Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Pasquale Frascolla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134336388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus provides an accessible and yet novel discussion of all the major themes of the Tractatus.

The book starts by setting out the history and structure of the Tractatus. It then investigates the two main dimensions of the early Wittgenstein's thought, corresponding to the division between what language can say by means of its propositions and what language can only show. It goes on to discuss picture theory, logical atomism, extensionality, truth-functions and truth-operations, semantics, metalogic and mathematics, solipsism and value, metaphysics, and finally, Wittgenstein's idea of the duty of maintaining silence.

Frascolla also proposes a new interpretation of the ontology of the Tractatus. Based on the identification of objects with qualia, the argument put forward in the book challenges the currently prevalent ideas of the 'New Wittgenstein'. The paradoxical nature of the Tractatus itself, and the theme of "throwing away the ladder", are thus revisited in a new key.

Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus is essential reading for anyone wishing to further their insight into one of the most influential works of twentieth-century philosophy.

1
INTRODUCTION

A brief account of the origins and fortunes of the Tractatus

Some time between the months of October and November of 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian army was decisively defeated on its southern front by the Italians, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was serving in the Royal-Imperial Army as an artillery officer, was captured and sent to a prison camp near Cassino, Italy.¹ At the time of his capture, Wittgenstein had with him in his knapsack the manuscript of a work entitled Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. It was this text that within a few years would become the famous book with the Latin title, Tractatus logico-philosophicus. The work had been written during the summer of 1918 when Wittgenstein, having been granted a leave of absence from the front, spent his summer staying at the family estate in Hochreit, or at the house of his uncle Paul in Hallein, near Salzburg, or in Vienna. What the manuscript contained was the result of a long and intensive research activity which Wittgenstein had begun several years earlier at Cambridge and carried out since then nearly uninterruptedly. He had arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of 1911 from Manchester where in 1908 he had gone to continue his studies in engineering, begun in Berlin-Charlottenburg, at the Technische Hochschule, in 1906.

It seems that it was in working on the mathematical aspects of a problem regarding the design of mechanisms for aircraft propulsion that Wittgenstein became completely absorbed by the problem of understanding the foundations themselves of mathematics and logic. This interest took him to reading one of the key texts in the contemporary history of the philosophy of logic and mathematics, Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics, and then Gottlob Frege's masterpiece, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic.² Wittgenstein in fact went to Jena in 1911 with the hope of working under Frege's guidance on a project concerning those philosophical questions which by that time had become his main if not only concern. Frege, however, suggested that he go and study with Russell, and so it was that Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of that same year, and in February 1912 was admitted to Trinity College with Russell as his supervisor.

It is not the aim of this book to go over the various phases in the scientific and personal history of the relationship between the young Wittgenstein and the already famous philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell, or to attempt to reconstruct the influence that each had on the other. To trace the impact that Wittgenstein had on the cultural life of Cambridge, dominated at that time not only by Russell, but also by men of such stature as Moore, Keynes, Hardy, Johnson, etc., and which found its highest and most refined expression in the activities of the Society of the Apostles, would equally go beyond the limits of this book. It is enough to note that by 1913, just before leaving for Norway — a place well suited for living in isolation and dedicating oneself entirely to philosophical labours — Wittgenstein had given Russell a short text which contained the results of his reflections on the nature of the proposition and the foundations of logic. Then, in April 1914, while he was still in Norway, he dictated a series of notes to Moore, who was visiting him at that time, in which were outlined the main points of the philosophy of logic which were later to be found in the Tractatus.³

According to Paul Engelmann, architect and friend of Wittgenstein, the Tractatus was compiled from a selective reworking of material which Wittgenstein took from seven volumes of notes which he had probably begun writing just before the war, and then finished, for the most part, during the war.⁴ Three of these volumes, known as the 'Gmunden Notebooks', were published in 1960, while the others have apparently been lost (the first two contain notes with dates that go, with hardly any interruption, from 22 August 1914 to 22 June 1915, while the third volume contains notes from 15 April 1916 to 10 January 1917). An earlier version of the Tractatus, which differs only marginally from the definitive one and which probably dates back to the months immediately preceding the summer of 1918, was discovered in Vienna in 1965 and subsequently published. The writings we have mentioned above, along with letters sent to Russell between 1912 and the outbreak of the war, constitute all the presently known material that Wittgenstein used in drafting the Tractatus.⁵

