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LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

P E N GUIN C L A S SI C S

TRACTATUS LOGICO- PHILOSOPHICUS

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 to a wealthy industrialist family and pursued an education in mechanical engineering before going on to study philosophy and later to teach at the University of Cambridge, where he lived until his death in 1951. He is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and his major works, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), are two of the most influential works within the history of the analytic tradition.

Alexander Booth is a poet and literary translator living in Berlin. The recipient of support from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture, the German Translators’ Fund and PEN America, his work from the German includes books by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm and Lutz Seiler.

Jan Zwicky is a Canadian philosopher, poet and musician. Her poetry collections include Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, The Long Walk and Wittgenstein Elegies. Her philosophical works include Lyric Philosophy, Wisdom & Metaphor and The Experience of Meaning.

W i TT gens T ein Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus

Logical-Philosophical Treatise

Translated by Alexander Booth

Introduction by Jan Zwicky

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First published 1921

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Introduction vii

Translator’s Preface xxxvii

A Note on Wittgenstein’s Notation xl

TRACTATUS

Introduction

In the autumn of 1919, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig von Ficker, the publisher of a literary journal called Der Brenner, to ask if Ficker would consider publishing a sixty-page manuscript. Wittgenstein said that he’d finished it the previous year, just before being captured and interned as a prisoner of war, and that it had taken him seven years to complete.1

Der Brenner had a reputation for cultural critique, and Ficker was a friendly acquaintance. He had assisted Wittgenstein earlier, in 1914, with the distribution of a sizeable portion of his inheritance among artists ‘in need’. In his letter to Ficker, Wittgenstein describes previous attempts to get his manuscript published. He’d first sent it to Jahoda & Siegal, the publishers of Karl Kraus, the notorious anti-bourgeois satirist. They’d refused. He’d then sent it to Wilhelm Braumüller, the publisher of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, a book Wittgenstein greatly admired. But Braumüller had wanted Wittgenstein to pay printing costs, and Wittgenstein told Ficker he thought it “indecent” for an author to force their work on the world in this way. So, he said, he’d then turned to a “professor in Germany” hoping for assistance in publishing the manuscript in a philosophical periodical.2 But the professor had asked for revisions that would “mutilate [the work] from beginning to end”, and Wittgenstein wanted none of it. Thus his query to Ficker. Wittgenstein concludes:

Until [I hear whether you might be interested], I’d like to say only this about it: The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there’s no empty babbling in it.

Ficker’s reply was kind; he invited Wittgenstein to send the manuscript. But, he said, post-war circumstances were financially challenging, and he couldn’t promise.

In the end, the manuscript did not appear in Der Brenner, and its path to eventual publication was fraught with further rejections. In 1921, under the auspices of Wilhelm Ostwald, it was published in Annalen der Naturphilosophie under Wittgenstein’s own simple title, “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung” (“Logical-Philosophical Treatise”); but Wittgenstein had not been sent proofs, and the text was so riddled with misprints and typographic errors that he disowned it. Finally, in 1922, it was published in England, in English translation with the German original en face. Bertrand Russell, an eminent Cambridge philosopher and intellectual celebrity, had provided an introduction that no doubt had helped to secure publication, even though Wittgenstein felt it misrepresented the book. The Latin title had been suggested by G. E. Moore, a colleague of Russell’s. It was meant to echo Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a gesture that Wittgenstein felt was not ideal. But he preferred it to the title Russell had suggested, Philosophical Logic – a subject Wittgenstein claimed did not exist.3

Thus began the career of what was to become one of the most famous and least well-understood books in the twentiethcentury philosophical canon.

