Saying and showing

Saying and showing is the distinction at the heart of the Tractatus. Some things can be said: they can be put into meaningful sentences that are true or false. Other things cannot be said, yet they are not nothing. They show themselves, in the way language works and in the way we live. Wittgenstein believed that the most important things belong to the second group.

Shortly after finishing the book, he wrote to Bertrand Russell (19 August 1919) that its main point was exactly this theory of what can be expressed by propositions and what can only be shown. He called it "the cardinal problem of philosophy".

The animation above shows the two images that best capture the idea. First a ladder whose rungs are the numbered remarks of the Tractatus, from 1 up to 6.54. A small figure climbs it, and at the top the ladder falls away: the figure no longer needs it and simply stands there, seeing the world as it is. Then a picture frame appears. You can draw anything you like inside the picture, except the frame that holds it.

What can be said?

According to the picture theory, a sentence says something by picturing a possible state of affairs. "The book is on the table" says something because the world could be that way or not. That is the whole range of what can be said: the propositions of natural science, in the broadest sense (Tractatus 6.53).

What only shows itself?

Here the frame in the animation helps. A picture can show a landscape, but it cannot show, within the landscape, its own frame. In the same way, a sentence can picture a fact, but it cannot picture what it has in common with that fact in order to picture it at all: its logical form. To do that, we would have to step outside logic, and so outside the world (4.12). The form is there, visible in every sentence, but it cannot be stated.

Was gezeigt werden kann, kann nicht gesagt werden.

What can be shown cannot be said.

Tractatus 4.1212

Wittgenstein extends this to several areas:

• Logic. A sentence shows its sense (4.022). Tautologies show the logical structure of the world without saying anything about it (6.12).
• The self. The subject is not an object in the world but its limit, as the eye is not part of its own field of vision (5.632, 5.633). What the solipsist means is right, he writes, but it cannot be said; it shows itself (5.62).
• Ethics and aesthetics. Ethics cannot be put into words (6.421). Value is not a fact in the world.
• The mystical. "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical" (6.522). Not how the world is, but that it is (6.44).

The ladder you throw away

This leads to a famous twist. If only factual pictures make sense, then the remarks of the Tractatus itself, which talk about logical form, the self and the limits of language, are not factual pictures. By the book's own standard, they are nonsense. Wittgenstein says so openly near the end: his propositions clarify by making the reader recognise them as nonsensical, once he has climbed up through them and beyond 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

Only then, he adds, will the reader see the world rightly. That is the moment the animation shows when the ladder disappears. The book ends with a single sentence:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Tractatus 7

How should we read this?

Here the scholars sharply disagree. On the traditional reading, associated with Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Hacker, there are deep truths (about logic, the self, ethics) that cannot be stated but are nevertheless grasped. The nonsense of the Tractatus is an illuminating kind of nonsense that gestures at them.

On the "resolute" reading, developed since the 1980s by Cora Diamond and James Conant (see the New Wittgensteinians), there are no ineffable truths at all. Nonsense is simply nonsense. The book works as a kind of therapy: by trying to understand its sentences and finding that we cannot, we are cured of the urge to say what cannot be said. Frank Ramsey had already joked in 1929 about the first view: what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy both give a fair account of the debate. You can also simply read the last pages of the Tractatus yourself; the English text is available at Project Gutenberg.

Silence is not dismissal

It is easy to read Tractatus 7 as a put-down, as if ethics or religion were empty talk. Wittgenstein meant almost the reverse. In a letter to the publisher Ludwig von Ficker in 1919 he described the book as having two parts, the one he had written and everything he had not written, and said that the unwritten part was the important one. His Lecture on Ethics (1929) makes a similar point: our attempts to talk about absolute value run up against the walls of language, and he would not ridicule that urge.

Everyday life is full of this. You cannot explain a joke without killing it. A friend's loyalty is not proven by a statement; it shows in what they do. A piece of music says nothing, yet it can show you something you could not put into words. The distinction does not ask you to stop caring about such things. It asks you to stop trying to turn them into claims.