extracts edited by D. Cole 1999
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same
2 What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs.
2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
2.01231 If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.
2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.
2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.
2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, thought it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on..
2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
2.0141 The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object.
2.02 Objects are simple.
2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely.
2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.
2.18 What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it--correctly or incorrectly--in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality.
2.181 A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture.
2.182 Every picture is at the same time a logical one. (On the other hand, not every picture is, for example, a spatial one.)
2.19 Logical pictures can depict the world.
2.2 A picture has logico-pictorial form in common with what it depicts.
2.201 A picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
2.202 A picture contains the possibility of the situation that it represents.
2.203 A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false.
2.22 What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.
2.221 What a picture represents is its sense.
2.222 The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
2.223 In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.
2.224 It is impossible to tell from the picture alone whether it is true or false.
2.225 There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.
3.202 The simple signs employed in propositions are called names.
3.203 A name means an object. The object is its meaning. ('A' is the same sign as 'A'.)
3.21 The configuration of objects in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign.
3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.
3.314 An expression has meaning only in a proposition. All variables can be construed as propositional variables. (Even variable names.)
3.323 In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification--and so belongs to different symbols--or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; 'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the proposition, 'Green is green'--where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective--these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.)
3.324 In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced (the whole of philosophy is full of them).
3.325 In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical grammar--by logical syntax. (The conceptual notation of Frege and Russell is such a language, though, it is true, it fails to exclude all mistakes.)
3.4 A proposition determines a place in logical space. The existence of this logical place is guaranteed by the mere existence of the constituents--by the existence of the proposition with a sense.
3.41 The propositional sign with logical co-ordinates--that is the logical place.
3.411 In geometry and logic alike a place is a possibility: something can exist in it.
3.42 A proposition can determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new elements in co-ordination.) (The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole of logical space.)
3.5 A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.
4 A thought is a proposition with a sense.
4.001 The totality of propositions is language.
4.022 Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is--just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes. The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.
4.011 At first sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for example--does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent.
4.012 It is obvious that a proposition of the form 'aRb' strikes us as a picture. In this case the sign is obviously a likeness of what is signified.
4.013 And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial character, we see that it is not impaired by apparent irregularities (such as the use [sharp] of and [flat] in musical notation). For even these irregularities depict what they are intended to express; only they do it in a different way.
4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed according to a common logical pattern. (Like the two youths in the fairy-tale, their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in a certain sense one.)
4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways. And that rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of musical notation. It is the rule for translating this language into the language of gramophone records.
4.015 The possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained in the logic of depiction.
4.016 In order to understand the essential nature of a proposition, we should consider hieroglyphic script, which depicts the facts that it describes. And alphabetic script developed out of it without losing what was essential to depiction.
4.02 We can see this from the fact that we understand the sense of a propositional sign without its having been explained to us.
4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation that it represents. And I understand the proposition without having had its sense explained to me.
6.36311 It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.
6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
6.372 Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
6.373 The world is independent of my will.
6.374 Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only be a favour granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed physical connexion itself is surely not something that we could will.
6.375 Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility.
6.3751 For example, the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the logical structure of colour. Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics: more or less as follows--a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to say, particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be identical. (It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction. The statement that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time is a contradiction.)
6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.
6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
6.422 When an ethical law of the form, 'Thou shalt ...' is laid down, one's first thought is, 'And what if I do, not do it?' It is clear, however, that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms. So our question about the consequences of an action must be unimportant.--At least those consequences should not be events. For there must be something right about the question we posed. There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself. (And it is also clear that the reward must be something pleasant and the punishment something unpleasant.)
6.423 It is impossible to speak about the will in so far as it is the subject of ethical attributes. And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only to psychology.
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts--not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
6.4312 Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required.)
6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
6.4321 The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is mystical.
6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.
6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one.
6.54 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.)
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.