BY OTHERS◆Sunday, April 29, 1951

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

A typed folio from the Nachlass. One masthead, one rotating remark, eight folded chapters - the Tractatus lattice, the language-games, seeing-as, family resemblance, the beetle in the box, the philosopher's method, a small museum of the life, and the line drawn at silence.

tags: philosophy, language, logic, ethics, wittgenstein

∮ ∞ ∮

author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
filed: Sunday, April 29, 1951
revised: April 24, 2026
words: 1,640
reading: ~9 min

252 remarks, filterable by work and searchable by string. Toggle DE in the search bar to see the original German alongside the translation, where available.

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Wittgenstein, Compiled

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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)Original German: Die Wahrheit der Tautologie ist gewiss, des Satzes möglich, der Kontradiktion unmöglich

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)

remark №001 / 252

Vienna, 1889. Cambridge, 1951. An engineer turned logician turned schoolteacher turned architect turned professor, who wrote one book that closed the mouth of philosophy and another that opened it again, differently. What follows is eight folds - six of thought, one of life, one of silence.

§ I

The World

- Die Welt -

the Tractatus · 1913 – 1922

4 remarks · TractatusLattice

The world is all that is the case.

The world and life are one.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

The Tractatus is numbered by decimal - §N.1 comments on §N, §N.11 comments on §N.1, and so down. The shape of the book is the shape of a lattice.

TRACTATUSLogico-Philosophicus§1–§7, with commentary. Click a proposition to read it.

§1The world is all that is the case.−
1. §1.1The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
2. §1.11The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
3. §1.12For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
4. §1.13The facts in logical space are the world.
5. §1.2The world divides into facts.
6. §1.21Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
§2What is the case - a fact - is the existence of states of affairs.−
1. §2.01A state of affairs is a combination of objects.
2. §2.02Objects are simple.
3. §2.1We picture facts to ourselves.
4. §2.12A picture is a model of reality.
5. §2.1512It is laid against reality like a measure.
6. §2.18What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it - correctly or incorrectly - is logical form.
§3A logical picture of facts is a thought.−
1. §3.001A state of affairs is thinkable: what this means is that we can picture it to ourselves.
2. §3.1In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses.
3. §3.221Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words.
4. §3.328If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim.
§4A thought is a proposition with a sense.+
§5A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.+
§6The general form of a truth-function is [ p̄ , ξ̄ , N(ξ̄) ].+
§7What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

§ II

Language

- Die Sprache -

the Blue Book · the Investigations · 1931 – 1951

2 remarks · BuildersGame · LanguageGames · MeaningAsUse

The Tractatus closes its mouth. The Investigations opens it again, but differently - no longer as a picture-theory of reality, but as a collection of small uses, habits, ordinary games. The first of them, the canonical one, is the builders.

❦   the builders · PI §2   ❦

click a word · A calls, B fetches the matching stone

- the building site is empty -

- the building site -

stones placed: 0

The builders are only one. PI §23 lists many more - orders, reports, riddles, jokes, prayers. A deck of small things people do with words.

PI §23How many kinds of sentence are there?There are countless kinds.

№ 1 / 14language-game

Giving orders and obeying them

The builder calls for "slab", "beam", "pillar" - the assistant brings them. Not a description of the world, but a move in the work.

example

"Slab." - and the slab is brought.

For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning, it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Take one word. See it used in four different sentences. The word does not change; its meaning does.

PI §43For a large class of cases - though not for all - the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

pick a word:

A game of chess lasted three hours.

⟶board-game, rule-bound competition

Don't look for what all games have in common. Look for family resemblances.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

§ III

Seeing-as

- Sehen-als -

Philosophical Investigations, Part II

2 remarks · DuckRabbit

Something he returns to in Part II of the Investigations: the same marks on paper, read first as one thing and then as another. The image he chose was Jastrow's duck-rabbit.

Jastrow's duck-rabbit (1899) — ❦ aspect-seeing · PI §II.xi ❦

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.

§ IV

Family

- Familienähnlichkeit -

PI §66 – §67

2 remarks · FamilyResemblance

Don't ask what all games share; look and see whether anything at all is common to them.

❦   family resemblance · PI §66   ❦

rules

skill

chance

physical

winners

competition

ball

board

children

solo

Chess

•

Football

•

Solitaire

•

Ring-a-roses

•

Tennis

•

Olympics

•

Roulette

•

Patience

•

hover a game or a feature · notice no column is full
- and yet every pair of games shares something

Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

§ V

The Beetle

- Der Käfer in der Schachtel -

PI §293 · On Certainty · 1950 – 1951

2 remarks · BeetleBoxes · HingePropositions

❦   the beetle · PI §293   ❦

minebeetle

yoursbeetle

hersbeetle

hisbeetle

theirsbeetle

click your box - the others cannot be opened. this is the point.

