TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS - Ludwig Wittgenstein

« Ludwig Wittgenstein was the grandson of a Jewish land-agent and the son of a steel millionaire who had nine children by a Catholic wife, and baptized all of them into the Catholic faith.

Born in Vienna in 1889, he attended the Realschule in Linz, where he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler.

At school he lost his faith, and soon after came under the influence of Schopenhauer's idealism.

After studying engineering in Berlin and Manchester he went to Cambridge, where his philosophical gifts were recognized by Russell, who devoted himself with great generosity to fostering his genius.

After five terms at Cambridge he lived in isolation in Norway, and when war broke out in 1914 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian artillery, and served with conspicuous courage on the Eastern and Italian fronts.

During this period he wrote his masterpiece, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which in 1918, as a prisoner of war at Monte Cassino, he sent in manuscript to Russell.

The book was published in German in 1921 and shortly afterwards in German and English with an introduction by Russell. The Tractatus is brief, beautiful, and very difficult.

It consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, often containing no more than a single sentence.

The two most famous paragraphs are the first ‘The world is all that is the case' and the last ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'.

The book's main concern is the nature of language and its relation to the world.

Its central doctrine is the picture theory of meaning.

According to this theory, language consists of propositions which picture the world.

Propositions are the perceptible expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are logical pictures of facts; the world is the totality of facts. Thoughts and propositions, according to the Tractatus, are pictures in a literal, not just a metaphorical sense.

An English sentence such as ‘the rain will spread across Scotland' or ‘blood is thicker than water' does not look like a picture.

But that, according to Wittgenstein, is because language disguises thought beyond all recognition. However, even in ordinary language there is a perceptibly pictorial element.

Take the sentence ‘Bristol is west of London'.

This sentence says something quite different from another sentence made up of the same words, namely, ‘London is west of Bristol'.

What makes the first sentence, but not the second, mean that Bristol is west of London? It is the fact that the word ‘Bristol' occurs to the left of the word ‘London' in the context of the first sentence but not the second.

So in that sentence, as in a map, we have a spatial relationship between words symbolizing a spatial relationship between cities.

Such spatial representation of spatial relationships is pictorial in a quite straightforward way. Few cases, however, are as simple as this.

If the sentence were spoken instead of written, it would be a temporal relationship between sounds rather than a spatial relationship on the page which would represent the relationship between the cities.

But this in turn is possible only because the spoken sequence and the spatial array have a certain abstract structure in common.

According to the Tractatus, there must be something which any picture must have in common with what it depicts.

This shared minimum Wittgenstein calls its logical form. Most propositions, unlike the untypical example above, do not have spatial form in common with the situation they depict; but any proposition must have logical form in common with what it depicts. In ordinary language the logical form of thoughts is concealed.

One reason for this is that many of our words, like ‘Bristol' and ‘London', signify complex objects.

The relationship between propositions and facts will only become clear if complex objects are logically analysed into simple ones.

In order to carry out this analysis, Wittgenstein made use of an extension of Russell's theory of descriptions.

For instance, ‘Austria-Hungary' can be regarded as a definite description of the complex object formed by the union of Austria and Hungary, and the sen-tence ‘Austria-Hungary is fighting Russia' can be analysed, in accordance with the theory of descriptions, as follows. For some x and some y, x = Austria and y = Hungary and x is united to y and x is fighting Russia and y is fighting Russia. In the sentence thus analysed, no mention is made of Austria-Hungary, and so we have got rid of one complex object.

However, this is obviously only a first step; Austria and Hungary are each of them, in their turn, highly complex objects, consisting of many different kinds of object in spatial and other relationships. If we proceed with the analysis of a proposition, Wittgenstein believed, we will in the end come to symbols which denote entirely noncomplex objects.

So a fully analysed proposition will consist of an enormously long combination of atomic propositions, each of which will contain names of simple objects, names related to each other in ways which will picture, truly or falsely, the relations between the objects they represent.

Such full analysis of a proposition is no doubt humanly impossible; but the thought expressed by the proposition already has the complexity of the fully analysed proposition.

The thought is related to its expression in ordinary language by extremely complicated rules which we operate unconsciously from moment to moment. The connection between language and the world is made by the correlation between the ultimate elements of these concealed thoughts and the simple objects or atoms which constitute the substance of the world.

How these correlations are made Wittgenstein does not explain; it is a deeply mysterious process which, it seems, each one of us must make for himself, creating as it were a private language. Much of the Tractatus is devoted to showing how, with the aid of various logical techniques, propositions of different kinds can be analysed into combinations of atomic pictures.

The truth-value of propositions of science would depend upon the truth-value of the atomic propositions from which they were built up.

The propositions of logic were tautologies, that is to say, complex propositions which are true no matter what truth values their atomic propositions take; an obvious example is the proposition ‘p or not p', which is true whether p is true or false.

Would-be propositions which are incapable of analysis into atomic propositions reveal themselves as pseudopropositions which yield no pictures of the world.

Among these, it turns out, are the propositions of philosophy, including the propositions of the Tractatus itself.

At the end of the book he compared it to a ladder which must be climbed and then kicked away if one is to see the world aright. Metaphysicians attempt to describe the logical form of the world; but this is impossible.

A picture must be independent of what it pictures; it must be capable of being a false picture.

But since any proposition must contain the logical form of the world, it cannot picture it.

What the metaphysician attempts to say cannot be said, but can only be shown.

Philosophy is not a theory, but an activity: the activity of clarifying non-philosophical propositions.

Once clarified, the propositions will mirror the logical form of the world, and will show what the philosopher wishes to, but cannot, say. Neither science nor philosophy can show us the meaning of life. 6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

Of course, there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. Even if one could believe in immortality, it would not confer meaning on life; nothing is solved by surviving for ever.

An eternal life would be as much a riddle as this one.

‘God does not reveal himself in the world,' Wittgenstein wrote; ‘it is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists'.

Philosophy could in one sense do very little for us; but what it could do, Wittgenstein believed, had been done once for all by the Tractatus.

The book contained all that was essential for the solutions of the problems of philosophy; and so, having written it, Wittgenstein gave up the subject.. »