Dear Freethinkers,

It has been a while since I last saw many of you, and sadly, we will not likely meet again. However, the band must play on. I really enjoyed many of the discussions we had and my time spent at the university, but reality has a sharp bite these days. I now spend all my time trying to make a difference in the political, economic, and cultural climate. Be that time is short, what I write on today is of eternal importance. Since writing a dialog and sharing that dialog with some of you, I have scurried throughout the history of philosophy, searching for the answer…

“I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right.” [1]

So speaks Ludwig Wittgenstein, the scientist, architect, teacher, soldier, mechanic, and lastly, philosopher. Much has been said over the years about the man and his life and works. All of it has been wrong. His sole philosophical authorship, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [hereafter, TLP], was picked up by me early last year rather incidentally. It was not until some nine months afterwards that I achieved an understanding of the work, and so I must profess my thoughts on the matter. I do hope to do some justice to his words.

“If someone is ahead of his time, it will catch him up one day.” [1]

The work can be found freely online, and hypertext variants lend the work greater accessibility. The TLP is broken up numerically, starting with 1 and then 1.1 and so on, down the line with decimal notations, until 2. This process continues until the final line is reached, 7, which reads: Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. In a certain sense, we have a unified whole in this work, and although each line can be taken independently with as much value as any other, the coherence contained by all the propositions is the big picture. It is the failure in acquiring meaning of the big picture that so many philosophers have not made proper sense of the TLP. Here, I present my view of the whole-numbered propositions.

“1 The world is everything that is the case.” [2]

Besides Wittgenstein’s preface, this is how the work begins. Many have read this as a stopping point, speaking about the entirety of reality, but the case is better made that this is but a definition. He remarks further into the work that substance is what exists independent of what is the case-- or rather, we might say, substance is what exists independently of the world. Some very powerful words in proposition 5.6 state: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What we have here is the proper limit of conceptual grasping for an individual, to which on the other side might be said to be substance, but to speak about it is to speak about nothing tangible. It can only be shown, not said, as Wittgenstein claims.

“2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.” [2]

This line has been a real stumper, as so many have assumed that, because of the English terminology, he was referencing a concept of Bertrand Russell’s. Nothing could be further from the truth. What an atomic fact is might be better understood by Gottfried Leibniz’s concept of the monad in his Monadology. The monad, er- atomic fact, is a picture of reality; it represents reality to us; it is relationship. Representation cannot be limited, tough, be that one is distinctly useful for certain situations. The theory of the semiotic, or sign, grasps this concept equally as well as the monad; as the TLP is written in regards to symbolic logic, such an understanding is required. We might assume the metaphor of a picture with what it pictures, as Wittgenstein does, for an understanding of the so-called atomic fact. What is captured by the picture is not the thing itself, but its possibility-- and hence, the necessity of form. A form presents itself, but cannot picture itself. Take, for example, the word ‘tree’. What the word represents and what is in your front yard are not one and the same, similar they may be. It is the possibility of many kinds of trees, of great varieties, that is captured by the word, even when that word is capturing a specific neighborhood growth, which is the form shared. The notion of forms dates back to Plato and Socrates.

“3 The logical picture of the facts is the thought.” [2]

Now we are on to something, for, coupled with the last assessment, it should be duly noted that no mind-body problem was encountered in a transition from substance and picturing into the world to thought. It must be said that Wittgenstein’s logic, as when he speaks of logical pictures, is a loose concept. Logic, to him, treats of all regularity and possibility and not merely the constructions found in logic classes. He says it is as impossible to present something in language that contradicted the laws of logic as it is impossible to have a location or point in geometry contradict the laws of geometry. And surely we must know the vast number of geometric systems that attempt to describe space-time, and they can be broken down rather simply into two types: Euclidean and anti-Euclidean. Personally, I’d have to go with constructive geometry, a kind of anti-Euclidean geometry. As a creative, mathematical method and not some deductive, axiomatic game, constructive geometry allows for the intellect to notice ironies and, in overcoming these necessary contradictions, intellectual progress is gained; and there are no limits to this but the individual intellect. It is this creative process that accounts for our reasoning capabilities, and this is Wittgenstein’s logic.