The events linked to the publication of what Wittgenstein considered the work of his lifetime were extremely painful (in a letter to von Ficker, Wittgenstein calls his work 'the unfortunate creature'). In spite of the formidable group of eminent personages who in various ways were involved in repeatedly trying to find a publisher — names such as Engelmann, Kraus, Loos, Frege, von Ficker, Rilke and Russell — all the editorial houses and journals to which Wittgenstein submitted his text, including those like Jahoda & Siegel, Braumuller, Der Brenner, Reclam and Cambridge University Press, refused to publish it, for one reason or the other. It was finally Russell who managed to persuade a publisher to accept the manuscript, after Wittgenstein, having lost every hope, had decided to drop the project. In order to convince the editors of the high quality of a terrific-looking typescript by an unknown philosopher, Russell, already famous by then, had to agree to write an Introduction which was to serve as a kind of guarantee for the value of the work. That Russell's trick was successful is evidenced by the words of Wilhelm Ostwald, chemist and director of the German journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, who at the beginning of 1921 wrote in his letter agreeing to publish Wittgenstein's work:

In any other case I would have refused to publish the article. My esteem for the work and character of Mr Bertrand Russell is so high, however, that I am happy to publish the article by Mr Wittgenstein in the forthcoming issues of my Annalen der Naturphilosophie. The Introduction by Mr Bertrand Russell will of course be particularly welcome.⁶

The Tractatus saw the light of day that same year, 1921, but with a German title, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. The first published version of Wittgenstein's work, however, was so badly edited and full of typographical errors and misprints that he thought it was a pirate edition.⁷ The Latin title by which the text is universally known, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, was given to it only in the following year, 1922, when it was published in Great Britain, as a single volume, by Kegan Paul, with Russell's Introduction at the beginning (which Wittgenstein, it must be noted, found rather misleading)⁸ and with the German text printed en face. The English translation was made by Cecil K. Ogden and Frank P. Ramsey and was checked by Wittgenstein himself. The title, which echoes Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, was suggested by Moore who had detected a Spinozian flavour in the last part of the book, and even though Wittgenstein was not very enthusiastic about it, he preferred it to the English title, Philosophical Logic, which he found entirely mistaken. It was Russell again who was the great promoter of this new edition: through the good offices of Ogden, Russell convinced the publisher, Kegan Paul, to get the work into print (at that time, Ogden was the director at Kegan Paul of a book series under which in fact Wittgenstein's Tractatus appeared).

When the text came out in Great Britain, the tormented history of the attempts to publish the Tractatus finally came to an end, and almost immediately afterwards, the history of its great success began. By 1922 Hans Hahn, professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna and member of that group of philosophers and scientists who a few years later would form the Vienna Circle, had already included Wittgenstein's work as one of the texts to be discussed during his seminars on logic and the foundations of mathematics.⁹ The influence of the Tractatus on the development of the ideas of the Vienna Circle, and therefore on the formation of that philosophical current of thought known as Neopositivism, or Logical Empiricism, is universally recognized, and I will make no attempt here to reconstruct even in general terms its complex history and the theoretical problems involved. It is sufficient to recall that neopositivists saw the Tractatus as one of the main sources of the three pivotal principles of their philosophy: the verificationistic criterion of propositional meaning; the thesis of the purely tautological nature of logical truths; and the claim that metaphysics is meaningless insofar as it is constituted by propositions that violate the first principle (hence, by pseudo-propositions). And so it was that in the manifesto printed by the Vienna Circle, entitled The Scientific Conception of the World, Wittgenstein, along with Frege, Russell and Einstein (among others), is explicitly mentioned as one of the sources of inspiration of the neopositivist movement.¹⁰ This is not to say that all neopositivists embraced without reserve all the theses put forward in the Tractatus; there were many who did not. Nonetheless, the idea that Wittgenstein's masterpiece contained, though cryptically expressed, the fundamental tenets of Logical Empiricism became so firmly entrenched that it was even shared by those continental philosophers who critiqued the Tractatus.

