The Limits of Language

For the Tractatus, a proposition has sense insofar as it pictures a possible fact. A proposition that attempts to say something about the logical form of language — or about ethics, the subject, or the mystical — does not picture a fact and so says nothing at all. It is not false; it is senseless. Traditional metaphysics, for Wittgenstein, is an attempt to say the unsayable: to use language to step outside the conditions of its own meaningfulness and describe the view from nowhere.

What cannot be said is not therefore non-existent or unimportant. Logic, the pictorial form shared by language and world, the existence of objects, the self as the limit of the world — all these make language possible but cannot appear as its content. They are not hidden truths awaiting a better language; they are conditions that show themselves in every meaningful proposition without being asserted by any. The inexpressible manifests itself; it does not wait to be expressed.

The correct method of philosophy, Wittgenstein writes, is to say only what can be said — the propositions of natural science — and whenever someone attempts to say something metaphysical, to point out that they have given no meaning to certain signs. Philosophy's work is elucidatory rather than doctrinal: it shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle, leaving everything as it is. This therapeutic picture of philosophy would deepen in his later work but has its origin here.

The key propositions are 5.6 ("The limits of my language mean the limits of my world") and 6.53–6.54. The image of the fly-bottle appears explicitly only in the Investigations, but the therapeutic aspiration is already present in the Tractatus's closing remarks.