Tractatus 7.

1: Translation and Silence

Peter Caws

Theres a story about an American evangelist who was challenged about

something in his preaching that didnt agree with the Greek of the New
Testament. He is supposed to have replied If English was good enough for Jesus
Christ, its good enough for me. Very funny, we all think. But a lot of otherwise
well-read people are a bit like that in some ways. Its not just that pious readers
think of the Bible as an English book (the
King James Version
, after all, is an
English book, and a classic at that), but that many people forget its not that
they dont know, they just forget that Aesops fables and Hans Christian
Andersons fairy tales and so on werent originally English books. Philosophy
students are particularly liable to this forgetting. Its surprising how many of
them write papers and even dissertations on the assumption that the texts of
Plato and Kant, or Habermas and Derrida, on which they base their arguments,
are unproblematically English.
In the case of any book not actually written in English, the reader who is not
acquainted with the original is at the mercy of the translator. Ideally the original
would be available too; and the ideal reader would have enough acquaintance
with the original language to be able to see, or at any rate to find out, what the
translator has been up to. This is too stringent a requirement for people who
read, say, Thomas Mann or Albert Camus for the story, or even the Greek
tragedians for the plot. Not many of us are going to know even the elementary
structure of Japanese and Finnish: it would be unreasonable to expect this, and
silly to say that in that case we arent entitled to read or even comment on the
Tale of Genji or the
Kalevala
. But it is not too stringent a requirement for serious
philosophers, or for real scholars in any field.
Enough acquaintance with the original language how much is that? Midway
between being able to read a language fluently and not being able to read it at all
comes the
crib
, or the parallel translation. With a dictionary and a rudimentary
knowledge of the grammar, its usually quite possible to work out what is going
on in the translation what the translator has missed, perhaps, or a point on
which two translators disagree. A superb scholarly resource for
English-speaking students is the great Loeb edition of the classics. The
translations themselves arent bad, but the Greek and Latin are invaluable. (You

could of course read for the English alone but use the original for purposes of
prestige, as Sir Harold Nicolson admits he did when reading Xenophon: I read
the English side of the page, but when I came to a point of interest it was the
Greek side that I marked.) Alternative translations are also a rich source of
philosophical stimulation, and may lead to useful discussions about what its
possible to say in English. A notorious and apparently simple case: there are two
major translations of Hegels
Die Phnomenologie des Geistes
, entitled
respectively The Phenomenology of Mind and The Phenomenology of Spirit.
That contrast in itself is enough to keep a Hegel seminar going for quite a while.
Wittgenstein wrote in German, although like the Bible his works have practically
acquired the status of English books. The earliest editions in English regularly
came with the German on facing pages, but this is no longer always the case.
Like Hegels
Phenomenology
, Wittgensteins
Tractatus starts to be provocative
from its title onwards. The original German was
Logisch-philosophische
Abhandlung
: Logical-philosophical Treatise, whose awkwardness was finessed
by G. E. Moores suggestion that the English version should be given a Latin title,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. A similar and equally dubious service was
provided by Freuds translators when they replaced his down-to-earth German
names
Es, Ich, ber-Ich
literally It, I, Over-I with their now familiar Latinate
equivalents Id, Ego, Superego. Public schoolboys of Freud and Wittgensteins
generation in England had been soaked in Greek and Latin, so this sort of thing
came naturally, as it did to Moore. The result in both cases has been to render
exotic what started out as robust common sense names.
The
Tractatus consists of seven numbered propositions, with more or less
extensive commentary or rather, of six propositions with commentary and one
without. The best-known of the seven propositions are the first and the last:
1.
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist
. (The world is everything, that happens to be
the case.)
7.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man schweigen
. (Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)
My version of the first of these differs from those of Ogden (The world is all that
is the case) and of Pears and McGuinness (The world is everything that is the
case) because these miss a couple of essential features of the original. First,
Wittgenstein has a comma, which separates off the main clause of the sentence
from its qualifying phrase. The fact that this makes for good style in German
does not mean that we are entitled to ignore an important aspect of its
rhetorical effect, namely that the
Tractatus opens with the statement: The