As with any classical text, however, the Tractatus both stimulates and supports different readings, and one of the earliest significant changes in how it was read had to do with rethinking its reputedly tight links with Neopositivism. For a group of scholars who wanted to bring the Tractatus back to its original framework, which was that of an enquiry into the foundations of logic and the theory of meaning within the great tradition of the investigations of Frege and of the early Russell, Wittgenstein's work had nothing to do with the epistemological problematic at the heart of the neopositivists' interests.¹¹ Then a further step in the same direction was made when it was recognized that the major contribution of the Tractatus to the formation of the dominant paradigm of the twentieth-century philosophy of language was to be found in the thesis that the understanding of a proposition would consist in the knowledge of its truth-conditions, which is to say, in the knowledge of those states of affairs which, if they obtain, make the proposition true.¹² With regard to this point, it is worth making the following observation, if for no other reason than to illustrate how complicated the whole matter is. On the one hand, the text of the Tractatus is compatible with a verificationistic reading of its theory of meaning (as clearly witnessed by both the neopositivists' interpretation and the interpretation of its ontology that I will present in Chapter 3 of this book); on the other hand, Carnap, in one of the texts contributing to the construction of the dominant paradigm, states that some of the ideas in the Tractatus were starting points in the development of his method of semantic analysis, yet in saying that, he refers to notions which, in themselves, have nothing to do with phenomenalistic verificationism.¹³

While the interpretative efforts briefly summed up above aimed at reappraising the significance of the linkage of the Tractatus with the neopositivist philosophy, they did not question its belonging within the wide and diverse stream of analytic philosophy. In the early 1970s, however, a certain mode of thought began developing which threatened to completely overturn these views. Basing itself on the parts of the Tractatus devoted to the Mystical, and privileging the clearly ethical ends to which the Tractatus aimed in the delimitation of the sayable, the attempt was made to situate Wittgenstein's work in that group of writings that emerged from within the neo-Kantian climate of pre-First World War Vienna, which through a critique of language inextricably linked ethics and logic.¹⁴ As the reader can easily see, not only is the presence of these themes in the Tractatus undeniable, but their prominent position is one of the main reasons for its peculiar physiognomy. Nonetheless, this does not alter in any way the fact that the principal undertaking of the Tractatus was that of constructing a theory of meaning and logic which remains of great interest as a powerful answer to the questions which had been raised by both Frege and Russell, granted that a by no means secondary effect of that construction, deliberately pursued by Wittgenstein, was the condemnation of metaphysics and the sheltering of the sphere of the Mystical and of value from any scientistic interference. In other words, the acknowledgement of the variety and complexity of Wittgenstein's intentions should not detract in the slightest from the extraordinary relevance of his theory of meaning and logic for an analytically oriented reflection on the nature of the linguistic representation of reality.

The structure of the Tractatus

Even if it were only for its graphic layout, the Tractatus appears as a very singular work. It is made up of 526 sections, each numbered according to an original system which I will explain in a moment. I use the term 'sections' and not 'propositions', in spite of the fact that in the explanatory note at the beginning of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein speaks precisely of 'propositions' (Sätze). I have done this for two reasons. The first is that the commentaries which correspond to the decimal numbers are often made up of more than one proposition. The second reason is that the Tractatus has as its object the nature of the proposition, and therefore it speaks about propositions. If we called 'propositions' what we are calling 'sections', we would find ourselves having to make affirmations like: 'in proposition 4.05 Wittgenstein maintains that reality is compared with propositions', a statement which would be inevitably confusing.¹⁵

The numbering principle Wittgenstein followed in his work is in response to the need to make evident the hierarchical organization of the sections that constitute the Tractatus by clarifying the relative importance of each section and the network of relations of their reciprocal dependence. The most important sections are those marked by the whole numbers 1 to 7. Then, sections which serve as successive commentaries on any one of those marked by a whole number are labelled by the whole number followed by increasing decimals. For example, sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 are the first, second, third, fourth and fifth commentary on section 3. Then, the level just below that of those sections marked with a whole number and one decimal is formed by sections marked by a whole number followed b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Understanding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the English edition
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The pictorial nature of thought and language
• 3 Logical atomism
• 4 The austere scheme of the Tractatus: extensionality
• 5 What we cannot speak about (I): semantics, metalogic, mathematics
• 6 What we cannot speak about (II): solipsism and value
• 7 Metaphysics, philosophy and logical syntax
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index