A review by theologiaviatorum
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

challenging slow-paced

3.0

I've never understood so little of any book.  I imagine my rating might have been higher had I understood it better. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which someone said sounds like a spell from Harry Potter) is the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. In it he seems to say something about how language works and the boundaries of what can be said. His own summary of the work is this: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof we cannot speak thereof one must be silent" (27). He suggests that so much of the confusion of philosophy is the result of men and women attempting to say the things which quite literally cannot be said and so devolving into the sort of nonsense contained in questions like, "What does the color 9 smell like?" It seems then that Wittgenstein thinks that we can say very little truthfully. But he also seems to say that the things worth saying anything about are the very things whereof we cannot speak. So his Tractatus ends with a few brief words on mysticism. "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical" (107). This inexpressible is the thing philosophy tries to address but (according to him) should leave alone. Wittgenstein conceives of the purpose of philosophy as being to show the nonsense of most (all?) philosophy. He concludes then that if we have followed the argument this far, "climbed out through them, on them, over them", we must now throw away the ladder and be silent. Now on to The Blue and Brown Books.