Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1921
extracts edited by D. Cole
1999
1
The world is all that is the
case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the
facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also
whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else
remains the same
2 What is the case--a fact--is
the existence of states of affairs.
…
2.0123 If I know an object I also
know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. (Every one of these
possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.) A new possibility
cannot be discovered later.
2.01231 If I am to know an object,
though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal
properties.
2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible
states of affairs are also given.
2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of
affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without
the space.
2.0131 A spatial object must be
situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in
the visual field, thought it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so
to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of
the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on..
2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
2.0141 The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form
of an object.
2.02 Objects are simple.
2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement
about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes
completely.
2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot
be composite.
…
2.18 What any picture, of
whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict
it--correctly or incorrectly--in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form
of reality.
2.181 A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical
picture.
2.182 Every picture is at the same time a logical one. (On the other
hand, not every picture is, for example, a spatial one.)
2.19 Logical pictures can depict the world.
2.2 A picture has logico-pictorial form in common with what it
depicts.
2.201 A picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of
existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
2.202 A picture contains the possibility of the situation that it
represents.
2.203 A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or
incorrect, true or false.
2.22 What a picture represents it represents independently of its
truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.
2.221 What a picture represents is its sense.
2.222 The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes
its truth or falsity.
2.223 In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare
it with reality.
2.224 It is impossible to tell from the picture alone whether it is true
or false.
2.225 There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.
...
3.202 The simple signs employed in
propositions are called names.
3.203 A name means an object. The object is its meaning. ('A' is the same
sign as 'A'.)
3.21 The configuration of objects in a situation corresponds to the
configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign.
3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can
only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say
how things are, not what they are.
…
3.314 An expression has meaning
only in a proposition. All variables can be construed as propositional
variables. (Even variable names.)
…
3.323 In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word
has different modes of signification--and so belongs to different symbols--or
that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in
propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures
as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence;
'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an
adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the
proposition, 'Green is green'--where the first word is the proper name of a
person and the last an adjective--these words do not merely have different
meanings: they are different symbols.)
3.324 In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced
(the whole of philosophy is full of them).
3.325 In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language
that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not
using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of
signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical
grammar--by logical syntax. (The conceptual notation of Frege and Russell is
such a language, though, it is true, it fails to exclude all mistakes.)
…
3.4 A proposition determines a
place in logical space. The existence of this logical place is guaranteed by
the mere existence of the constituents--by the existence of the proposition
with a sense.
3.41 The propositional sign with logical co-ordinates--that is the
logical place.
3.411 In geometry and logic alike a place is a possibility: something can
exist in it.
3.42 A proposition can determine only one place in logical space:
nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise
negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new
elements in co-ordination.) (The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture
determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole
of logical space.)
3.5 A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.
4 A thought is a proposition
with a sense.
4.001 The totality of propositions is language.
4.022 Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of
expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or
what its meaning is--just as people speak without knowing how the individual
sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is
no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately
from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so,
that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form
of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not
designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.
The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends
are enormously complicated.
4.003
Most of the propositions and questions to be found
in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot
give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are
nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from
our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same
class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.)
And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at
all.
4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in
Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the
apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model
of reality as we imagine it.
4.011 At first sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for
example--does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is
concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of
a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of
our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the
ordinary sense, of what they represent.
4.012 It is obvious that a proposition of the form 'aRb' strikes us as a
picture. In this case the sign is obviously a likeness of what is signified.
4.013 And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial character, we
see that it is not impaired by apparent irregularities (such as the use [sharp]
of and [flat] in musical notation). For even these irregularities depict what
they are intended to express; only they do it in a different way.
4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the
sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of
depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed
according to a common logical pattern. (Like the two youths in the fairy-tale,
their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in a certain sense one.)
4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician
can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the
symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule,
to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity
between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different
ways. And that rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into
the language of musical notation. It is the rule for translating this language
into the language of gramophone records.
4.015 The possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of
expression, is contained in the logic of depiction.
4.016 In order to understand the essential nature of a proposition, we
should consider hieroglyphic script, which depicts the facts that it describes.
And alphabetic script developed out of it without losing what was essential to
depiction.
4.02 We can see this from the fact that we understand the sense of a
propositional sign without its having been explained to us.
4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a
proposition, I know the situation that it represents. And I understand the
proposition without having had its sense explained to me.
…
6.36311 It is an hypothesis that the
sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will
rise.
6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another
has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.
6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion
that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
6.372 Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as
something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in
fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer
in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern
system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
6.373 The world is independent of my will.
6.374 Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only
be a favour granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion
between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed
physical connexion itself is surely not something that we could will.
6.375 Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too
the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility.
6.3751 For example, the
simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is
impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the logical
structure of colour. Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics:
more or less as follows--a particle cannot have two velocities at the same
time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to
say, particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be
identical. (It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions
can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction. The statement that a point in
the visual field has two different colours at the same time is a
contradiction.)
6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world
everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any
value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it
would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.
6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is
transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
6.422 When an ethical law of the form, 'Thou shalt ...' is laid down,
one's first thought is, 'And what if I do, not do it?' It is clear, however,
that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of
the terms. So our question about the consequences of an action must be
unimportant.--At least those consequences should not be events. For there must
be something right about the question we posed. There must indeed be some kind
of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action
itself. (And it is also clear that the reward must be something pleasant and
the punishment something unpleasant.)
6.423 It is impossible to speak about the will in so far as it is the
subject of ethical attributes. And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only
to psychology.
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it
can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts--not what can be
expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an
altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The
world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
6.4311 Death is not an event in
life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not
infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those
who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our
visual field has no limits.
6.4312 Not only is there no
guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its
eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely
fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is
some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as
much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in
space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution
of any problems of natural science that is required.)
6.432 How things are in the world
is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal
himself in the world.
6.4321 The facts all contribute
only to setting the problem, not to its solution.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that
it exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the
question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be
framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.
6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it
tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only
where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer
only where something can be said.
6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have
been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course
there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the
problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period
of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to
say what constituted that sense?)
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following:
to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural
science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then,
whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to
him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the
feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only
strictly correct one.
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them,
on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has
climbed up on it.)
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.