Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into an extremely wealthy family and was home schooled up until the age of 14 when he moved to Realschule in Linz and attended the school at the same time at Hitler, but it is unknown if the two ever met.

When the First World War broke out Wittgenstein enrolled in the Austro-Hungarian army in an artillery workshop, he was extremely well honoured and was decorated with several medals for his role in defending against the Brusilov offensive. He also fought on the Russian front and the Italian front. He took a military leave in 1918 and stayed in Vienna where he completed the Tractatus and submitted it for publishing.  

After he sent the Tractatus for pubhlishing a series of events which made him rethink his life and give away his vast fortune; his brother killed himself,  the Tractatus was not published; David Pinsent, a man whom he had fallen in love with as a teenager, had died in a plane crash and as if to ad insult to injury he was captured by allied roves an spent 9 months in an Italian prisoner of ward camp. When he returned to his family he talked incessantly of suicide and decided to do two things: give away his fortune, as I mentioned, and become a teacher.

While Wittgenstein was living and teaching in rural Austria, where he gained a reputation as a bit of a tyrant, the Tractatus was published first in Germany and later in England with an introduction by Bertrand Russel.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written as 7 short declrarative sentences which make it sound simplistic, but each sentence if followed by several footnotes, each itself a statement which proves the former.

The seven propositions of the Tractatus are:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with a sense
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: . This is the general form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein is his last and most famous statement “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” creates a limit on what can and cannot be discussed and analysed in a logical way. This puts a limit on language and philosophy and means that matephysical ideas like God, religion and ethics should not be discussed by philosophers because statements about them cannot be verified.

The rest of the statements and their relevant footnotes discuss how language relates to objects and how these objects can be analysed using language and broken down to simpler and simpler forms, this is a similar idea to logical atomism.  

Proposition 1:

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.

This sets out some basic principles for the following propositions, mainly outlining what objects are, what they are made off and what does and doesn’t count as an object.

I’m going to jump in the middle here to “1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.” Wittgenstein coined this idea of a logical space which is somewhere in which everything that can, and can be proven to exist, does. So for example a desk, a chair and a computer and all the parts which make them exist in this “logical space” whereas god, love and ethics would not. I have started off here because I think it’s a good way to think about what facts are and how they relate to the rest of the statements.  

Proposition 2 is where the logical analysis is introduced in its simplest form.

2 What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs.
2.01 A state of affairs is a combination of objects.
2.02 Objects are simple.

Here Wittgenstein introduces the concepts of objects and states of affairs.

An object is basically a simple object, something that is really made up of one object so say a chair leg. Whereas the chair itself is a state of affairs because it is made up of several objects; legs, arms, a back and a bottom. This way of thinking about the world as objects and states of affairs can let you analyse objects down to their atomic states and let you create abstract ideas like a forest or a city.

Proposition 3 combined with 2 brings to an end Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language. A basic overview of this theory is that the world consists of interconnected atomic facts, and propositions make up pictures of the world.

Language is at the basis of Wittgenstein’s work and in his later book Philosophical Investigations he discussed the concept of something he called “language games”.

The “language game” is a simple concept compared to those I have talked about the in Tratatus, and at its roots says that language, for example the English language is a game and has a set of rules that in essence all the “players” must adhere to. So when you begin a conversation with a person you are both entering into a language game with a set of rules, grammar, which you have both agreed to. Different situations have different rules so for example if I were in the pub I would use different language than if I were in a job interview so the language games in the two different situations have a different set of rules.