Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Mystical Path Through Logic’s Limits

The Crystalline Vision of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

In this work, which is made up of seven propositions about how language functions to describe the world and how that can complicate a philosopher’s understanding of the world. Essentially from my understanding, it is Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy has come about due to the misunderstanding in how language works in natural speech versus when we try to penetrate deeper questions, like an ethical question or mystical or ontological.

In his view those questions are best shown and not said, meaning that philosophy and a philosophical work is not the best form to address these deeper questions and something more akin to art or poetry is a better form for understanding.

I know that he turns in his later philosophy to a more free flowing style whereas Tractatus is aiming towards a crystalline distillation.

Language as a Picture of the World: Wittgenstein’s Core Idea

In his understanding in his early philosophy, it is that logic is to form the basis for philosophy, so that everything can be drilled down with a mathematical precision and then rebuilt from the ground up.

He sees the world as being made up “of the totality of facts, not of things,” in the first proposition and he will spend the rest of the book explaining this, and why this results in the misunderstandings in language at the root of philosophy.

My understanding of his ‘facts’ is that a fact is able to be articulated into ‘parts’ whereas a thing isn’t.

He is trying to get around the problems that were in the world of logic which he inherited from Bertrand Russell which saw the world as being made up of objects, properties, and relations.

However, Wittgenstein sees in this first and second proposition that nothing can be gained through arguing about this and that in fact the world just is as it is and we with our language are trying to map things onto the world.

So he sees language as trying to do what a picture would do.

Propositions and Paradoxes: The Roots of Philosophy’s Struggles

In a famous episode from his life when conceiving Tractatus, he was reading the newspaper about a court case in Paris where the lawyers were using a model of a car accident to discuss what happened in the actual car accident.

It hit him that this is what language is trying to do with the world, it forms a picture of the world.

In the next few propositions Wittgenstein expands on this by saying that “a logical picture of facts is a thought,” meaning that a thought forms a logical picture of the universe.

A proposition comes to form a logical picture of the world, but because language can be slippery, a logical proposition can also form a nonsensical picture of the world like it is both raining and not raining.

This in his understanding is the root of the problem in philosophy, the difference in our understanding between the everyday speech that allows us to navigate the world and trying to use this imprecise tool for deeper questions.

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The Mystical Turn: When Logic Meets Silence

In the final concluding propositions I think Wittgenstein really starts to shine.

In the last explanation of proposition six he’s says that this book was only so you can see what he was saying and once having thought the way he thinks you can throw the book away.

Then in proposition seven we get his famous, if you can’t speak you must be silent.

Here he isn’t saying that you shouldn’t talk, what he is saying is that how we’ve been trying to talk about these deeper philosophical questions has distracted us and that these, in his term, mystical questions must be shown through an activity, like poetry or art or thinking.

Wittgenstein’s Struggles to Be Understood: The Publishing Battle

With Tractatus he thought that he had solved the problems of philosophy and that once you were able to understand what he had said and what he had thought about you’d be able to see the solution as well and we could all go on to focus on living a good life.

However the problem was that he couldn’t find a single soul who understood what he had written.

Because of this he couldn’t find a publisher who would accept it.

He sent it to his old mentors, the top analytical philosophers and logicians of his day, Russel and Gottlob Frege, who found it beyond comprehension.

Russel eventually sat with Wittgenstein for a few hours everyday for a few weeks as they went line by line through the book so that Russel could understand it enough to write an introduction so the work could get published.

However, even that introduction Wittgenstein felt missed the mark.

Even today as I was reading some secondary criticism to try to understand the book there seems to be a mixed reception and interpretation to the work.

From what I can tell there is two basic readings of the work, that of a work of therapy and that of a work on logic.

The reading that the book is therapy comes as a result from what Wittgenstein himself wrote in the introduction as well as the last two propositions, so that we should take the work literally, that it is meant to cure one from philosophical questions.

I am very partial to this reading as I am not a philosopher, I am an English major trained in Post-Structualist reading where we take only what the text is saying for itself for interpretation, so if the text is saying this then why not just take it at face value.

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The Experiential Challenge of Reading Philosophy

It reminds me of a story I once heard about Heidegger’s conception of thinking, he too had ideas around the mystical.

He grew up in the south of Germany where the Black Forest is, which at the time was well known for its forestry and timber industry. In the forests there are these paths that the lumberjacks would use to get to their worksites and Heidegger would often wander around getting lost in nature.

Heidegger describes thinking as going on these lumberjack paths through the dense forests where it is dark and still, the canopy from the high trees not letting in any light.

And you follow these paths through the forests, sometimes leading to a dead end where you’d have to retrace the path back, and at other times splitting into different paths with no discernible difference in which path to take.

Since you’re just wandering and enjoying the dense forests, it doesn’t matter which path you take as you have no destination.

However, every once in a while you see some light up ahead coming through the trees on the path, and you come out into this huge field of felled trees from the lumberjacks where there is no longer any darkness, and light pours in on the field.

He called this the clearing, the place where these meandering paths of thinking finally lead you to an insight.

You bask in the sun for a little while, but again you feel the call for wandering, so you find another path out of the clearing and you enter the dense, dark forest of thought once more.

I’ve always appreciated that analogy of his, and it is evident that this is what had happened to Wittgenstein running up to the publication of Tractatus.

Mystical Influences: Tolstoy and the Turning Point

He was in the war, full of fear in facing death, having already mastered logic, when he came across a book that made a profound impact on his life—Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief.

He had what can only be termed a mystical experience reading it that, in the words of another one of his favorite authors, William James, reorganized his entire outlook and attitude toward life.

Wittgenstein hardly ever wrote for publication.

He only had one book, a book review, and, I believe, one article in publication when he died.

So, what he did write is loaded with his current thought, like a dam holding a reservoir back that, when it falls, a torrent comes rushing forth.

That is the Tractatus.

It stops at the mystical—at the things in the human condition that can only be experienced and can’t be said.

And I think it achieves this perfectly.

Tractatus as a Mystical Poem

It is a poem composed of philosophy, not a philosophical poem.

It is a work one allows to wash over oneself, standing there in the beauty of a foreign land with an alien tongue, marveling at the humanness of it all, of the connection of us all.

It is a work following the dark paths in the woods and the glimpse of the clearing.

I highly recommend it, even if I don’t understand it.

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