Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was probably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, even though he only published one short book in his lifetime.  This book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for logical/philosophical treatise) consists of numbered propositions.  There are seven principal propositions or statements, and the rest of the book is a commentary on these.   Some of the main ones, in reverse order, are:

7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

4. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.

2. What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs. 

1. The world is all that is the case. 

The book presents us with three main ideas to consider:

a) The picture theory of meaning.   Meaningful thoughts and sentences are pictures of actual or possible bits of the world.  Anything about the world itself as a whole, or about things that are supposed to transcend the world, is meaningless.  What cannot be said or thought, though, can be shown.

b) The metaphysics of the Tractatus.   Propositions can be analyzed, in theory at least, into elementary propositions, which correspond directly with states of affairs.  Their components are names of absolutely simple objects (rather like atoms or monads, only more simple, more basic).   So the world is made up of different combinations of what we might call logical atoms.

c) Nonsense.  According to the picture theory, all we can talk about is states of affairs.  But the Tractatus   is not about states of affairs.  It is about the world as a whole, logic, the relation between language and the world as a whole, and so on.  So mustn't this book itself be meaningless, according to its own theory of meaning?  See 6.53 and 6.54.   Wittgenstein says that indeed his propositions are nonsensical.  What are we to make of this?  One view is that he believes that some profoundly important truths (of a spiritual nature) are beyond language.  The most common view is that Wittgenstein means that talk about logic, etc. is nonsensical in a somewhat technical sense.  The other, 'postmodern' or 'austere' view is that he really means what he says in a straightforward way.  This would make his early work quite similar to his later work (published after his death) in which he clearly rejects such things as the picture theory and any metaphysics implied by it.  What would be the point of writing a nonsensical book? Perhaps to show that philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, cannot help at all with the big problems of life.  The methods of Kant cannot help with the problems of Kierkegaard.

For more on Wittgenstein see the links below:

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/553892

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/w/wittgens.htm