Two translations of Wittgenstein’s seminal work
TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Translated by Michael Beaney 208pp. Oxford World’s Classics. Paperback, £8.99 (US $11.95).
TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Translated by Alexander Booth 144pp. Penguin Classics. £14.99.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is the only work of philosophy ever to have given me nightmares. I was seventeen or eighteen, camping somewhere in the foothills of the Jura; my copy was a former library book with the faded stamp of some Oxford college on the inside cover. After a long introduction and a short foreword the body of the text was presented in a way I had never seen before: a set of numbered propositions, 1 through 7, with decimalized subpropositions (1.1, 1.2) and sub-sub-propositions (1.11, 1.12) elaborating on those that came before. The start of the work seemed clear enough: “1. the world is all that is the case”, “1.1 the world is the totality of facts, not of things” (in the Ogden/Ramsey translation). These building blocks are combined in the middle sections by means of some formidablelooking logical notation, Greek letters and strange curling brackets that, combined with the perfect clarity of individual propositions, represented to me the epitome of philosophical sophistication. These were, it seemed, the most profound questions, thought through with total and unforgiving rigour, a mirror held up to the structure of reality. Its truth seemed unassailable and definitive. Yet he writes just before his final proposition:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) This most compelling and intense argument was, in the opinion of the man who had written it, literally nonsense. Later, as I fell asleep, numbered propositions lingered somewhere in this strange aporetic space between sense and nonsense. I experienced them as a kind of fever dream.
It is unusual for a work in the philosophy of logic and language to have such an effect, even on impressionable young readers. Yet I am far from alone in feeling this mysterious intensity of the Tractatus. Originally Wittgenstein struggled to find a publisher for the book. He hated the introduction by his mentor Bertrand Russell and was at best ambivalent about the translation by C. K. Ogden and Frank Ramsey. Yet its publication was only secured by the introduction, almost as long as the text itself – Russell was then Britain’s foremost intellectual celebrity. The introduction was a blessing and a curse. Wittgenstein thought it misrepresented the book entirely. In part th
