¹ From the manuscript material left by Wittgenstein published as Culture and Value, tr. Winch, Peter, ed. Von Wright, G. H. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 8.Google Scholar

² Lessing, G. E., The Education of The Human Race, tr. Robertson, F. W. (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1872), 42Google Scholar. All additional references come from this short text. Here I rely neither on the translation Peter Winch offers in Culture and Value, nor on the translation H. B. Nisbet offers in the Cambridge edition of Lessing's Philosophical and Theological Writings, since neither of these translations allow that the lines themselves ‘practice sagacity’; these translations consequently dilute or effectively dilute Lessing's suggestion that the lines were intentionally crafted to produce the effect they do.

³ ‘By a “hint” I mean that which already contains any germ, out of which the, as yet, held back truth allows itself to be developed’, Lessing writes. ‘By allusion I mean that which was intended only to excite curiosity and to occasion questions. As, for instance, the oft-recurring mode of expression, describing death by “he was gathered to his fathers”’ (41).

⁴ Lessing, 21–22.

⁵ Wittgenstein offers this description of the Tractatus in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, wherein he explains that his work ‘consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one… In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’. See B. F. McGuinness's appendix to Engelmann's, PaulLetters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 143–4.Google Scholar

⁶ We can say that the Tractatus is built on these seven separate sentences because as Wittgenstein points out, n1, n2, etc., are comments on no. n; n.m1, n.m2, etc., are comments on no. n.m; and so on.

⁷ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Ogden, C. K. (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999 [Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922])Google Scholar, 6.54. In this essay I intentionally rely on the translation by Ogden (assisted by Frank P. Ramsey) as opposed to the more recent translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. However, since both Ogden and Pears and McGuiness translate Wittgenstein's sätze as ‘propositions’, and it seems to me that discovering how to think of Wittgenstein's Sätze comprises the central work of reading the Tractatus, I have kept this term in the original German. In subsequent quotations from the Tractatus rendered in English I'll use the standard ‘proposition’ for Sätze, though this essay should make clear why I find the translation misleading.

⁸ Wittgenstein's description of his writing as literary is found in his account of the work to a prospective publisher, Ludwig von Ficker. Quoted in von Wright, G.H., Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 81Google Scholar. The promise that the Tractatus is not a textbook appears in Wittgenstein's preface to the work.

⁹ After introducing the idea that God wished to educate the Hebrew people, ‘a race of slaves…not permitted to take part in the worship of the Egyptians’, and not simply reveal Himself to them, Lessing writes: ‘But, it will be asked, to what purpose was this education of so rude a people, a people with whom God had to begin so entirely from the beginning? I reply, in order that in the process of time He might employ particular members of this nation as the Teachers of other people. He was bringing up in them the future Teachers of the human race. It was the Jews who became their teachers, none but the Jews; only men out of a people so brought up, could be their teachers’ (Lessing, 13).

¹⁰ ‘The miracles which He performed for the Jews’, writes Lessing, ‘the prophecies which He caused to be recorded through them, were surely not for the few mortal Jews, in whose time they had happened and been recorded: He had His intentions therein in reference to the whole Jewish people, to the entire Human Race, which, perhaps, is destined to remain on earth forever, though every individual Jew and every individual man die forever’ (Lessing, 17).

¹¹ Lessing, 5

¹² This is the description of literary works Melville offers in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, Editors Hayford, Harrison and Sealts, Merton M. Jr, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 62.Google Scholar

¹³ Bouwsma, O. K., Without Proof or Evidence, edited and introduced by Craft, J. L. and Hustwit, Ronald E., (Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1984)Google Scholar, ix.

¹⁴ Ibid., viii.

¹⁵ The lines of Bernard Harrison's are from his new as yet unpublished work What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

¹⁶ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Public and Private Occasions, ed., Klagge, James C. and Nordmann, Alfred (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 157.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Lessing, 15–16. Wittgenstein glosses this notion when, after reading Lessing, he writes in his diary: ‘The sermon can be the precondition of belief, but in itself it cannot aim to impel belief. (If these words could attach one to belief, other words could also attach one to belief.) Believing begins with Believing’ (Public and Private Occasions, 159).

¹⁸ Wittgenstein's remarks at 4.462 further support the opening claim of 4.461 that tautology and contradiction show that they say nothing, or do not stand in a ‘presenting relation’ to the actual world: ‘Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality (der Wirklichkeit)’ he writes. ‘They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none’.

