Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only philosophical book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime: some seventy pages of numbered remarks that try to show how language can picture the world, and where it must fall silent. It opens with the world and closes with silence, and in between it claims to have solved the problems of philosophy, then calls its own sentences nonsense.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

The world is everything that is the case.

Tractatus 1

How the Tractatus came about

Wittgenstein began the work in Cambridge with Russell before the First World War and carried it on as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. The Notebooks 1914-1916 show it taking shape. He finished the text in the summer of 1918, was taken prisoner by the Italians that November, and sent the manuscript to Russell from a prisoner-of-war camp.

Finding a publisher was hard. Several turned it down, and Wittgenstein hated the introduction Russell wrote for it. It finally appeared in 1921 as Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie. In 1922 Kegan Paul in London published the German text with an English translation by C.K. Ogden, done largely by the young Frank Ramsey. The Latin title, an echo of Spinoza, was G.E. Moore's suggestion. The book is dedicated to David Pinsent, Wittgenstein's close friend, who died in the war.

How the book is built

The Tractatus consists of seven main propositions. All other remarks hang beneath them, with decimal numbers showing their weight: 2.1 comments on 2, 2.11 on 2.1, and so on. You can read it straight through or as a tree, following one branch at a time. The style is oracular. There are almost no arguments in the usual sense, only claims set out with great precision and very little explanation.

What the Tractatus says

Roughly, the book moves through five steps.

• The world. The world consists of facts, not things. Facts are combinations of simple objects.
• Pictures. A thought or proposition is a logical picture of a possible fact. Its elements stand for objects, and their arrangement says how the objects are arranged. If reality is like that, the proposition is true.
• Logic. Complex propositions are built out of elementary ones by truth-functions such as "and", "or" and "not". The propositions of logic are tautologies: always true, and for that reason saying nothing about the world.
• Showing. A picture cannot depict its own form. What propositions have in common with reality shows itself in them but cannot be stated. This distinction between saying and showing carries the whole book.
• The limits. Whatever lies outside the totality of facts (value, ethics, the meaning of life, God, the self as subject) cannot be put into meaningful propositions.

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Tractatus 5.6

This gives philosophy a new job. It does not produce truths of its own, the way physics does. It clarifies.

Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.

Philosophy is not a doctrine but an activity.

Tractatus 4.112

Then comes the famous twist. The remarks of the Tractatus itself try to say what can only be shown, so by its own standards they are nonsense. Whoever understands the author, 6.54 says, recognises them as such once they have climbed through them.

Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.

He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.

Tractatus 6.54

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

What one cannot speak about, one must be silent about.

Tractatus 7

Two ways to read it

Scholars disagree deeply about what the ladder remark means. On the traditional reading, associated with Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Hacker, the book points to real but inexpressible truths about logic and the world, which show themselves even though they cannot be said. On the resolute reading, developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant and taken up by the New Wittgensteinians, there are no such hidden truths: the nonsense is plain nonsense, and the book works as a kind of therapy that cures you of wanting to say it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a fair overview of the debate. Neither side has won.

A letter to the publisher Ludwig von Ficker in 1919 adds a further twist. Wittgenstein wrote that the point of the book is ethical, and that it consists of two parts: the one on paper and the one he did not write, which is the more important.

How to read the Tractatus

Expect a hard book. It is short, but every line is compressed, and it assumes the logic of Frege and Russell in the background. Some advice:

• Read the preface first. It is clear, and it states the aim: to draw a limit to the expression of thought.
• Read the seven main propositions on their own before going into the branches.
• Skim the technical middle (the 4s and 5s on truth-functions) on a first reading and go straight to the last pages, 6.4 to 7, on ethics and the mystical.
• Keep a good commentary or introduction nearby.

The Ogden translation of 1922, checked by Wittgenstein himself, is free on Project Gutenberg. The Pears and McGuinness translation (1961) has long been the standard. Recent translations by Michael Beaney (Oxford, 2023), Alexander Booth (Penguin, 2023) and Damion Searls (2024) bring a fresh, more readable voice. Read a bilingual edition if you can: the German is often simpler than any English version.

Why it matters

The Tractatus shaped twentieth-century philosophy far beyond its size. The Vienna Circle read it sentence by sentence in the 1920s, and logical positivism took much from it, though Wittgenstein felt they misunderstood its closing pages. In 1929 Cambridge accepted it as his doctoral thesis. Its ideas on truth tables, tautology and logical form became standard in logic.

And then Wittgenstein himself turned against it. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations he speaks of grave mistakes in his first book. Much of his later work is an argument with the Tractatus, which is why you cannot fully understand the later Wittgenstein without it.

Verdict

Read this if you want to meet one of the strangest and most beautiful books in philosophy, if you like logic, or if the line about the limits of language has stayed with you. Do not expect to understand it all the first time: almost nobody does, and that is part of the experience. If you want an easier way in, start with the preface, the seven main propositions and the last two pages, then come back for the rest.