world is everything. Second, although the English case is from Latin

cadere to
fall it has no echo, as the German does, of the
contingency of what befalls, how
things fall out so is the case by itself is too thin for Wittgensteins thought;
happens restores the missing nuance.
My English text of proposition 7 agrees with Ogden, but Pears and McGuinness,
trying to be helpful, manage to mislead. Their version says, What we cannot
speak about we must consign to silence which lends concreteness to the
unspoken and suggests that it is something that can be manipulated: there it is,
and we consign it to silence. But the German, as we shall shortly see, doesnt
commit itself to any status for what lies beyond speech; it just says we should
shut up about it.
The uncanny appropriateness of the numbers 1 and 7 to these propositions
cannot have completely escaped attention, though in everything I have heard or
read about Wittgenstein (very far from all of it, to be sure) it seems to have
escaped remark.
Tractatus 1 is clearly the One, the All, Unity, while
Tractatus 7 is
the mystical, the unsayable, the perfect. Their numbers have stood for these
things throughout the long history of numerology, and Wittgenstein cannot have
been unaware of this fact. We can be confident that he knew what he was doing
here when he worked out the numbering scheme. It may not even be
unreasonable to suggest and Im sure many people have done so
that the
structure of the
Tractatus is essentially religious: it begins with the whole world
of facts and ends with the mystically felt limits of the world, which make room
for
das Hhere
, what is higher.
When everything that can coherently be said about everything has been said,
there remains the
unsayable
, or at least the
unsaid and perhaps also the
not-to-be-said
, whether from
disinclination or
prohibition
. Mystical in English
and
mystisch in German, from the Greek, have all four senses. The root of
mystery is
muo
, to close or to keep shut, used mainly of the eyes or the mouth,
and there are obviously several reasons why one might keep ones mouth shut.
On the one hand, one might have nothing to say. On the other hand, having
something to say, (a) one might not be able to think of the words in which to say
it; or (b) one might wish not to say it on some particular occasion or perhaps
ever; or (c) one might be forbidden to say it, or have sworn not to do so. The
Greek Mysteries were mainly of this last sort: there was a communicable
doctrine, but it was esoteric, and insiders were enjoined not to speak of it to
outsiders. (It is said that when one of the Pythagoreans revealed the
incommensurability of the square root of two, the others threw him off a cliff.)
Schweigen (be silent) has elements of all these senses in German but, especially
in conjunction with
darber
, also some additional overtones. One of the

overtones is musical:
schweigen as used of a musical performance is to end or to
cease: it stands for the falling-silent at the conclusion of a work for
completion, for satisfaction, also perhaps for regret. It is a powerful last word for
a book whose structure, according to Erik Stenius, is musical. (There is nothing
contradictory in the idea that it might be both religious
and musical, like a Bach
chorale.)
Schweigen however also stands for a sort of civilised reticence: there
are things one doesnt say, that one doesnt draw attention to, that one passes
over in silence. And then there is the silence of the Law:
darber schweigt das
Gesetz
; about this the law says nothing here you are free to draw your own
conclusion, to do as you please. Kants project in the first
Critique seems to have
been (among other things) to show that there are limits to reason and hence
concepts that escape its law concepts that we can adopt as regulative, that we
can cherish as grounds for hope. Similarly Wittgensteins project in the
Tractatus
is clearly to show that there are limits to language and to its law. Wittgenstein
wrote to Ludwig Ficker that the most important part of the book was the part
that was not written. As I once put it in another context, instead of being
primarily concerned with what logic and language include, Wittgenstein by this
account cared about that only because it showed what they
exclude
; rather than
drawing the outer boundaries of speech, he was drawing the inner boundaries of
silence.
Tractatus 7 is thus a rich closure to the only major work of Wittgensteins to be
published during his lifetime. The idea of
Tractatus 7.1 an explanation of
Tractatus 7 seems like a contradiction, or a violation. After proposition 7 there
surely is nothing more to be said much to be seen and felt, the mystical, the
higher, the whole domain of the
unaussprechlich or ineffable, but nothing
capable of expression in language. Wittgenstein himself seems to have meant
this quite seriously at the time. He believed that in philosophy at least, he had
nothing further to say, and for a time declined to engage himself in the
profession. And yet the
Tractatus now represents only a small fraction of his
available corpus, and all the rest, with the exception of some notebooks, dates
from after its completion.
What can possibly be the status of this extra work? It is true that Wittgenstein
changed his mind but that does not necessarily mean that he was altogether
wrong the first time. Can some of his later writings at least be viewed as an
attempt to say the unsayable as a kind of extended
Tractatus 7.1? Of course
Tractatus 7 doesnt mean we have to shut up
altogether
. In fact the harder we
look at it the less it has to say. What we cannot speak of, in the sense of being
unable
, rather than disinclined or forbidden, to do so, we have to pass over in
silence, not so much because we must as because we cant help it. Pretty
obvious. But there still remains all the things we
can speak of, about which we

