Whereof One Cannot Speak

The mystical, for Wittgenstein, is not the supernatural but the fact that the world exists at all. How the world is does not belong to the mystical; that it is — the existence of the world itself — exceeds anything a proposition can say. Ethics, similarly, does not belong to the world of facts. It cannot be stated in any empirical proposition. If there is an ethical value, it must lie outside the totality of facts — and therefore outside language.

Wittgenstein calls ethics transcendental: like logic, it is a condition of the world rather than a feature of it. An ethical proposition — "this is good," "you must not" — would have to state a fact, but no fact can carry the weight of an unconditional ought. The attempt to put ethics into words produces only pseudo-propositions, sentences with the grammatical form of assertions but with no propositional content. Silence here is not ignorance but accuracy.

What matters most shows itself in the way a person lives, in the aesthetic quality of a work, in the expression of a face. These are not coded messages that a better language could decode; they are forms of manifestation irreducible to the factual. The Tractatus is a peculiar book: it says that its own central insights cannot be said, and that its own propositions — strictly speaking — are senseless. Having read it, one must climb past it. The silence at the end is not empty but full.

The propositions on ethics and the mystical appear in 6.4–6.522. The "ladder" passage is 6.54. Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing runs throughout the book; it is most explicitly stated in 4.1212.