- Length
- 96 pagesPears and McGuinness, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge, 1961
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Seventy-five pages written mostly in trenches and finished in a prison camp, claiming to have solved the problems of philosophy and to have shown thereby how little is achieved when they are solved. It founded a movement, and its author spent the rest of his life arguing against it.
- Date
- 1921
- Author
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Region
- Austria-Hungary and Cambridge
- Language
- German
- 1922 English, C. K. Ogden With Ramsey's help and Wittgenstein's correspondence; the first English version Attested
- 1961 English, Pears and McGuinness The other standard translation; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years to the reply
- 32 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 11 years
The only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, adopted as a founding document by a movement he thought had misunderstood it, and repudiated by its author within a decade.
What the book says
Seventy-five pages of numbered propositions, arranged in a decimal hierarchy so that every remark is a comment on a numbered predecessor, setting out what can be said and where saying stops. The world is everything that is the case, and what is the case is facts rather than things. A proposition is a picture of a possible state of affairs: it works by sharing a structure with what it represents, the way a model of a road accident shares a structure with the accident. Every meaningful proposition is either elementary or built from elementary ones by truth-functions, so its truth is fixed by the truths of its parts. From this the limits follow. Logical truths say nothing, since they are true under every combination; there are no logical objects; and anything that could be said at all could be said clearly. What cannot be said includes most of what philosophy has tried to say - about ethics, about value, about the meaning of the world, about the relation between language and reality itself - and Wittgenstein does not conclude that these are nonsense in a dismissive sense. He concludes that they show themselves, and that his own propositions are among the ones that must be discarded once they have been used.
What it argues
That the limits of language are the limits of what can be thought, and that most philosophical problems arise from attempts to say what can only be shown. The picture theory does the work: a proposition represents by having the same logical form as the situation it depicts, which means the form itself cannot be depicted - a picture cannot picture its own relation to what it pictures. So the relation between language and world is not something further that can be stated, and neither is anything about value, since values are not facts in the world. The book's last move is the strangest and most argued over: having used propositions to reach these conclusions, Wittgenstein says his own propositions are nonsensical, to be recognised as a ladder that is thrown away once climbed, and closes by saying that what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence.
What it answered
Principia Mathematica 1910-1913Russell and Whitehead
Russell and Frege on the foundations of logic, and behind them the assumption that philosophy is a body of doctrine. Wittgenstein's claim in the preface is that the problems have been solved definitively, and his conclusion is that this shows how little was at stake - a combination of confidence and deflation that is unlike anything else in the tradition. He then acted on it, giving away his inherited fortune and leaving philosophy to teach in Austrian village schools for six years.
What answered it
Philosophical Investigations 1953Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein himself, over thirty years, and no one else so effectively. The Vienna Circle read the book as a charter for eliminating metaphysics and treated the closing propositions as a stylish flourish; Wittgenstein, meeting them, insisted they had inverted his point, since the unsayable was what mattered most to him. Carnap and Ayer built the verification principle on foundations the author disowned. The Investigations then dismantles the picture theory, the demand for exactness, and the idea that language has one underlying form.
How it argues
By numbered propositions with no argument shown. The decimal system indicates logical weight rather than sequence, so 2.1 is a comment on 2 and 2.11 on 2.1, and a reader who follows the numbers rather than the page order gets a different book. Almost nothing is defended; positions are stated with a compression that has been called oracular. This is deliberate on one reading - a book about what can be said should not pad - and on another it is why the text supports so many incompatible interpretations.
The moment
Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, served on the eastern front and in Italy, was decorated, and finished the manuscript while a prisoner of war at Cassino in 1918. He sent it to Russell and to Frege, neither of whom he thought understood it. No publisher would take it. When it appeared it was through Russell's introduction, which secured publication and which its author regarded as a misreading.
How it travelled
Through a movement that misread it and an author who outlived it. The book became the sacred text of logical positivism in the late 1920s, was read line by line by the Vienna Circle, and shaped the philosophy of the following two decades. Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929 and his subsequent work displaced it. Since the 1990s the so-called resolute reading, which takes the claim that the propositions are nonsense entirely literally, has reopened almost every question about what the book was doing.
The strongest objection
That the book cannot be read consistently with what it says about itself. If only propositions picturing possible states of affairs have sense, then the Tractatus - which says nothing about how things stand and everything about the conditions of saying - is by its own account nonsense; and the ladder image asks the reader to have understood the propositions well enough to be changed by them and then to concede there was nothing there to understand. The traditional reading treats this as an unavoidable cost of expressing an ineffable insight, which makes the nonsense a special illuminating kind. The resolute readers insist that plain nonsense is meant, which is more consistent and leaves it much harder to say what the reader has gained. Neither answer has settled the field, and the difficulty is the book's own.
Why read it
Because it is short, extraordinary and unlike anything else, and because the closing propositions on ethics, the mystical and silence can be read on their own by someone with no logic at all. The middle sections on truth-functions and the general form of the proposition need a commentary. Read the preface first: it tells you what the author thought he had done.
- First printed
- 1921
- First in English
- 1922
- Digitised
- Yes
The 1921 journal printing was so badly produced that Wittgenstein disowned it. The 1922 bilingual edition carries the Ogden translation, made with Ramsey's help and Wittgenstein's correspondence, and Russell's introduction, which Wittgenstein disliked and which is nonetheless why the book was published at all.
Ogden's 1922 English and the Pears-McGuinness of 1961 are both standard and both in copyright in most jurisdictions; the German is public domain.
Where it stands
Revived, in the sense that the interpretive argument is more active now than it has been since the 1930s. The specific doctrines - the picture theory, logical atomism, truth-functional analysis - are historical; what is live is the question of what a book that declares its own propositions nonsensical could possibly be for.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain but both standard English translations remain in copyright in most jurisdictions, and the famous closing sentence differs between them. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How to read the concluding remarks about nonsense is the central and now most active question, dividing the traditional readings from the resolute ones. Whether Russell's introduction fundamentally misrepresents the book is generally agreed and its extent is not. What Wittgenstein meant by the simple objects that analysis terminates in, and whether he had any examples, is unresolved - he was asked and would not say. And how much continuity there is between this book and his later work is argued in every generation, with positions ranging from total rupture to a single continuing preoccupation stated twice.