can go on and on, and often do. As far as that goes, a lot of people seem to go on
and on about what cant be spoken of (but then they cant
really be speaking of it,
on pain of contradiction).
So
Tractatus 7 brings the
Tractatus to a close, but it doesnt, unless youre
Wittgenstein at that time, bring
philosophy to a close. And I wouldnt be making
such a fuss about it if Wittgenstein hadnt put it all by itself and left it so
pointedly without afterthought or commentary. Viewed simply as the final term
in the sequence of propositions that begin with
Tractatus 6.4 say, in which
Wittgenstein makes a series of more and more audacious and largely
unsupported assertions about ethics, the will, death, the mystical, and the
eventual transcendence of all philosophy, it seems a natural enough conclusion.
Stripped of that anticipatory apparatus, in splendid isolation, clothed in its
numerological aura, the proposition takes on heightened significance and offers
a more rigorous challenge.
After a period of voluntary renunciation Wittgenstein comes back to philosophy,
or eventually at least, to a professorship of philosophy, at Cambridge. His later
work, as he puts it, travel[s] over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every
direction, but in spite of his suggestion that it might do so, it doesnt really
connect with other work going on at the same time (although it often echoes it).
Wittgenstein chose for the most part to ignore the history of philosophy,
especially its recent history, leading a philosophical life as deliberately
impoverished as his material one. (I dont say this of his intellectual life as a
whole he seems to have read a lot outside philosophy.) His mind when engaged
in philosophy was as sparsely furnished as his rooms, which in no way
denigrates the genius that was at work in the former or the wisdom that might
be imparted from the latter. It seems he could not do philosophy otherwise, and
it may be that the clutter of other peoples ideas would simply have stunted his
own.
But to go back to the leading thought of this essay what was he
not saying all
this extra time? And how do we translate
that
? Thats what we have to look for.
For
Tractatus 7.1 wont be
said or to put it differently, anything that is
subsequently said wont refer to what the
Tractatus
regards as unsayable.
The suggestion I want to put forward is that Wittgensteins later work is an
elaborate way of avoiding the whole question of
what can and cannot be spoken
of by concentrating on the
speaking that is, on the
practice of language rather
than on its
meaning
: Dont look for the meaning, look for the use. This
injunction is generally interpreted as suggesting that theres no point in looking
for the meaning, thats not how language functions its a game and whats

significant about it is the way its played, not the content it conveys. But the
injunction can be read quite differently:
Dont look for the meaning! Dont go
there! Content yourself with looking for the use! Who knows what you might
find, where you might end up, if you insisted on looking for the meaning! It is my
impression (subject to correction) that the later Wittgenstein really does shy
away from the cluster of speculative issues that lead up to the end of the
Tractatus
, concentrating instead on what we might call safer puzzles, conceptual
and linguistic. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that he was still haunted on
a personal level by the yearning for perfection, for the higher, but he seems to
have stuck to the principle of
Tractatus
7 in his philosophical work.
Two things strike me as significant, and as poignant, about the later work, and
they can be captured by a closing reflection on two lines in German that are
regularly left untranslated in the English versions of his books. One is that the
later Wittgenstein never achieved the spare and economical expression of
thought that he was aiming for at the time of the
Tractatus
. The motto to the
Tractatus
, from the Austrian playwright Ferdinand Krnberger, reads ...
und
alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehrt hat, lsst sich in
drei Worten sagen
(... and anything anyone knows, hasnt just heard [people]
roaring and blustering about, can be said in three words). It would hardly be fair
to characterise Wittgensteins manner in the later years as blustering and
roaring (though there was some of that, the most famous example probably
being the episode of brandishing the poker at Poppers talk to the Moral Science
Club at Cambridge in 1946). But it was insistent, and it certainly used a lot more
than three words to say what he had to say. One problem of course is that the
epigones and scholars wouldnt leave any of his words alone theyve all been
noted, gathered up and published, even
Zettel
, from the little slips of paper on
which he jotted things down. The impression sometimes is of a sort of unceasing
repetition of head-banging perplexities and hapless rhetorical questions,
certainly stimulating, and no doubt exciting for people who had the privilege of
being present, but not leading anywhere in particular.
Not that they were meant to lead anywhere in particular. That wasnt
Wittgensteins conception of how philosophy was done. But the untranslated
epigraph to the
Philosophical Investigations
, from a second Austrian playwright,
Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, suggests that at least the concept of getting
somewhere was operative in the background, along with the realization that
wherever that somewhere might be, it wouldnt be very far. In Nestroys words,

berhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, dass er viel grsser ausschaut, als er
wirklich ist.
(One thing about progress, at any rate, is that it looks much
greater than it really is.) Whether Wittgensteins achievements will be looked
back upon as representing great progress in philosophy is hard to say

certainly enough people already think so. But perhaps the greatest progress due
to Wittgenstein is the realization that a certain sort of progress isnt to be
expected.
Theres admittedly something disappointing in that. Bertrand Russells judgment
may seem harsh, but he has a point: I admired Wittgensteins
Tractatus but not
his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best
talent. This however is in the context of a comparison of Wittgensteins
greatness to that of Pascal and Tolstoy not bad company!
I have been implicitly suggesting that Wittgensteins later verbosity may have
been a defence against a fear of the silence that a strict reading of
Tractatus 7
would have demanded, something perhaps not so far from what Pascal felt: the
eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. It may not be too
far-fetched to regard Wittgenstein as a man intimidated by the implications of
his own genius. But, as everyone who knew him was ready to attest, genius it
certainly seems to have been.
Peter Caws 2006
Peter Caws is University Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington
University, Washington DC.