Living with what cannot be said

The Tractatus ends with a single sentence: what one cannot speak about, one must be silent about. It is usually read as a stern rule of logic. But in the pages just before it Wittgenstein is writing about ethics, the meaning of life, death and the mystical, and he told a prospective publisher that the unwritten part of his book was the important one. Read that way, the last sentence is not only a prohibition. It is also a hint about how to live with the things that matter most.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

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

Tractatus 7

What the Tractatus says cannot be said

For the early Wittgenstein, meaningful sentences picture possible states of affairs (see the picture theory). Science says what is the case. But value is not one more fact among the facts:

Der Sinn der Welt muß außerhalb ihrer liegen.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.

Tractatus 6.41

So ethics cannot be put into words (6.421), and neither can the answer to the riddle of life. The remarks here are compressed and strange. Death is not an event in life; we do not live through it (6.4311). It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is (6.44). And then:

Wir fühlen, daß selbst, wenn alle möglichen wissenschaftlichen Fragen beantwortet sind, unsere Lebensprobleme noch gar nicht berührt sind.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life have not been touched at all.

Tractatus 6.52

The next remark adds that the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem (6.521). Then: there is indeed the inexpressible; it shows itself (6.522). This is his distinction between saying and showing.

The unwritten part

In the autumn of 1919, looking for a publisher, Wittgenstein wrote to the editor Ludwig von Ficker:

Ich wollte nämlich schreiben, mein Werk bestehe aus zwei Teilen: aus dem, der hier vorliegt, und aus alledem, was ich nicht geschrieben habe. Und gerade dieser zweite Teil ist der Wichtige.

For I meant to write that my work consists of two parts: the one that lies here, and everything I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.

Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, 1919

He added that his book draws the limits of the ethical from the inside, as it were. Ten years later, on 17 November 1929, he gave his Lecture on Ethics in Cambridge, written in English and published only in 1965. There he described experiences such as wondering at the existence of the world and feeling “absolutely safe”, and argued that every attempt to put them into words runs against the boundaries of language. He called this running against the walls of our cage “perfectly, absolutely hopeless”. Then, in the same breath, he said it was a tendency of the human mind that he could not help respecting deeply.

That pairing is the key for practice: the limit is real, and so is the respect.

Interpretations differ

Scholars disagree about how to read all this. On the traditional reading, the Tractatus points towards real but inexpressible truths about ethics and value. On the so-called resolute reading (Cora Diamond, James Conant), the book's own sentences are plain nonsense, and what we are meant to learn is to stop wanting a theory of these matters at all. Both readings agree on one practical point: ethics is not a body of doctrine you can write down and look up. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the debate.

Exercises for living with the unsayable

In grief

People often fear saying the wrong thing to someone who is grieving, so they say too much: explanations, reasons, comparisons. Remark 6.52 fits this precisely: all the facts can be known and the problem of life is untouched. Try showing instead of telling. Be there, bring food, remember the date, say the name of the person who died. A short sentence and a long silence often carry more than a theory of loss.

In ethics

Think of the people you most admire morally. Could you write down their principles? Probably not very well. What you admire shows itself in how they act. As an exercise, write down one thing you do that shows what you value, without naming the value. Then ask whether naming it would add anything.

In wonder

Once a week, notice something that makes you wonder that it exists at all: a child's sentence, the night sky, a piece of music. Do not explain it, and do not post about it straight away. Wittgenstein thought the words we reach for here misfire. That does not make the experience any less real.

In parenting and teaching

Children learn decency far more from what adults do than from what they say about it. When a speech about honesty is contradicted by what the child sees, the showing wins. Fewer speeches, more example.

What this is not

“Being silent” is not advice to bottle things up. Talking about grief, fear or shame with friends or with a professional is often exactly what helps, and nothing in Wittgenstein argues against it. His point is narrower: some things cannot be settled by finding the right proposition, and trying too hard to state them can make them smaller. Nor is this a path to secret mystical knowledge. Wittgenstein disliked chatter about ethics, but he wrote no manual for living. You can read the text yourself in the Project Gutenberg edition of the Tractatus, and the lecture in the Wittgenstein Project text of the Lecture on Ethics.