David Peat

Language 77Wittgenstein spent the end of the war as a prisoner of the Italiansbut was lucky enough to have his “Logical-Philosophical notebook” inhis rucksack at the time of his capture. He sent this to Russell, whowrote the introduction and arranged to have it published. The philosopherG. E. Moore gave it the rather pompous title of TractatusLogico-Philosophicus.In fact Wittgenstein objected so strongly to Russell’s introductionand what he felt to be Russell’s misinterpretation of the book that hewashed his hands of its publication. Indeed, this was to be a recurringtheme in Wittgenstein’s life, that he was constantly being misunderstoodand misread, even by his own students. He had little hope thatthings would be any better in the future and felt he was writing forpeople with other sorts of minds.Wittgenstein’s notebook must be one of the shortest works in philosophy,yet it is one of the most significant of the twentieth century. Injust 75 pages of short numbered statements Wittgenstein delineatedwhat can be said from what cannot be said and must be passed over insilence.Wittgenstein’s propositions set out his picture correspondence betweenlanguage and the world. The book begins with the first proposition:“The world is everything that is the case.” It continues usingpropositions, subpropositions, and sub-subpropositions, each with itsappropriate number and subnumber, to set down everything that canbe said in a precise way.As with Russell’s logical atoms, Wittgenstein’s propositions, thethings that can be said clearly about the world, are close to scientificstatements. According to him, these are the only sorts of things we cansay about the world. On the other hand we human beings don’t normallyspeak in scientific statements. We want to talk about our hopes,desires, and fears. We want to know what the world means, if it has apurpose, and how all this relates to the values of our own life.For Wittgenstein these nonscientific statements cannot be statedclearly and in such a way as to picture some corresponding state in theworld. Thus, he says, “the sense of the world must lie outside theworld.” The Tractatus begins “the world is the case” and everything inthe world is in the world, and what happens in the world happens. But