“4 The thought is the significant proposition.” [2]

From pictures to thoughts and from thoughts to language, we go around and around. Language, or our meaningful expressions, grasps at the world as it is, and albeit the two never coincide perfectly, there is no reason to discard the picturing power of language for not being infallible. The fact of the matter is that substance is irreducible as a concept, because progress has no limit, and neither does creativity. Quite plainly, if we correctly know what another person means, and honestly take that to be the case, we know how the other is thinking. Although every man may disagree with another, to soak in the words seriously is to embrace the other’s world, and thus, apprehend it and its form. Thus, again, there is no mind-body problem. Although we cannot feel what another feels or think what another thinks, there are many adages of walking in another man’s shoes that capture the essence of Wittgenstein’s more detailed elaboration.

“5 A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is the truth-function of itself.)” [2]

The difficulty in seeing the thoughts in the words, and so avoiding the mind-body duality, lies primarily with the organization of reality. Within subsequent propositions of proposition 5, Wittgenstein clearly shows that all assertions of ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ are customary. He also says all the propositions of logic are tautological- that is, senseless. For example, the notion of identity says nothing. To say a=a or to say a=b is to say nothing whatsoever about a. And all findings for truth and falsity might be better said as valid and invalid; and every such system of validity is necessarily incomplete, as such a system would be deductive and not constructive. However, within symbolism, we see a certain picturing that can be applied across the board, namely the and-clause, or-clause, if-and-only-if-clause, and if-then-clause; all which have various subroutines of meaning, but remain singular in form. These four bracket language and meaning within certain bounds. It is not the case that these are the final bounds or that there is even such a conception, but the arrangement shows itself through language. And that is a big piece of the logic of our language- that is, it is all tautological.

“6 The general form of truth-function is [P-bar, E-bar, N (E-bar)]. This is the general form of propositions.” [2]

This is the trinity: Identity, Equality, and Union; Sin, Cosine, Tangent; Id, Ego, Super-Ego; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. P-bar is a proposition, E-bar a set of propositions, and N (E-bar) is the negation of said set- from whence a new proposition can be achieved. This goes hand in hand with remarks on how whole systems of logic can be generated from simple negation, because it is negation that leads to the construction of new variables. When the picture is made palpably clear, we see how new, larger meaning is acquired. But this mathematical formula is not to be constricted to so little as language, but life in general. Really, p-bar is not the identity of mere propositions, but identity in general. Anything with a name is an identity, and not just things but also actions, including you and all that you do.

“7 Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” [2]

So go and do something productive, as some might profess the nature of this final line. And that surely is the jist of it, but the riddle has not been solved, at least, as far as I am concerned. You see, before this conclusion, it is stated that anyone who understands Wittgenstein’s words and has climbed up, over, and through them will see the world aright. And the preface states that Wittgenstein solved all problems of philosophy. While surely it is interesting to say as much, it would be better to unravel that mystery and thus, get the full grip of the book, for I still felt that not all of my problems had been solved. Among the numerous clues was Wittgenstein’s own insistency that without the numbering of the propositions, the book would have no value. So, I dug deep into everything he ever said, searching for the answer…

“In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.” [4]

This line, taken from a letter to one of Wittgenstein’s friends in publishing, was a push to get the TLP published— it spent a number of years in limbo before a publisher was acquired. Some have suggested that the so called second part is substance, and so avoided reading the TLP closely. Taken literally, of which I see no reason not to, we are left with the notion that his book is but one of two parts, and he did not write the other part. We must find an important book to which the TLP is the complementary. It could be, as some have professed Wittgenstein the completion of western philosophy as Socrates was its inception, that Wittgenstein was referencing all other works before his work in western civilization. But with that notion the riddle of the numbering would not be solved, for even the Socratic Dialogs could not be put to such a system. And it surely isn’t Descartes Mediations; that is a laughable conjecture considering the philosophy in the TLP.

