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 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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