Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Limits of Our Language
Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” is as important for what it doesn’t say as for what it does
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” is a brief, but impressive book whose influence per page might be among the highest in philosophy. It can be a difficult read at times, given the author’s obsession with logical precision, but taking the time to understand the book, as well as the man who wrote it, is an exercise well worth undertaking, even if a full understanding may be out of reach for most of us.
Wittgenstein was born in Austria in 1889 to one of the wealthiest families in Vienna. He wrote the bulk of “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”—which means logical philosophical treatise—while he was on military leave from the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. The book was first published in 1921 in German and translated into English a year later.
By all accounts, Wittgenstein was an unusual man with some strange habits. He had three brothers who committed suicide. He was apparently homosexual. He was a skilled architect and engineer, who obsessed over details of the living spaces he inhabited, which he sometimes kept near-barren. He gave away an inheritance to relatives rather than live off money he hadn’t earned. At times he lived as something of a recluse. He even considered becoming a monk.
However, Wittgenstein also had a formal education and connections to elite academia. He taught and studied at the University of Cambridge under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, and at the end of his life taught at Trinity College in Ireland.
The Tractatus itself is a compact book that can easily be read in a day’s time. Unlike many academic tomes, Wittgenstein apparently felt no need to impress colleagues by filling hundreds of pages with dense academic scribblings and obscure references. Much of the book reads like a mathematical treatise, with statements that include variables, functions, and similar notation. He is sometimes credited with the invention of truth tables, which are used in mathematics and logic. These devices serve to make statements more precise, and philosophical precision is a key theme in the book.
Wittgenstein’s argument can be summarized in a single, terse statement, which appears as the book’s final sentence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The sentence points to the limits of philosophy, a field involving the search for truth through the tool of reason. Wittgenstein—like a father breaking the bad news about the nature of death to his young children—is telling philosophers there are limits to reason and therefore limits to philosophy. The specific limits he points to are limits in language, through which reason is exercised.
Wittgenstein begins the “Tractatus” by noting that the world is comprised of certain facts or datum and that the sum of these facts comprises our physical universe. We can make certain kinds of statements about facts. There are statements that consist of value judgments, which are impossible to prove or disprove. Wittgenstein thinks a lot of philosophy gets caught up in these kinds of statements. Then there are statements that are true, but only in a tautological sense, so in essence these tell us nothing informative. There are also contradictions, which can’t simultaneously be true at the same time.
The most interesting cases involve statements that present a picture of the world. These pictures can be either consistent with the facts of the world or not. Statements can also suffer problems of incompleteness and redundancy. For example, some facts can’t be described using language because there is no word or sentence that corresponds with the precise fact to be described. Other facts can be described using multiple words or sentences of the same meaning. This is further complicated by the fact that words can have multiple meanings, and therefore a particular set of facts one wishes to describe through statements can be misunderstood when communicated.
When reading Wittgenstein’s book, it is hard not to think of its religious implications. Wittgenstein is even known for taking a slightly mystical turn in some of his writings. If God exists or there is otherwise a mystical nature to the world, it should not be surprising if some facts related to these phenomena lie outside our ability to describe them. In this sense, Wittgenstein can be seen as defending religion from attacks based on reason. He is, in a way, a follower of Thomas Aquinas, who saw reason as a gift from God and therefore in no way in conflict with religion.
If philosophy is the beginning and not the end of the pursuit of truth, then once one has resolved philosophical problems, one is freed to pursue higher-order problems involving religion, art or the nature of beauty. Indeed, this is apparently what Wittgenstein did after publishing his treatise. He retired to rural Austria to teach school children, for a time abandoning elite academic life.
Wittgenstein’s obsession with precision helps explain why he often wrote in terms of notation. In the ideal world, every fact would have one and only one word or symbol corresponding with it. Then there would be no confusion about what a statement means because it could be interpreted in only one way. One should strive for precision where it is possible to state things precisely, and be silent on all other matters. This leads us back to Wittgenstein’s famous sentence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
If Wittgenstein is correct about the limits of language, it leads one to wonder what other forms of communication might complement or even replace spoken language. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Morse code, sign language, and secret code all come to mind. (Wittgenstein even wrote parts of his personal diaries in secret code, which were recently decoded and published for the first time.) But each of these examples seems, if anything, more prone to miscommunication than ordinary language is. At a minimum, these are just languages of a different sort, so they would seem to suffer the same limitations as traditional languages.
There is a pessimism to Wittgenstein’s outlook in that philosophy is, if not doomed, then at least limited in what it can achieve and fraught with the potential for misunderstanding. The book is also a neurotic piece of writing, almost obsessive in its style. Yet, the Tractatus is also a captivating book and a marvel of logical precision. It deserves its place in the literary cannon even if many of its lessons, somewhat ironically, are hard to decipher. Good teachers of philosophy should at least attempt to relay these lessons to students, whether they be can be spoken of or not.