Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

1 The world is everything that is the case.

3.02 The thought contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it thinks. What is thinkable is also possible.

3.321 Two different symbols can therefore have the sign (the written sign or the sound sign) in common—they then signify in different ways.

Think about written sign and sound sign re: cinema

3.334 The rules of logical syntax must follow of themselves, if we only know how every single sign signifies.

Think of GEB: rule following

Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.

4.002 aka to understand all of language is to understand all of human psychology

4.003 Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.

4.014 The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common.

Poetic list related: Leibniz, "Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting."

4.112 The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

4.112

4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

4.462 Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality. They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none.

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now.

Contradiction is the external limit of the propositions, tautology their substanceless centre.

5.143 getting koan-y

all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

5.43

5.511 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.

Logic precedes every experience—that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What.

5.552

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

6.1 The propositions of logic are tautologies. 6.11 The propositions of logic therefore say nothing.

6.1262 Proof in logic is only a mechanical expedient to facilitate the recognition of tautology, where it is complicated.

Related: GEB's proof-generating machines

6.13 Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. Logic is transcendental.

6.373 The world is independent of my will.

6.43 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. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

Related: Marcus Aurelius, "All is as thinking makes it so."

If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

6.4311

The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

6.432

6.5 For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)

Religious expriences are ineffable

6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said,

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.