ART, INEFFABILITY AND PICTURING THE WORLD

Not all works of philosophy have become best-sellers. It’s unusual to see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Leibnitz’s Monadology quoted in anything but scholarly papers. The Tractatus, however, has garnered a broad readership outside the academy in the century since its initial publication. And, despite its devotion to logic, it has attracted the attention of a wide range of artists working across all media. Composers Elisabeth Lutyens, Anthony Powers and Balduin Sulzer, for

example, have set selections from its text in choral and operatic works. Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi quotes a run of propositions in one of his screenprints, and references to the Tractatus show up in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. Derek Jarman made an experimental comic-dramatic film about Wittgenstein’s life and work, and translations of propositions into various languages are spoken as part of media artist Tibor Szemzö’s score to Péter Forgács’s video Wittgenstein Tractatus. 4 It should be said that Wittgenstein, often reclusive and conservative in his artistic tastes, is unlikely to have understood or appreciated many of the compositions inspired by his work. But this is a risk run by anyone who chooses to publish.

Terry Eagleton, the author of the initial script for Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, asks, “What is it about this man, whose philosophy can be taxing and technical enough, which so fascinates the artistic imagination?”5 The answer is, in part, the artistic power of Wittgenstein’s own work. The Tractatus is fundamentally analogical in its mode of comprehension: it depends, throughout, on a correspondence between linguistic structures and structures in the world. Its aphoristic style demands that we read slowly and contemplatively, as we would read a poem. It does not ‘deliver information’ in a straightforward sequential manner, but often requires us to hold its sentences side by side in our minds until connections dawn. But Eagleton is right, I believe, to focus the question on Wittgenstein’s character, as much as on his thought. Wittgenstein lived with great intensity, so dedicated to his vision that he was willing to sacrifice almost everything else – certainly the material and social comforts of urban life – to remain loyal to it. His extraordinary devotion to his work, his commitment to its moral demands, thus poses a question for other creative thinkers: is this what is required to produce great and memorable work? The possibility is both thrilling and frightening – a provocative combination.

Wittgenstein’s announced aim in the Tractatus is to draw a limit to the linguistic expression of thoughts. He wants to do this because he contends that the solution to the age-old questions of philosophy is their dissolution. The perplexities associated with ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of the world

are real, he believes, and he deeply respects the impulse to think about them;6 but philosophizing about them, he maintains, is not just pointless, it is wrong. We become confused in our attempts to lead a good and meaningful life. If a limit to the expressible can be drawn, such confusions won’t get a foothold in our imaginations. And he views the drawing of such a limit as, itself, an ethical task. In the undated letter to Ficker that accompanies his submission of the manuscript, he says:

. . . the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can only be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.7

Wittgenstein was in some respects a visual thinker, and the Tractatus is famous for what has come to be called the ‘picture theory’ of meaning. Proposition 2.1 says, “We picture facts to ourselves”, and 2.12 says, “A picture is a model of reality”. There is a story that this view had its genesis in a magazine’s account of a Parisian lawsuit that Wittgenstein read while a soldier at the front in the First World War.8 A scale model of a car accident had been presented to the court, and the model was said to have described a possible state of affairs. It occurred to Wittgenstein that this was how meaningful language functions: the way in which its parts are combined corresponds to a possible combination of things in the world. A sentence that is true will correspond to a way the world actually is; one that is false will correspond to a way that it could be but isn’t; a meaningless, or sense-less, use of language will sketch a combination of model-elements that isn’t possible. (In the car-accident case, the last might be something like the milk truck being entirely absorbed into the lamppost, or the car turning left and turning right at the same time.)

By ‘picturing’, Wittgenstein does not intend that our linguistic models should focus exclusively on reality’s visible aspects. The example he gives is sonic: a gramophone record, the musical thought it encodes, the series of written notes, and the sound waves. He says that these “all stand in the same pictorial, internal relationship to one another as exists between language and world.” [4.014] And this feature of reality – that language has a “pictorial, internal” relationship to the world – is what an adequate notation for logic should reveal. Whenever we attempt to formulate something meaningless, the notation itself should resist our efforts. It should show us that we’re trying to talk nonsense. As a notebook entry from 1916 announces, “What cannot be said, can be not said!”9 This gnomic observation captures very precisely Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus. It is both the fundamental aspiration of the project and its engine.

