts a possible state of affairs.
This yields a sharp criterion of meaning. A proposition is meaningful (has sense) if and only if it pictures a possible state of affairs - if it lays out a possible fact that could be checked against the world. The totality of true propositions would be the whole of natural science, the complete description of all the facts. But this criterion has a devastating consequence for everything else we try to say. Propositions of logic turn out to be tautologies - they picture no possible fact, being true under all conditions (‘it is raining or it is not raining’ rules out nothing), and so they say nothing about the world, though they display its logical scaffolding. And the propositions of metaphysics, ethics, and religion fare worse: when we try to speak about God, the soul, the good, the meaning of life, the nature of value, we are not picturing any possible state of affairs in the world at all - so, by the picture theory’s own criterion, these utterances have no sense. They are not false; they are nonsense, attempts to say what cannot be pictured and therefore cannot be said.
The Tractatus ends with two of the most famous and haunting passages in modern philosophy. First, the image of the ladder: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.’ The book does not state truths; it performs an operation on the reader, leading them to a vantage point from which they see that the propositions they climbed were themselves nonsense - and from which they see the world, and the limits of language, rightly. Then comes the final proposition, the seventh, standing alone: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
This silence is the key to the whole book, and it is widely misunderstood. It is not the silence of dismissal - ‘ethics and religion are meaningless, so forget them’. It is the silence of reverence before what cannot be said. Wittgenstein, in a letter, explained that the real point of the Tractatus was ethical, and that the most important part was the part he had not written - the vast realm of value that the book, by drawing the limits of language from the inside, had fenced off and protected from the chatter of those who would reduce it to nonsensical pseudo-propositions. By showing that ethics, the self, God, and the meaning of life cannot be said, Wittgenstein meant to show that they belong to a higher realm that shows itself, that is shown in how one lives rather than stated in propositions, and that is degraded the moment we try to drag it into the sayable. ‘There is indeed the inexpressible,’ he writes. ‘This shows itself; it is the mystical.’ The whole austere logical machinery of the picture theory exists, finally, to clear a space for silence - to mark the boundary beyond which the most important things lie, untouchable by language and safe from it. The young Wittgenstein believed he had thereby solved philosophy and shown where its proper limits, and its proper humility, lie. The deeper account of how language pictures, and the saying/showing distinction, is the subject of the next lesson.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein holds that meaningful propositions are pictures of possible facts, that the limits of language are the limits of the world, and that the most important things (ethics, value, the mystical) cannot be said but only shown - so ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be s…
Leads to Bertrand Russell.
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