Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
This is a short, strange book made of numbered sentences, one after another, like steps. Wittgenstein asks a simple question: what can words really say about the world? A sentence, he says, pictures a fact, the way a map pictures a road. Some things can be said clearly. Some things, like what matters most in life, cannot be put into words at all, and there we must be quiet.
Wittgenstein wrote most of this book as a soldier in the First World War, in notebooks kept at the front, and it was published in 1921. It is not built like other philosophy books. There are no chapters. Instead there are seven main propositions, numbered 1 to 7, and under each a tree of shorter comments, numbered 1.1, 1.11, 2.01 and so on, each one explaining the step above it.
The thought runs like this. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. A sentence pictures a fact when it shares the fact's shape, and a sentence that pictures a possible fact can be true or false. Put together, language can say everything that facts allow. But logic itself, and ethics, and the meaning of life, cannot be stated in sentences. They show themselves instead.
Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein's teacher and friend, wrote the introduction, and C. K. Ogden made the English translation. Near the end Wittgenstein says his own sentences are a ladder to climb and then throw away, and the book closes with its famous seventh step: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Few short books have been argued about more.
Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, a short, dense, numbered chain of propositions about language, logic and the world itself. It opens with the claim that the world is everything that is the case, argues that what can be said at all can be said clearly, and ends by asking silence where speech fails. This shelf holds C. K. Ogden's English translation, with Bertrand Russell's introduction.
Scope first: the Project Gutenberg source, eBook 5740, is a German and English parallel text, prepared from TeX, and its transcriber's note explains that in the original, even pages carried the German and odd pages the English. This shelf keeps only the English: C. K. Ogden's translation, with Bertrand Russell's introduction. The German text is not shelved here.
Russell's introduction states the problem the book attacks. Wittgenstein, he says, is concerned with the conditions a logically perfect language would have to fulfil: sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols, and uniqueness of meaning. The business of language is to assert or deny facts, and between a sentence's structure and a fact's structure there must be something in common, which cannot be said in language, but only shown. Russell then follows the book's road, from symbolism and logical inference through theory of knowledge and the principles of physics to ethics and the mystical.
Wittgenstein's preface warns that the book is not a textbook and may be understood only by those who have already thought similar thoughts. Its whole meaning, he says, could be summed up thus: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Edition: C. K. Ogden's English translation, with Bertrand Russell's introduction. Only the English text is shelved; the German parallel text of the original edition is not included. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 5740 (TeX source).
The first chapter
1 The world is everything that is the case.
[Note: The decimal figures as numbers of the separate propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the emphasis laid upon them in my exposition. The propositions n.1, n.2, n.3, etc., are comments on proposition No. n; the propositions n.m1, n.m2, etc., are comments on the proposition No. n.m; and so on.]
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
Source: Project Gutenberg. German original 1921. Author died 1951. Ogden translation 1922. Public domain in the United States. Share this book: WhatsApp
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