Consider the way in which the figure known as the Rubin Vase presents one of two contrasting images, depending on how you look at it. We see how, by strictly portraying the boundary of one figure – that of the chalice, say – we also end up portraying the outlines of the other figures – the two faces in profile. Or think about how wood engravers work: to reveal their subject, they must cut away, in precise detail, everything it isn’t. Wittgenstein understands the relation between what can be said and what cannot be said in the same manner: if one

Rubin Vase

carefully describes the ways in which it is possible for linguistic gestures to possess meaning, one will, at the same time, have revealed the boundaries, the outline, the basic shape, of what such gestures cannot capture: beauty, goodness and the meaning of the world.

Nonetheless, because Wittgenstein is explicit that what remains – what can be expressed – are the propositions of natural science, many philosophers initially took the Tractatus to be a defence of positivism, the view that only the claims of empirical science are worthy of attention. The Viennese positivists Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and their associates soon realized that Wittgenstein was not one of their number. But philosophers in the Anglo-colonial analytic tradition have generally been less discerning. Perhaps because Russell’s introduction focussed almost exclusively on technical aspects and was virtually silent about the book’s ethical dimension, perhaps because the technological juggernaut that America became mid-century left little room for any intellectual attitude but positivism, the Tractatus continued to be taught by analytic philosophers as a crucial text in their field. No one pretended its final pages didn’t exist, but they were not regarded as essential to Wittgenstein’s project.

Yet it is clear that in those final pages Wittgenstein has deployed logic and analysis against their now ubiquitous cultural valorization. He regards neither as a source of meaning. They cannot teach us how to live. This view is underlined from the outset in his preface:

I am . . . of the opinion that I have conclusively solved the problems [involved in saying what can be said clearly] . . . . And if I am not wrong about this, the value of this work consists [in part] in showing how little the solving of these problems achieves.

At the end of his life, while he was working on Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein said to his friend Maurice Drury, “It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?”10

FROM VIENNA TO CAMBRIDGE

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born 26 April 1889, the youngest of eight brilliant siblings.11 His mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was an accomplished pianist, and his father, Karl Wittgenstein, was an industrialist with an engineering background. The family was exceptionally wealthy. Its members were of assimilated Jewish ancestry and professed Roman Catholicism.

Ludwig’s father was also very musical; he insisted on carrying his violin with him on business trips. Brahms was a family friend, and musical evenings in the home were attended by other luminaries such as Mahler, Bruno Walter and Pablo Casals. Ludwig’s brother Paul was the pianist who commissioned Ravel, Korngold, Hindemith, Prokofiev and other leading composers to write concerti for the left hand after he lost his right arm in the First World War. The oldest of Ludwig’s three sisters, Hermine, recalled that as a child Ludwig had not played an instrument, but as an adult, when accreditation as a schoolteacher required him to learn one, he chose the clarinet. She says that he “played with great musical feeling, and his instrument gave him a great deal of pleasure”.12 He was also an extraordinary whistler. His repertoire included a large number of Schubert songs, which he whistled to piano accompaniment by others. On one occasion, he whistled the entire viola line of the third movement of a Beethoven string quartet.13 He admired the work of the cultural critic Karl Kraus, who denounced the Viennese bourgeoisie for its moral hypocrisy, and was friendly with the architect Adolf Loos, a defender of strict functionality in design. But he took no parallel interest in Arnold Schönberg’s dismantling of diatonic tonality. His musical tastes were centred firmly in the Viennese classical and Romantic tradition: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

Before he was 15, two of Ludwig’s older brothers were dead, one of suicide, the other in circumstances in which suicide was conjectured. By the time he was 30, a third brother had also committed suicide. Ludwig’s diaries and letters indicate that he, too, struggled with suicidal impulses throughout his adult life.