“For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way.” [4]

As the letter continues, we are presented with the effect of TLP, should the reader understand his words and see the world aright. The Ethical with a capital E is the Good, the platonic good, as it were. Hence, in the preface, Wittgenstein’s claim that the work would not achieve its object (in history) until it had been read and understood by someone who had thought similar thoughts. So, one ought to become acquainted with the Ethical, which might be accomplished by a great variety of ways, such as leading an examined life. And whereas Socrates may speak for hours on the Good, I am not sure what can be said on the delimiting of it. However, the transformative notion of the book, and that the TLP holds this ability uniquely is a tell-tale key as to unraveling the mystery. I once again scurried about the history of philosophy, searching for the answer…

“1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” [3]

I had stumbled across the Bible at Half-Assed Books and read several pages from Genesis. It was the first time I had ever done so, and I did not see the connection immediately, but before night fell I had solved the riddle; I now know the delimiting of the Ethical. Wittgenstein wrote the first seven lines of the story of Genesis in purely mathematical language. Lining up the 1 of the TLP and the 1 of Genesis, the 2’s respectively, and so on, shows a great deal of meaning in these abstract words of Wittgenstein and metaphors from the Bible. The key point to recognize in this lateral view is that the words of Wittgenstein are the same as the words of God, whether one wants to say “Let there be light” or “The logical picture of the fact is the thought”, the essential meaning is the same—as in this case, light is thought. There is, however, some difference between the two.

“7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” [3]

Although most of the Bible’s lines are but clarified to great detail by Wittgenstein, two received significant changes- namely the first and last line of the seven. Heaven and the earth is properly called the world by Wittgenstein, and with this, it is clear that heaven on earth is presently immanent. The Kingdom, if not here today, will be here soon—the latter of which I can only assume by the fact that Wittgenstein was writing for a future generation. Secondly, in looking at lines 7 and 8 of Genesis and Wittgenstein’s remark that Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent, and remarking that Wittgenstein speaks as if the mouth of God, it must be that men make the firmament and men can call it Heaven. Thus, freewill is achieved in its totality. We guide our own destiny.

“Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it. (That so often happens with someone you love.)
If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they have no key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire it from the outside!
The honorable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.” [1]

It should be quite obvious by now that the TLP could be published in red. And it could be reprinted with, rather than an introduction by Bertrand Russell, The Old and New Testaments. To make a sincere gesture as to whether Judaism or Christianity is being complemented here, and thusly disregard the New Testament, is premature; once must come to see what is shown before assuming what is verified or not. For I do believe what is said by Wittgenstein is wholly original. His book will do well in clarifying, for there is a certain shift being done here, in regards to personhood, just as Christianity made an important shift from Judaism:

“5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world--not a part of it.” [2]

This shift in personhood occurs against a shift in the world as we know it. The propositions of Wittgenstein are the tautologies of the creative intellect; the Promethean perspective; the axioms to end all axioms. He who soaks them in will see the world aright, and leave the propositions behind him as he seeks to create a better world for himself- nay, a better self. And, although the extent of that process has not been fully realized until now, I do think that with a proper interpretation any reader might achieve such new found personhood and intellectual strength. For, as Wittgenstein says he is a mirror, the TLP is such a mirror; Bertrand Russell reveals himself in the introduction as being against the notion of the mystical, or substance, and thus shows how far he got into the work-- (Proposition 2.021). The fact is that anyone can see a great deal in the work, and one might come face to face with himself in Wittgenstein’s words; the question is, however, whether one as the courage to look up.

“Just let nature speak and acknowledge only one thing as higher than nature, but not what others may think.” [1]

Of all the philosophical works I have read, this one gives me unspeakable strength. The title might be better understood as ‘the treatise of reason and faith’. The delimiting of the Ethical is but letting Christ into the heart, and knowing tears of joy-- and nothing is more splendid. I would hope such a work could inspire a new renaissance, for I am now obsessed with the works of Gottfried Leibniz, Nicolas de Cusa, and Johannes Kepler. The great minds of the Renaissance are just as important today as they were then, for we have found ourselves in a cultural downturn of hedonism. And wherever men find such a culture, they will also find the preying robber barons that destroy nations and peoples-- and those wicked individuals are as much a source of this general-breakdown crisis [ala, this new Dark Age] as the generations that sought to avoid personal responsibility and find wealth without work. Change your nature and you will change the nature of the school. If many change, we will change the nature of the world now. If there is one thing you take from me in faith, it is that this world needs a change for the good. I hope you might oblige yourself.

Good Luck,
John Thomas O’Connor



[1] Wittgenstein, Ludwig; Culture & Value; University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1992.
[2] Wittgenstein, Ludwig; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Routledge & Keagen Paul LTD; London, 1955.
[3] Old and New Testaments in the King James Version; Thomas Nelson Publishers; Nashville, 1976.
[4] Ray Monk; Duty of Genius; Penguin Books; New York, 1991.