¹⁹ See the Tractatus, 4.462: ‘In the tautology the conditions of agreement with the world – the presenting relations – cancel one another, so that it stands in no presenting relation to reality’ and 6.2: ‘The propositions of mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions’.

²⁰ Engelmann's explanation of why an equation is a mathematical tautology forms part of his explication of the Tractatus, as he had it from Wittgenstein when they spent time together in Olmutz in 1916. Engelmann, Paul, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 105–106.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid., 105–6. I am indebted to the philosopher David Charles McCarty and Yeshiva University undergraduate honors student Leah Goldberg for helping me to understand the ways in which tautologies have the qualities of equations p(q) but do not have an entirely symmetrical relationship with equations (p = q) as I mistakenly assumed in an early draft of this paper.

²² Tractatus, 4.024.

²³ Regarding Wittgenstein's poetic style we might say, for example, that the density and cadence of his remarks both encourage a reader's feeling of having grasped his meaning and make holding on to that feeling impossible.

²⁴ Tractatus, 4.031–4.032.

²⁵ Notebooks, 3.9.14.

²⁶ This view of the Tractatus is relatively widespread, though in order to represent the position I have here selected phrases from Pears', DavidParadox and Platitude in Wittgenstein's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–2, and xCrossRefGoogle Scholar. The description of Wittgenstein's ‘attractive but ultimately unsatisfactory’ view that ‘propositions were pictures of reality’ is from the back cover of Pears', D. F. and McGuinness, B. F.’ translation of Wittgenstein's’ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge, 1961/1974).Google Scholar

²⁷ Engelmann, Paul, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 106, 115Google Scholar. Wittgenstein always contended that the work of philosophy was undertaken in discussion, and the view that the Tractatus was intended for a very particular audience with whom Wittgenstein hoped to speak does go some way toward explaining why Wittgenstein was so depressed when both Frege and Russell failed to understand it.

²⁸ As Wittgenstein writes in Notebooks 1912–1914, ‘if logic can be completed without answering certain questions, then it must be completed without answering them’ (4.9.14).

²⁹ Notebooks, 22.8.14.

³⁰ Notebooks, 19.9.14 and 27.9.14.

³¹ ‘Logic must take care of itself’ is the first line of the Notebooks and appears in the Tractatus at 5.473. The insight that a proposition shows what it pictures before the speakers of a language subject it to any kind of assessment is as Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison suggest, the ‘leitmotiv’ of the Tractatus and its accompanying volume, Notebooks 1914–1916. Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–3.Google Scholar

³² Notebooks, 20.9.14.

³³ Notebooks, 20.9.14.

³⁴ Notebooks, 29.10.14.

³⁵ ‘Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.’ Notebooks, 13.10.14, Cf. Tractatus, 5.473.

³⁶ As Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks, ‘the logical identity between sign and thing signified consists in its not being permissible to recognize more or less in the sign than in what it signifies.’ (4.9.14) Or, since a sign is only a sign if it has sense, a sign and the situation it purports to represent – how things stand if the sign has sense – must be indistinguishable in respect to their total logical content.

³⁷ Philosophical Investigations, §89. That logic lies at the bottom of all the sciences is also what Wittgenstein means to indicate when he writes in the Tractatus that language itself prevents any logical mistake. ‘That logic is apriori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically’ (5.4731).

³⁸ Notebooks, 29.9.14: ‘In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally’. Cf. Tractatus, 4.031: ‘In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment’. If this idea is as essential to the work of the Tractatus as I believe it to be, we ought to give serious consideration to what is misleading about the way Pears and McGuiness translate this line: ‘In a proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment’. The strangeness of this translation has to do with the way Wittgenstein's remark has been put in the service of empiricism. One does not construct a proposition by experiment, or by way of worldly trials. Rather, and as Wittgenstein's says, a proposition is put together experimentally, which is to say it is put together without checking it against reality. We can assume Wittgenstein employed this non-empirical use of ‘experiment’ because it was the version he learned from Claude Bernard, whose Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine Wittgenstein considered required reading for students of logic. ‘In teaching man’ writes the great 19^th century physiologist, ‘experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations. Here is, indeed, the one goal of all the sciences’. Bernard, Claude, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 28.Google Scholar

³⁹ Notebooks, 19.9.14 That the signs of our language do indeed have definite meanings is, Wittgenstein insists, perhaps their most interesting feature. Moreover the scandal that the sentences of natural science should be so unclear in this regard – a critical point Wittgenstein learned from Frege – is what ought to make them utterly uninteresting to philosophers. Though it is clearly mischievous to say that the sentences of natural science are not properly part of what we call ‘language,’ I mean here to indicate that a scientist's view of language is – in broad strokes – a view according to which the central business of language is to make true or false assertions.

