Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

"It’s a really extraordinary book, and probably the only book on the list that is absolutely unique in its form and its nature. It’s a very short book, divided into a list of numbered positions. It is basically about Wittgenstein’s search for logic. He goes in search of a perfect language, where the symbols equate perfectly to the atomic facts – as he calls them – that those symbols are attempting to describe. Wittgenstein comes to the conclusion that logic itself cannot be expressed, it can only be shown, and from that he concludes that all the most important things in life are actually beyond expression. He ends with this very famous and extraordinary paradoxical quotation, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” One of the extraordinary things that the book shows very convincingly is that any attempt to represent reality through symbols or language or numbers is always going to be highly inadequate. I think intuitively we know this to be true, in things like meaning, purpose, compassion and love. We can put words to these things but we know that they can’t actually be adequately described. This book had an enormous impact on me when I read it in 2003, while I was on sabbatical from the diplomatic service. Wittgenstein proves that all representations of life are inadequate. However logical they may appear they cannot describe logic itself – they cannot describe what is most important. From that follows, for me in particular, that something like economics (I studied economics at university) is a woefully inadequate way of describing what is important in life. How human life functions on the planet is not something you can describe through graphs and equations. So Wittgenstein shoots a hole under the waterline of the theoretical construction of what society is about, and that to me was a revelation. The Leaderless Revolution is not just about the inadequacies of representative government. The influence of Tractatus is that it leads to a fundamental intellectual shift for me. Representative government and the market economy are the two pillars of how Western society is organised. Democracy is heavily influenced, I would argue to a corrupt level, by money and by business. If you conclude that the capitalist enterprise is not about what matters most, you start to question the whole edifice. That’s what happened to me. I began to question the whole edifice of economic thought that justified an economic system such as we have, that is predicated on a very limited understanding of human objectives and desires – that basically all we are is profit-maximising animals and that the things that matter most to us can be measured, when in fact they cannot. If you accept Wittgenstein’s argument, one of the fundamental premises of market economics basically falls apart, and instead what you should work for is a society that promotes these inexpressible values. Values like purpose, meaning, love and compassion are more important than what is measurable."

"Despite having a Latin title, it’s not written in Latin ; it’s written in German. Quite. In a way, this follows on from the Sainsbury book, because in it we see the limits of logical thinking. When struggling with the paradoxes we seem to have reached or even transgressed the limits of thinking. Wittgenstein’s book is about how we understand the thinkable and the unthinkable, which is a traditional philosophical problem. In this book, Wittgenstein approaches the problem from the point of view of formal logic. It’s worth reading Bertrand Russell’s preface to the book, where he summarizes how the book proceeds very simply: “The logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference are first dealt with. Thence, we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics and finally the Mystical.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a fascinating and puzzling book. It’s absolutely clear that Wittgenstein starts with an interest in formal logic and that distinctive way of thinking which is concerned with truth, accuracy and precision. He doesn’t take this as an end in itself, but thinks it is the route into solving the really big questions Russell mentions. He goes on to say, “[Wittgenstein] is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism [Russell’s using ‘Symbolism’ here to mean symbolic representation of the world] i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence ‘means’ something quite definite.” Wittgenstein is building his philosophy—trying to solve philosophical problems—by starting with the conception of what language can and should do that is embedded in formal logic. It’s not the natural language approach to talking about the world; it’s the formal logic approach to talking about the world. Wittgenstein uses this starting point to get to some very big conclusions. Wittgenstein’s approach reminds us of what I was saying earlier about the second way of thinking about formal logic, namely as a self-standing language. Wittgenstein is saying we all possess natural language, but when we want to focus on the precise and exact expression of truth and the relationship between truths, we need to move into these formal languages where everything is defined explicitly. He is claiming that when you do that, you can start solving the big philosophical problems. For me that’s the fascination of the book, but I should warn that there are very different interpretations of it around. I’d be very careful about that. The interpretation of the book is very controversial and has been increasingly so for the last 20 years. Most commentaries on the book are highly partisan, they’re driving an agenda, and therefore not particularly introductory. If you forced me to recommend one, it would be David Pears’ – it certainly helped me find my way through on first reading. Monk’s book is certainly helpful, but the TLP is more Euclidean than the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The structure of it is seven numbered propositions. Under all of them except number seven—I’ll come to number seven in a second—we have sub-propositions. The first proposition is “The world is all that is the case”, and then under that we get proposition 1.1, “The world is a totality of facts, not of things.” So that’s an elucidation of 1. But then we get 1.1.1, so this is going into an elucidation of 1.1, and so on. A very useful way to read the book is one that wasn’t available to its original audience. We’re used to bullet points and collapsing bullet point structures and this consists in nested bullet points. One of the things I would recommend the reader is to go through and identify the seven master propositions, and then identify the propositions immediately below them, and so on. I’ll just mention proposition seven, which has no sub-propositions, and thus in a sense is the conclusion of the book. In the translation I tend to use, which is Pears and McGuinness, it is “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” This drives the historically dominant interpretation of Wittgenstein: that if you start with this logician’s conception of accuracy and precision of language, sticking to only what is true and only truth-preserving consequences, then there are some very, very sharp limits to what we can say. And that’s it. You’ve got to stop at that point. The controversy over the book’s interpretation is over what Wittgenstein thinks human beings may also be able to do as well as logic. There’s a suggestion by Wittgenstein that there may be other forms of human expression or intellectual activity which allow us to engage with the things we can’t engage with through logical languages. A famous early positivist criticism of the book was by Frank Ramsey, who pithily said, “What you can’t say, you can’t say, and you can’t whistle either.” That’s why Russell mentions ethics, because a lot of the immediate critics (and followers) of Wittgenstein thought he was pushing ethics into the non-factual and making it less important, subjective and a matter of taste. Whereas what we know of him is that this was not his intention at all. This dispute has driven the more recent interpretations which say Wittgenstein is showing the limits of truth-directed, fact-speaking – logical – discourse, not the limits of human expression and human engagement with reality."