Doubt works only because there are other things not up for doubt. The doubted question turns on a hinge that does not turn.

On Certainty · §341 – §343Doubt swings on a hinge it cannot doubt

the hinge

There is a world. There are birds in it. My eyes see them.

the hinge

The earth has existed long before I was born.

the hinge

I am not a brain in a vat. The word "hand" has a normal use.

the hinge

I have a past. My memory is the kind of thing that gets things right.

Click a door. The hinge below it is the proposition the door swings on.

The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. […] If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.
- On Certainty, §341 – §343

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.

§ VI

The Philosopher

- Der Philosoph -

Notebooks · Philosophy · Culture & Value

3 remarks · CambridgeChalkboard

The method was out loud. He did not speak from notes. He would chalk a remark up, strike it through, begin again.

Trinity College · CambridgeIn his own hand - corrected

rev. № 1 / 5

The world is the totality of things.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

He did not speak from notes. He lectured as if to make the problem actually happen in front of us. He would sometimes stop, strike through what he had just said, and begin again.
- as recalled by his students, passim

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

§ VII

The Life

- Das Leben -

Culture & Value · Personal Recollections

5 stations · 4 remarks

He lived in five places that matter. An engineering hall in Manchester, a hut above a Norwegian fjord, an Austrian artillery post, a village schoolroom, a townhouse on Kundmanngasse. Each is a station; each produced an object.

Before the logic there was a propeller. In 1908 he went to Manchester to read engineering, and filed a British patent for an aeronautical airscrew before philosophy took him.

BRITISH PATENT OFFICE17 AUGUST 1911PATENT N° 27,087

An Improvement in Propellers applicable for Aerial MachinesManchester · 1910 - filed while reading engineering at Victoria University. He left two years later to study logic under Russell.

In 1913 he built a hut above a fjord in western Norway and spent the winter alone there, drafting the book that would become the Tractatus.

The Norwegian HutHe rowed across the fjord and climbed the rock to reach this door. Inside, he drafted the Tractatus. By most accounts the villagers called him den engelskmannen som vil være alene - the Englishman who wants to be alone.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

The next year the war began. He volunteered, and finished the Tractatus in an Italian POW camp.

Shadowbox - 1914 – 1918He finished the Tractatus in captivity, and sent the manuscript from Cassino to Russell.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

After the war he gave away the fortune he had inherited and took a post as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria. It did not end well.

Primary-school slateTrattenbach & Otterthal, Lower Austria · 1920 – 1926. After the inheritance was given away, he taught six-year-olds. It is said he struck a pupil hard enough to injure him, fled, and for years avoided the village.“I have not been a good teacher.”

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

Then, back in Vienna, he designed a house for his sister Gretl - austere, exact, the proportions fought over to the millimetre.

Haus WittgensteinVienna, 1926 – 1928 · for his sister GretlPhilosophy in stone. He insisted the builders raise one ceiling thirty millimetres. When they were finished, he insisted they raise it another thirty.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

❦   the ladder · Tractatus §6.54   ❦

§1

The world is all that is the case.

§2

What is the case - the fact - is the existence of states of affairs.

§3

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

§4

A thought is a proposition with a sense.

§5

A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

§6

The general form of a truth-function is [p̄, ξ̄, N(ξ̄)].

§7

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

click to throw the ladder away

§ VIII

Silence

- Schweigen -

Tractatus §6.522 – §7

the line between what can be said and what must be shown

What can be put on one side of the line and what, by its nature, must remain on the other.

§6.522 - §7What can be said · what must be shown

sayable- propositions with truth-values -

§1.1The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
§3A logical picture of facts is a thought.
§5A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
§5.6The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
§2.063The total reality is the world.
§4.024To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true.

can be written · weighed · shown to be true or false

showable- what makes itself manifest -

§6.44It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
§6.41The sense of the world must lie outside the world.
§6.421Ethics is transcendental.
§6.43The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.
§6.522There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.
§6.522They make themselves manifest.

… must not be said … can only be pointed at …

§7What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

L.W. / 1929Heretics Society · Cambridge · 17. xi.

A Lecture on Ethics

My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.

Nevertheless, it is a document, and the tendency which it is a document of is, I believe, the ultimate expression of the human mind.

- last words · Cambridge · 29. iv. 1951 -

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DACHVARD

Wittgenstein, Compiled

LUDWIGWITTGENSTEIN

The World

Language

Giving orders and obeying them

Seeing-as

Family

The Beetle

The Philosopher

The Life

Silence