introduction to wittgensteins

project
Wittgenstein had, to say the least, an interesting life.
Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 to one of the richest families in Austria (his father was
a cultured Brahms and Schumann were family friends steel magnate).
Wittgenstein was very cultivated and clever from an early age and went on to study mechanical
engineering at the Techinsche Hochschule in Berlin, to prepare him for the day when he took
over the family business, and engineering research in Manchester in 1908, after which, out of
the blue, he moved to Cambridge in 1911 and asked Bertrand Russell to teach him in
philosophy.
In 1913, Wittgenstein worked alone in a cottage on a fjord in Norway, but then enlisted in the
Austrian Army as a rank-and-file soldier with the breakout of World War i.
He was a prisoner of war at the end of the war, but it is known that at that time he had a
completed version of the Tractatus.
Russell did not know what to think of Wittgenstein on their first meeting (whether he was a
madman or a genius), but just two years after that meeting Russell wrote that he could not
continue with philosophy because Wittgensteins objections to the Principia Mathematica were so
devastating.
Books to look for:
Routelidge Guide to the Tractatus.
The False Prison by David Pears.
Notes on Logic, Notes Dictated to Moore, Notebooks, Prototractatus, the Tractatus, Letters and
later work by Wittgenstein.
Anscombe on Wittgenstein.
A Companion to Wittgenteins Tractatus.
Reality and Representation in Wittgensteins Tractatus by Zalabardo.
The german book Jos mentioned.
Wittgenstein seems to be trying to convince us of the truth of his doctrines in the Tractatus, but it
is probably more accurate to assume that he expects us to read the book as a ladder to truths
that we must then throw away eventually.
Wittgenstein tells us towards the end that if you really understand the book youve just read,
youll recognise that it is nonsensical.
The traditional response to Wittgensteins claim that the Tractatus is nonsense is to take it with
a pinch of salt, a response that uses Wittgensteins own idea that there is a difference between
what a proposition and what a proposition shows.
This approach claims that the propositions of the Tractatus manage to express inexpressible
truths through nonsense so that we arrive at truths in a way other than through the
propositions themselves.
Another approach, however, is to read his claim literally: that there is no such thing as
illuminating nonsense and that the Tractatus should be understood as such.
Wittgenstein claims that from the realisation that the Tractatus is nonsense we can learn higher
truths (that we will see the world aright), but how would this actually work?
We do not seem to be intellectually better off by realising that the propositions of the
Tractatus are nonsense, but rather if we realise that philosophy itself is nonsense,
highlighting another possible interpretation.
The claim here is that recognising Wittgensteins answers as nonsensical means that
philosophy itself doesnt make sense.
But how does a nonsensical answer to a philosophical issue translate to meaning that the
issue itself is nonsensical?
Suppose Wittgenstein convinces you that his ideas, including his claims to nonsense, are
correct and that you understand his ideas entirely, it would seem that philosophy could

(legitimately by its own rules) convince you of something thats nonsense, but this
requires that we have previously come to see the propositions of the Tractatus as
providing the correct answers to philosophical questions.
The whole project is that Wittgenstein starts off by showing us ideas that we recognise as
correct, and then shows us later that it follows from their correctness that they are
nonsense.
With this realisation of nonsense, we simultaneously gain a realisation that philosophy is just
the illusion of sense placed over and representing a nonsensical world, meaning that we are
free to break out from philosophys restrictions.
Wittgenstein saw himself as engaging in philosophy, a statement that must be said clearly since
it might otherwise be thought that he might be engaging in something other than philosophy in an
attempt to disprove philosophy.
The philosophy in the Tractatus can be thought of as an activity governed by rules that single
out certain propositions both as expressing correct doctrines and as meaninglessness.
Wittgensteins later work can be thought of as answering the same question posed in the
Tractatus but completely differently, in a different way, and from a different perspective.
Even if we accept the new interpretation of Wittgenstein's nonsense, even if we accept that the
project of philosophy is nonsensical, Wittgenstein still engages in philosophy to show this
because his readers are still climbing up the ladder, so to speak, of philosophy before we can
throw it away and we must thus engage with the Tractatus in kind.
Wittgenstein does not establish his claim to nonsense independently of the propositions he
claims are nonsense, but rather establishes a theory and shows that it is nonsense from the
consequences of it.
If his theory is correct, then his theory is nonsense.
The claim that the Tractatus is nonsense requires that we accept its theories as correct,
meaning that we can think of it as making sense if we reject some of its propositions.
Wittgenstein thought that he could succeed in his project because even though he is convinced
that the book is nonsense, we will think on first reading not only that its theories make sense, but
that they are true.
He may succeed in convincing us of the Tractatus nonsensicality because beforehand
Wittgenstein too was a victim of the illusion we, the readers, are also under; he thought that
philosophical questions are legitimate and that he had the right answers to them and by
understanding his movement away from this he thinks that we will come to agree with him: that
philosophy is nonsense.
Wittgenstein was obsessed with death throughout his early life, thinking that he would suddenly
die at any moment, disturbed by the suicide of his brother, and thus lived as if each day was his
last.
He thus put every philosophical thought he ever had into the Tractatus because he wanted it to
be his last testament.
Some of its ethical propositions appear in close quarters to its logical propositions, but there
are sometimes few links between them.
The core notion of the Tractatus is how language and the mind represent the world, following on
to ask what language, the mind and the world must be like to be represented as they are to us.
This is known as the Tractarian Account of Representation and Reality (TARR).
Wittgenstein seems to present a coherent theory of language and how language represents the
world to us presented with three components:
One might think propositions represent the world, but Wittgenstein thinks that the world is
actually represented through elementary propositions, more fundamental propositions, that in
turn are represented by regular propositions (and act as truth functions on elementary
propositions).
Elementary propositions are combinations of names which refer to objects (and objects are
simple) and it is combinations of objects that constitute states of affairs.
States of affairs are the world-side correlate of elementary propositions, combinations of
which constitute the possible and actual state of the world and propositions respectively.
A possible state of the world is a complete state of affairs.

 States of affairs are independent of each other and any possible combination of them in
totality constitutes a possible state of the world.
In other words, language is connected to propositions, which are analysed into elementary
propositions, which are connected to states of affairs, which in turn are (de)analysed into
names, into objects, into states of affairs, and, finally, into states of the world.
Language and the world are connected at a low level.
Any possible state of affairs that actually obtains is a fact, facts being elementary and states
of affairs being based upon them.
Names
are, for Wittgenstein, a technical term that cannot include anything that we would call

names because otherwise his theory would not work the way he wants it to.