The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, By David Wittgenstein

To attempt to advance a theory of ethics corresponding with Wittgenstein’s philosophy is to faced with what initially seems an impossible task. The author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus does not seem to mince his words when he says that “ethics cannot be put into words” (TLP 6.42). Nonetheless, Wittgenstein wrote (and spoke) extensively on the nature of ethics in his Notebooks, 1914-1916 and in a 1929 lecture he gave to the Heretics Society in Cambridge titled A Lecture on Ethics. It would seem, furthermore, that the Tractatus was, as Wittgenstein advanced, a fundamentally ethical text. In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein wrote that “The book’s point is an ethical one” (Engelmann 143). Wittgenstein certainly did not write

Our words, only capable of expressing facts, cannot express anything of ethical value, or what Wittgenstein calls “absolute” value (Lecture 5). Hanna Pitkin explains, “all of art and esthetics, all of religion and ethics, all really of judgment, sensibility, and affect will have to be abandoned… Those things cannot be talked about, and if men continue to experience them they must do so in silence and therefore in isolation, in the wordless private world of dreams” (Pitkin 336-337). At this point, our first opportunity to advance a kind of ethic appears. Vera Fisogni writes in her essay “Ethics and Language in Wittgenstein,” that Wittgenstein’s ultimate claim in the Tractatus—that “[w]hat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”—is not just a claim about our capabilities (TLP 7). And Fisogni seems to be headed in a fruitful direction—to say that we are incapable of speaking about that which is ineffable is quite clearly tautological. Wittgenstein certainly knows this as well—the connection between logical form and language is rooted in the tautological (“The propositions of logic are tautologies” (TLP 6.1)). Yet Fisogni advances that Wittgenstein’s claim in point 7 of the Tractatus is an ethical one. She claims that his assertion that “we must” not speak of that which is ineffable is a direct claim about how we should act—that in order for a statement to be logical (and in this case, ethical), its

This might seem a pointless endeavor when we consider the kind of paradox that Wittgenstein’s theory of language presents, yet Wittgenstein was deeply familiar with the paradoxical nature of his argument. Wittgenstein advances that “[i]t is clear ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental” (TLP 6.421). Yet, the philosopher advances in one of the final sections of the Tractatus that “[t]here are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522). If these ineffable things do indeed exist outside the realm of language—that realm which Wittgenstein’s linguistic solipsism denotes as the limit of our thought—in what realm do they exist? In the same letter I previously mentioned that Wittgenstein wrote to von Ficker, the philosopher