⁴⁰ Tractatus, 6.53.

⁴¹ To be fair, it was from Frege that Wittgenstein first learned to distinguish propositions proper (the ‘sentences of natural science’) from elucidations; it was Frege who taught Wittgenstein to think about sentences.

⁴² Tractatus, 4.03.

⁴³ Tractatus, 4.031.

⁴⁴ Tractatus, 4.032 italics added.

⁴⁵ ‘This book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.’

⁴⁶ Tractatus, 4.1121.

⁴⁷ In his Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: ‘I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own’. What should be clear to readers is the trouble Wittgenstein took, in both his books, to demonstrate the way in which understanding is itself an educative or corrective practice – that the event of understanding is not only something that philosophy needs to defend, but is itself a way of doing philosophy.

⁴⁸ As quoted in Monk, Ray, How To Read Wittgenstein (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005)Google Scholar, 33.

⁴⁹ For more explicit discussion of the burden of authorship, see Kenneth Dauber's analysis of American writing from its beginnings to the Civil War, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Tractatus, 3.12.

⁵¹ Tractatus, 3.12–3.141.

⁵² Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’ to the Tractatus, 7, tr. Ogden.

⁵³ Russell, Bertrand, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: The philosophy of logical atomism and other essays, 1914–19 (London: George Allen & Unwin), 163.Google Scholar Also quoted in Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison, Word and World, 74. Wittgenstein's remarks in the Notebooks suggest that he was both amused and dismayed by Russell's sense of what was self-evident or what ‘goes without saying’.

⁵⁴ Okshevsky, Walter C., ‘Wittgenstein on Agency and Ability: Consequences for Rationality and Criticalness,’ Philosophy of Education, 1992Google Scholar. See also Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ This reorienting phrase is from Kenneth Dauber's essay, ‘Beginning at the Beginning in Genesis’, from his co-edited volume (with Walter Jost) Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 331.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Frege, Gottlob, The Foundations of Arithmetic, second revised edition, (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1980), 1.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Morris, Wittgenstein and the Tractatus (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 22Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Empson is writing about Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (Empson, William, ‘Tom Jones’ in Fielding, ed. Paulson, Ronald, Prentice Hall, 1962, 135Google Scholar.) His idea that a great book becomes more interesting when you attend to its thesis can still be put to useful service in relation to those philosophers (sometimes described as presenting ‘a new Wittgenstein’, or a ‘resolute’ reading) who seem unable to hear an argument in the Tractatus.

⁵⁹ Michael Morris, 11.

⁶⁰ The propositions/tautologies of the Tractatus are as follows:

1. 1.

   1. The world is all that is the case.

2. 2.

   2. What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.

3. 3.

   3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.

4. 4.

   4. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

5. 5.

   5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)

6. 6.

   6. The general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)]. This is the general form of a proposition.

7. 7.

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

⁶¹ Tractatus, 4.024.

⁶² Perhaps that is harder to remember when, unlike the rallying call with which the Notebooks begin, ‘logic must take care of itself’, the opening declarative sentence of the Tractatus feels like a proposition of natural science – when what it ‘says’ (that the world is everything that is the case) appears to turn it into a proposition in the Russellian sense. Many readers are reassured by the idea that Wittgenstein's first proposition has assertoric content, or that unlike the tautological proposition ‘logic must take care of itself’ it doesn't circle round and round on imaginary axes – that it isn't sustained by the force of its own style.

⁶³ McCarty, David Charles, ‘Undoubted truth’. Philosophy of Education 1992Google Scholar. Proceedings of the 48^th Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, ed. Hanan Alexander (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1993), 172–76.

⁶⁴ Tractatus, 4.0031, (tr., Ogden).

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ See Rudolph Haller's careful discussion of Mauthner in ‘Philosophy and the Critique of Language: Wittgenstein and Mauthner’, Questions on Wittgenstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 57–73.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Ibid., 60.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 59.

⁶⁹ Notebooks, 3.9.14, and Tractatus, 5.552.

⁷⁰ This way of describing the relationship that does not interest Wittgenstein is borrowed from Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison. Word and World, 3.

⁷¹ The idea that there are no propositions of logic is Paul Engelmann's summary of a point Wittgenstein repeatedly made when he verbally walked Engelmann through his work in the Tractatus. Memoirs, 102.

⁷² Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: tr. Pears and McGuiness (New York: Routledge, 1961), 6.54.Google Scholar