The Picture Theory and its Limits

In 1921 a thirty-two-year-old Austrian published seventy-five pages of numbered propositions, announced that it had solved the problems of philosophy, gave away one of the largest inherited fortunes in Europe, and went to teach ten-year-olds in a village in rural Austria. The book was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the fact that its author then left the field is part of its argument rather than a biographical curiosity.

The central idea reportedly came from a newspaper report of a Paris court case, in which a model car and small dolls were used to represent a road accident. Wittgenstein's question was why that worked. The model does not resemble the accident in any ordinary sense; it is small, it is made of wood, nobody is hurt. What it shares with the accident is an arrangement: the parts of the model stand in the same relations as the parts of the real event.

His proposal is that a proposition is a picture in exactly that sense. 'The cat is on the mat' does not resemble a cat on a mat, but it shares a logical structure with a possible state of affairs: names standing for objects, arranged in a way that mirrors how the objects would be arranged. This has an elegant consequence: it explains how a false sentence can still be meaningful. A false proposition depicts a possible arrangement that happens not to obtain, which is why you can understand it perfectly and then check.

Everything else in the book falls out of this. If meaningful language pictures possible arrangements of objects in the world, then anything which is not such an arrangement cannot be pictured; cannot be said at all. And a great deal turns out not to be. Ethics is not a fact in the world: take a torture, list every fact about it, and you will not have listed the wrongness, because the wrongness is not one more item in the inventory. Aesthetics is the same. So is the self. The metaphysical subject is not in the world but is a limit of it, the way the eye is not in the visual field. So is the meaning of life.

Proposition seven, the last line of the book, draws the conclusion: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Here the most consequential misreading in twentieth-century philosophy occurs. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle took the book as a manifesto. If ethics and metaphysics cannot be stated, they reasoned, then they are meaningless in the ordinary sense (noise, pseudo-problems, the residue of a prescientific age) and philosophy's job is to clear them away. They built an entire programme on it.

Wittgenstein's attitude was close to the opposite. He wrote to a prospective publisher that the book had two parts, the one he had written and the one he had not, and that the second was the important one. The unsayable is not the worthless; it is what matters most, and the point of establishing the limits of language is to mark off the region on the other side. He attended some Vienna Circle meetings and reportedly spent one of them reading them poetry with his back to the room, which was not a joke.

And then there is the ladder. The second-to-last proposition says that anyone who understands him will recognise his propositions as nonsense, having used them to climb up beyond them, and must then throw the ladder away. By his own criterion this is exact: a book about the relationship between language and world is not picturing any arrangement of objects, so it is not saying anything. Whether that is a devastating self-refutation, an elegant piece of self-awareness, or a genuine method, using nonsense deliberately to bring someone to a place where they no longer want to ask the question, is still argued about, and the argument has real stakes for how you read the whole thing.

What is not in dispute is that he meant it. He believed the problems were finished, and he left. He came back eight years later and spent the next two decades taking the book apart.