Huenemanniac

I’m teaching a course on the history of early analytic philosophy, and we just worked our way through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It’s a work I have been reading for probably 40 years. I won’t say I fully understand it, but I’m getting a better sense for it, and I wrote up a short overview, copied below. I don’t think we will have a proper grasp of the work until someone writes an archaeology of the text, working through all the notes leading up to the final work, the decisions Wittgenstein made along the way, and how the work evolved as his thinking evolved. Or has someone already done this? All the needed materials are available online at the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project. Thanks to my student Ryan Rechsteiner for pointing this website out to me. But, short of that monumental achievement, here is what I have come to.

Overview of the Tractatus

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein tries to present logic as the most fundamental scaffolding of thought (6.124). Indeed, his logic is so fundamental that, by its nature, it can only be shown, and not properly described. It is analogous to the canvas of a painting: the painting cannot present the canvas itself, since everything in the painting consists of paint, and every portion of that paint presupposes the canvas. A painting might try to present a representation of the canvas in some clever, self-referential way (say, a painting of a mischievous figure lifting up a corner of the painting to reveal the canvas below), but this will only serve to prompt the viewer to consider the canvas itself, the thing that can never be present in the painting. 

Wittgenstein’s logic has more structure than any canvas. Its structure limits what can be, and what can be said. It allows for the existence of facts, which may be true or false. Logic doesn’t care whether they really are true or false; it is only their truth-or-falsity that matters. Logic provides an overall grammar for truth-or-falsity, a kind of grammar that must be used in any coherent attempt to describe experience, and indeed must be used in the structuring of the world (whatever the world happens to be).

However the world is—and Wittgenstein does not think logic has any say in this—it will have basic or “atomic” facts, which are like the prime numbers of the world (2.04). They are the facts from which all facts are built. The building of the world from atomic facts must obey logic, as logic is the structure that allows for the existence of facts and their combinations. Logic will determine that if A is true in the world, and B is true, then A & B will be true, and it does not care what “A” and “B” represent.

The atomic facts might be masses, or distributions of electrons, or fields, or probabilities. It is up to scientists to select the best paradigm (6.341). Logic does not say. Logic says only, “Give me the atomic facts of the world, and I will show what can happen.” Indeed, the atomic facts, whatever they are, already presuppose logic, and intrinsically have possible arrangements carved into them. That clustering of possibility is ultimately what they are (2.012).

Language is also a combination of facts in the world, and so is bound by the same logical structure. It is in virtue of this shared structure that language can represent the world (2.18, 4.014). But language also has its own grammar, which allows for sentences that follow the grammar of language but do not represent logical structure (4.002). So, for example, I can say, “The smell of onions is divisible by teal,” even though logic does not allow for that sentence to be true or false, given the atomic facts of our world. It is senseless. I can also say, “The form of the Good is itself neither good nor not-good,” which similarly follows the grammar of language but not the grammar of logic, given our atomic facts (4.1). There is no logical way to build that claim from our atomic facts.

Wittgenstein’s greater purpose in the Tractatus is to show that many or all of the claims of philosophy are similarly senseless, which explains why philosophical problems are intrinsically unsolvable (4.003). The true job of the philosopher is to serve as a therapist, and show each puzzled philosopher why their puzzle is a kind of illusion. But that’s not to say there aren’t mysteries of existence. They exist beyond the bounds of what can be thought or said, which is what “ineffable” means (6.5, 7).