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And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
Philosophy limits the disputable sphere of natural science. 4.114 It should limit the thinkable and thereby the unthinkable. It should limit the unthinkable from within through the thinkable.
(“A knows that p is the case” is senseless if p is a tautology.)
A tautology follows from all propositions: it says nothing.
Contradiction vanishes so to speak outside, tautology inside all propositions.
A proposition is in itself neither probable nor improbable. An event occurs or does not occur, there is no middle course.
But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.
If e.g. an affirmation can be produced by repeated denial, is the denial—in any sense—contained in the affirmation? Does “∼∼p” deny ∼p, or does it affirm p; or both?
The solution of logical problems must be simple for they set the standard of simplicity. Men have always thought that there must be a sphere of questions whose answers—a priori—are symmetrical and united into a closed regular structure. A sphere in which the proposition, simplex sigillum veri, is valid.
In a certain sense we cannot make mistakes in logic.
How can the all-embracing logic which mirrors the world use such special catches and manipulations? Only because all these are connected into an infinitely fine network, to the great mirror.
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
A composite soul would not be a soul any longer.
Logic precedes every experience—that something is so.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. 5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which only I understand) mean the limits of my world.
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
The fact that the propositions of logic are tautologies shows the formal—logical—properties of language, of the world.
This throws light on the question why logical propositions can no more be empirically established than they can be empirically refuted. Not only must a proposition of logic be incapable of being contradicted by any possible experience, but it must also be incapable of being established by any such.
Every proposition of logic is a modus ponens presented in signs. (And the modus ponens can not be expressed by a proposition.)
Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Mathematical propositions express no thoughts.
(In philosophy the question “Why do we really use that word, that proposition?” constantly leads to valuable results.)
Only uniform connexions are thinkable.
At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
The world is independent of my will.
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and æsthetics are one.)
Language is somehow insufficient in expressing art. Notice how art and morality are connected here - much as they are in a Nietzschean framework.
There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.
If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.
Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.)
Does this line imply that it is the task of philosophy to address these problems?
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
