For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, Ed. 1 the Whole Meaning of a Book of Nonsense: Reading

For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, ed. The Whole Meaning of a Book of Nonsense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus1 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a monograph of less than 100 pages, has perhaps generated the highest ratio of commentary and controversy to text of any philosophical book of the past century. Wittgenstein recognized the difficulty his work would present to his readers. The only debts he cites in the Preface to the Tractatus are to “the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell,”2 yet Wittgenstein concluded that neither of these understood his book.3 In a famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker, whom he was trying to persuade to publish the Tractatus, Wittgenstein admitted that “You won’t – I really believe – get too much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it – the content of the book will be strange to you.” But he added, “In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is an ethical one.”4 It is doubtful that Ficker found this last remark comforting, for it must have appeared completely mysterious to him how this book, which seems to consist almost entirely of a discussion of issues in philosophy of logic tied to the then still fairly obscure systems of symbolic logic of Frege and Russell, with only a few cryptic remarks about ethics in its closing pages, could have an ethical point. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein was completely serious in making this remark, and I hope to explain how a book with the title Logisch- 1 Portions of this material were presented to the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University and discussed in a “Master Class” there on the Tractatus, and also at a Workshop on Wittgenstein and the Literary, the Ethical and the Unsayable at the University of Chicago. I am indebted to these conversations for several clarifications and improvements in this essay. 2 Quotations from the Tractatus are generally from the Ogden and Ramsey translation. Occasionally I will make silent emendations in the light of the Pears and McGuinness translation. Citations from the body of the Tractatus will be by numbered proposition. 3 Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 103, 118, 119-20. 4 “Letters to Ficker,” 94. 1 For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, ed. Philosophische Abhandlung could yet be conceived as having an ethical point by the end of this essay. Wittgenstein provided Ficker with a suggestion as to how to understand the book: “For the time being I’d recommend that you read the foreword and the conclusion since these express the point most directly.”5 I will begin by following this advice, discussing the Preface and final numbered propositions of the Tractatus, with an eye to understanding the general approach to philosophy that these passages suggest. I will then build on my reading of these passages to interpret key moments in the main body of the work, returning at the end to the ethical point of the book as a whole. I. The whole meaning of the Tractatus: a first approach In the second paragraph of the Preface, Wittgenstein provides a statement of the “whole meaning” of the book which “could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” This summation has two parts; and a contrast is implied between the two, between “what can be said” and that “whereof one cannot speak.” Both parts reoccur in the main body of the work. The second half corresponds to the last numbered proposition, 7; whereas the first half is close to a proposition in the middle of the work, 4.116: “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” This first branch of the contrasting pair seems relatively easy to understand: it expresses an ideal of clarity, shared by Wittgenstein with Frege and Russell – whenever we use language so as to make sense, what we mean can be expressed in a totally perspicuous manner. Frege and Russell held that the way to achieve such clarity was to 5 Ibid., 95. 2 For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, ed. employ a symbolism designed expressly for this purpose, a notation in which clarity would be built into the structure of the language – a Begriffsschrift or symbolic logic. Wittgenstein shared with his predecessors the project of clarifying our thought; we will see below in what sense Wittgenstein shared also their approach to realizing this project. The second half of Wittgenstein’s contrast has proved much more difficult to understand, and has generated a great deal of scholarly controversy. Wittgenstein seems to speak here of that “whereof one cannot speak” and to say that about it “one must be silent.” This suggests the following reading:6 there are ineffable truths, things we can know, but which cannot be expressed in words. These truths, once recognized, can only be appreciated in a respectful silence. The Tractatus aims to get us to recognize these truths. However, since they are inexpressible, the book must do this in an indirect way: it communicates these truths which cannot be spoken through the failed attempt to speak them. An example can help to clarify the thought that is here being attributed to Wittgenstein: Frege’s difficulty in conveying the categorial distinction between concept and object that is fundamental to his conception of logic. Frege found that any attempt to put this distinction into words inevitably misrepresented it – in saying something like “concepts are not objects” he ended up treating concepts as if they were objects, as if the same things could meaningfully (if falsely) be said of concepts as could be said of objects. Yet Frege insisted that his distinction reflected a truth, “founded deep in the 6 One locus classicus of this kind of reading is Hacker, Insight. It was for fairly standard in the literature until the advent of the “resolute reading” or “new Wittgenstein” championed by Cora Diamond and James Conant (see for example “Throwing Away the Ladder” and “The Method of the Tractatus”). My reading of the book is in the general family of “resolute readings,” so-called because they attempt to resolutely accept Wittgenstein’s claim that his propositions are nonsensical and convey no ineffable truths; readings such as Hacker’s are sometimes characterized as “ineffability” (or, less sympathetically, “irresolute”) readings. 3 For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, ed. nature of things.”7 One could see that the distinction held, and one could bring others to see this as well, though the words one would use to do this would inevitably “miss my thought.”8 On the present suggestion, Wittgenstein’s view of philosophical matters in general is a kind of analogous extension of this thought of Frege’s about fundamental logical distinctions.9 This way of reading the Tractatus draws support from its famous closing paragraphs, the “conclusion” which Wittgenstein mentioned to Ficker. Immediately before the final proposition Wittgenstein writes at 6.54: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense, 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.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. According to the present suggestion, Wittgenstein’s propositions are nonsensical because they attempt to express in words ineffable truths. Sometimes, this is put using a distinction that Wittgenstein draws between “saying” and “showing:” 4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said. Writing to Russell in 1919, Wittgenstein called this distinction both his “main contention,” and “the cardinal problem of philosophy.”10 According to the reading I am sketching here, the nonsensical propositions of the Tractatus result from the attempt to say what can only be shown – but those unsayable truths can be seen, by one who “sees 7 “Function and Concept,” 156. (Frege is there referring to his distinction between first and second-level functions but clearly would take the same view of his distinction between first-level functions, including concepts, and objects.) 8 “Concept and Object,” 193. 9 An early and influential exploration of this idea is found in Geach, “Saying and Showing.” 10 Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 98. 4 For Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, M. Beaney, ed. the world rightly.” One who sees them overcomes the attempt to express them –and appreciates them in silence. This is not the reading of the Tractatus that I am going to develop in this essay. However, it has been a widely popular reading, and it has a definite advantage – it offers a way of accounting for the ethical dimension of the work. Towards the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes some brief remarks about ethics, which he says “cannot be expressed” and, like logic, is “transcendental” (6.421, 6.13). If “transcendental” here refers to that which transcends expression, we might take it that ethics, like logic, consists in a body of ineffable truths. There is an ethics, then, that Wittgenstein is trying to communicate. The ethical point of the book is both to get the reader to see this, and also to see the ineffable ethical truths that the book fails to express directly. This ethical point is subsumed under the whole meaning of the book, here understood as follows: whatever we can say can be said clearly; but there is a realm of unsayable truths, including both logic and ethics.

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