WITTGENSTEIN.

WITTGENSTEIN. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”
(Translation in first comment.)

Comments

  1. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

    [N.b.: In September 2002 this post had ten comments, all of which were lost in the move from Blogger to MT; I seem to have added this one, reproducing the lost first comment, a year later. –LH, Aug. 2024]

  2. One might well be silent about what can’t be said. But the obverse to this statement, I always thought, may be: “What is real can not be said”, but only indicated.

    Despite Wittgenstein’s picture-perfect liguististic hope outlined in the ‘Tractatus’, he ended up rejecting Bertrand Russell’s ‘logically perfect language’, coming instead to write his ‘Philosophical Investigations’, and so, maybe paving the way for the overly subtle, self-reflexive deconstructivist machinations of a Jacque Derrida. But was he right?
    Revision may botch language, and so also whatever crossing it has with reality. Our own William Burroughs may have said as much, cautioning us all.

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