TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Certainly something that would have been better to read in a college setting with an expert. However, I knew the book’s reputation going in and had steeled myself to face its (intellectual) wrath. Fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as tricky and confusing as I was led to believe. Additionally, it’s only about 80 pages long and I found it helpful to just read the whole thing in one long sitting. It is formatted unlike any book I’ve read before. It is built around 7 propositions which then is each broken out into dozens of numbered statements. You end up with something like this:
4.002 Language disguises thought.
4.003 And it is not surprising at all that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
Honestly, it’s a cool format. As Wittgenstein himself says later in the book, philosophy is supposed to aim, “at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” This book is the anti-Deluze. Wittgenstein is obsessed with intelligibility and utility. As he says in 4.116, “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.” He also rails against using words imprecisely, like say the way “rhizome” is used in continental philosophy. I will certainly not claim to understand large sections of the middle of the book. Wittgenstein goes deep on some questions of formal logic and it gets a little in the weeds for me. He comes up with a formula for the essential form of all sentences that is so full of Greek letters and esoteric notations that I can’t even reproduce it on the computer. I had to bring up the Wikipedia for “List of Logic Symbols” to make it through some parts. Though I think I still see the forest despite the fuzziness of certain trees. Wittgenstien’s program is to shrink philosophy down dramatically. For instance, the subject is out. 5.632: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.” Likewise with aesthetics and ethics, 6.421: “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one in the same.)” which leaves little left since he commands us in the final proposition to be silent about matters we cannot speak about. It’s a very austere, I would venture masculine,view of philosophy. That the only things to concern ourselves with are those things which we can articulate clearly and can reduce into a logical chain of symbols and whatever falls outside of this (and I would say all of the interesting questions fall outside of this) is not to be spoken of. I will agree that when you’re talking about more esoteric philosophical matters, it is annoying and childish when someone treats it like a math problem so I applaud Wittgenstien for showing how stupid that is. I have some very logically-minded friends who would enjoy this. Gotta love any book that claims it will “solve” anything, let alone something as large as philosophy. 526 logical postulates.
