Bump.

We stopped at proposition 2.5-3.0

Anyone welcome to continue with us where we left off.

Given that the Investigations' reading group is flourishing, any more takers on this one?

I really want to return to this book. Anyone care to accompany me?

hey, it says in the rules that bumps are not allowed!!

I could accompany you but as I am new, we would have to take it from the beginning. I studied and analysed the Tractatus, sentence by sentence, up to the start of chapter 3, so I could post all this here, but I have to translate it first since they are in greek! :)

I could accompany you but as I am new, we would have to take it from the beginning. I studied and analysed the Tractatus, sentence by sentence, up to the start of chapter 3, so I could post all this here, but I have to translate it first since they are in greek! :) — Pussycat

That's fine. Let me know when you want to begin?

Whenever you are ready, I guess. Although i am pretty tired now to start a proper conversation.

But I think you missed the preface, and even before the preface, not Russells comments but W's. Well, what do you have to say about that?

But I think you missed the preface, and even before the preface, not Russells comments but W's. Well, what do you have to say about that? — Pussycat

I don't know. Please elaborate.

So,

I think we left off here:

2.22 The picture represents what it represents, independently of its truth or falsehood, through the form of representation.

What is "the form of representation"?

It starts out on page 114, in the attachment:

Ok, first of all with the pre-preface:

Ludwig Wittgenstein
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
DAVID H. PINSENT

Mo t t o: . . . und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen
und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen.
Kürnberger.

“… and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” Kürnberger

Who was this Kürnberger guy, and what are these three words Ludwig is referring to?

I dont know. Some historicism I see

But who was David Pinsent? Not much information on him, but the wiki page states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pinsent

David Hume Pinsent (24 May 1891 – 8 May 1918) was a friend, collaborator and platonic lover of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is dedicated to Pinsent's memory.

So could it be that these three words were "Ich liebe dich", "I love you"?

Most likely. Wittgenstein dearly loved Pinsent.

Yes, but he doesn't make a matter of love only between him and Pinsent, but rather, in the motto above, includes everyone else, and whatever a man knows, with everything else being just rumbling. And if this is so, this makes the Tractatus, which is seen as an essay on logic and language, an essay on love, which carries the ethical weight that W mentioned to Ludwig von Ficker, that the point of the Tractatus was ethical.

That can all be true.

It may, or it may not, but certainly it is a possibility that we cannot dismiss. I mean, have you read about his life? A most troubled one, for sure, which I think shaped his philosophy, so I think we should see his work in tandem with his life, so that to understand better what he was on about.

In the wiki quotes, I read a statement of the physicist Freeman Dyson, mostly famous for the Dyson sphere, if you know about that, but anyway here it is:

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.
Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible. — Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, "What Can You Really Know?", The New York Review of Books (November 8, 2012)

So this inexpressible might as well have been an expression of love and affection, something that appears easy, but apparently is not, as it has been obscured by language. And it might be that Wittgenstein's critique of language, and why he was so obsessed with it, was to expose this aspect, in order to arrive to the things that really matter the most in this world, feelings and love that is.

I never would have thought of Wittgenstein as a misogynistic fool. Thanks for the highlight of my day.

haha, I doubt that he was, but then again, people say things about him. Anyway, that was not my point.

Anyway, that was not my point. — Pussycat

What was your point?

My point was what I said above about what I think he was trying to do: to find a way to dissolve language, so that the inexpressible, the mystical like he says, or whatever this is, could either be expressed or show itself (6.522), to shine its way through, that is my take on Wittgenstein. But you know, we can be pretty harsh sometimes, cruel even, asking for trouble, mostly in cases where our love is involved, when it cannot be shown or appreciated, when someone or something stands in our way, and this is what I think happened to him, and why he was like this.

But we can see here, between us two I mean, how language can lead to the greatest misunderstandings.

I like your psychological touch to the intent or "reason" why the Tractatus was written for Wittgenstein. I wonder what other members think?

Well I don't know, really, but I would like to explore that possibility, enjoy it even, I mean in logic it's all about possibilities, isn't it?

Huh, googling for the term, I came up with this:

https://ludwig.guru/s/enjoy+the+possibilities

I see it like in Logicomix, I don't know if you know about it or read it, but you might enjoy it as I did.

Yes, indeed.

That which we cannot talk about must pass over in silence.

And to add:

In that silence, "work" is done.

Yes, but this most famous proposition is a bit ambiguous, isn't it? There are a few different interpretations I mean, which can lead to completely different conclusions and worldviews, as it seems.

But what kind of "work" you mean?

Yes, but this most famous proposition is a bit ambiguous, isn't it? — Pussycat

Depending on whether you adopt the principle of bipolarity, not so much.

But what kind of "work" you mean? — Pussycat

Deeds, acts of kindness/charity. That kind of "work".

Depending on whether you adopt the principle of bipolarity, not so much. — Wallows

What does bipolarity have to do with this? But it's like these Viennese "philosophers" said in the comix above:

What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence. Where "speak" naturally mean "speak logically!". Your work gave us the means to expel religion, metaphysics, ethics etc from rational discourse. Since "what cannot be spoken about logically" is, quite literally, non-sense, and, obviously, beneath the dignity of serious minds!

Only to get the answer from Wittgenstein:

Just wait a minute! The meaning of the "Tractatus" has completely escaped you! Its point is the exact opposite: the things that cannot be talked about logically, are the ones which are truly important!!

Only a comic, one would say, perhaps mirroring the views of its writer. However, Wittgenstein, at a later time, in his lecture on ethics to the Heretics Society at the university of Cambridge, closes his speech thus:

"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".

http://sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf

Or as he says elsewhere:

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

or in PI:

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

So I think that the Tractatus gave the wrong impression, thus giving birth to trends like analytic philosophy and logical positivism, where ethics, and metaphysics in general, are either seen as meaningless or treated with contempt. This is what I meant when I wrote that "it can lead to completely different conclusions and worldviews".

But what do you think about all this?

What does bipolarity have to do with this? — Pussycat

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4290/principle-of-bipolarity

But bipolarity has to do with propositions that have sense and can be either true or false, which is why they are called bipolar in the first place. The "That which we cannot talk about must pass over in silence", refers to non-bipolar propositions, in the realm of the nonsensical.