Someone I know said that they get “90% of the philosophy I read” from this blog which leads me to two thoughts : 1) How oddly specific, and 2) how oddly depressing. I’m an undergrad, and a prep cook in the philosophical world, watching people with bigger brains stroll by all the time, apparently effortlessly having epiphanies that I struggle to comprehend. And right now, I am dealing with the bane of all philosophy undergrads, Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly at this moment, the Tractatus Logico-Philiosophicus, a book which countless doctoral dissertations and other books have been written about. I’ll skip the potted biography of Wittgenstein, aside to say that it is a constant source of annoyance to me that his genius is always mentioned, and that I have just done it myself.
And there’s no doubt that Ludwig had a big old brain on him. He was able to synthesize and understand the dominant philosophy of the day (he famously did not read the ancients until later in life, and then it appears in only a cursory manner), distill it, and then write a book which, among other things, changed its course. And it did so in 75 or so pages. Wittgenstein did not fuck around when it comes to brevity, sometimes, I feel, to the detriment of everything else.
The book is famously structured as a series of numbered propositions; there are 525 of them, numbered using a system of his devising, which frankly I found elusive. They are theoretically a way of assigning logical “weight” to each proposition, with hierarchies indicating commentary on each ‘base’. It makes it look kind of like a set of instructions, and given Wittgenstein’s technical background, that makes sense, but it’s not really borne out, at least in my experience. The short, pithy sayings sometimes reminded me of Zen koans– but that is a mistake as well; nothing in the Tractatus can really be taken in isolation, including the famous 7th proposition. Everything builds on everything else; Wittgenstein uses a non-standard definition of the word ‘fact’, but doesn’t define that until later, and doesn’t fully develop it until even later. If it’s a koan, it’s a very, very long koan meant to be read by a Trafalmadorian, who can take it all in at once, and then, presumably, discard it.
Ok, so those are some metaphors. What’s it *about*? A surprising number of things, given its brevity. I’m going to sum it up as I can as a prep cook, but remember there are a lot of people a lot smarter than me who will offer alternative views, and who were not as massively confused by the latter parts of proposition 5 and the early parts of 6.
Effectively, Wittgenstein creates an entire theory of language and logic that he believes shows that a lot of philosophical problems are nonsense; his own philosophical musings are included in this nonsense, and the book famously concludes with the notion that once you understand what is nonsense, you’ll discard the tools he has given you and simply– be. It reminds me of John Cage’s story from Indeterminacy : “Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains.” After telling this, Dr. Suzuki was asked, “What’s the difference between before and after?” He said, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground.” The Tractatus famously offers as it’s penultimate proposition to essentially forget the Tractatus :
“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.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.”
That’s it.
How he goes about that is the difficult part. There are a few references to a couple of philosophers who, at the time (and today, really) remain fairly obscure, a fairly arch set of critiques of logic, a recasting of logic, and a section on truth tables. He also outlines a “picture theory of language”, which is a key to understanding how we come to think about things. It’s hard going; and added to all this is Wittgenstein’s own rejection of some or all of this later in life, creating a further debate about how much of it is valid. It is worthy of noting that Wittgenstein had proposed that his second book Philosophical Investigations (ultimately published posthumously) be placed in a volume with this one, so the reader could presumably compare and contrast. We’re supposed to read this later in the semester, and maybe I will be able to do just that. For now, my own explanations of the Tractatus put me in mind of the scene in Chernobyl where a career party man listens to a two minute explanation of how a nuclear reactor works, and then states “now I know how a nuclear reactor works“. In one sense, he does, in another, he’s still an idiot. I’m still an idiot.
I am, since I am studying the book, going back and reading it section by section with supplemental material, looking at scholarly writings on it (my personal recommendation is Hülster’s “Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractates Logico-Philosophicus” which for the lay reader may replace the need to read the original). But I am glad to have finished it, even though I am certain I have not grasped it all. I am a big advocate of the notion that the way to read difficult books is to read them. You’ll probably carry something away.
For me, the thing that stuck out is that Wittgenstein regarded philosophy as ‘an activity’. In the context of the Tractatus, this is a specific activity (from 4.112) :
“Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear.”
I like the notion, even if I am not certain that activity is limited to clarifications. A book I have just started reading , Open Socrates, suggests that Philosophy has become too concerned with being a discipline, and should be more concerned with being in the world. I think ultimately this may have been one of Wittgenstein’s concerns as well, but he expressed it in an extremely different fashion. Ideally, for Wittgenstein, philosophy teaches us what we can speak about, and instructs us to shut up about what we cannot. I don’t know how much of that notion I agree with, but I do believe that what the Tractatus sets out to do– create a kind of enlightenment, is an interesting goal. There’s a fuckton to be said about the mystical qualities of what, on the surface appears to be a dry and logical text, but I’m going to leave things here for now; I’m not in a space to tackle them in the fashion they deserve. Perhaps some other time, after I learn how a nuclear reactor works.
The Lithole 
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