Wittgenstein on the Limits of Language

The final proposition of the Tractatus — 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' — is one of the most quoted sentences in twentieth-century philosophy and one of the most misread. Wittgenstein did not mean that we should refuse to talk about difficult subjects. He meant something more precise and stranger.

The Tractatus draws a hard boundary between what can be meaningfully said (facts about the world, expressible in propositions with truth values) and what can only be shown (the logical form of language itself, and by extension the ethical, aesthetic and religious). The latter is not nonsense; it is, in Wittgenstein's specific technical sense, unsayable.

The later Wittgenstein of the Investigations complicated this picture considerably, but the underlying intuition survives: language is a tool with specific uses, and pushing it beyond those uses produces not deeper insight but philosophical confusion.

The lesson for anyone drawn to the mystical or the metaphysical is not to abandon those interests but to be careful about what verbal formulations can and cannot do. Some things, on Wittgenstein's view, show themselves in practice, in life, in what a person actually does — not in what they manage to say about it.