Wittgenstein, Silence passage correction

It took a little bit of finding the right words for a google search and using the goggle translator for each word...but it does clarify that Wittgenstein passage.

In regards to silence, Wittgenstein writes:
darüber muß man schweigen

This literally means "more [therefore, moreover] one must be silent."

The "pass over" is a nice literary embellishment, but for someone who doesn't read German and tries to reflect on every single nuance of each word (what can I say: overtraining in lit crit classes), such embellishments can hinder the understanding of the passage.

Besides the "one must be silent", one should note the passage before it as composing a polar opposite. So to put it in a visually helpful way:

what can be said at all can be said clearly

therefore one must be silent

There's a nested logic movement in the first portion:

If it can be said, it can be said clearly.

Here, I feel that Wittgenstein is laying almost an imperative to speak clearly (I can almost hear an English professor beseeching me to speak more clearly).

But if it cannot be said (and if it cannot be said, it clearly can't be said clearly), then the only option is to be silent.

As Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerns itself with logic, it seems to be aligning logic with what can be said clearly. What is interesting is how much he leaves as being outside the realm of logic and the realm of language. Over and over in Culture and Value, he speaks about the limits of language.

I just found out that John Koethe, the poet, has written a book on Wittgenstein. To a good extent, this helps me to understand the questions that are propelling his poems.

Silence

What one cannot speak of, one must pass over in silence.
Wittgenstein.

There are a couple of different ways to view this aphorism which shows up in the preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The first is that it is a truism. If one cannot speak of something, then silence is the apparent consequence.

However, I am intrigued by the construction of this sentence. Although I cannot read the German, all translations have the same "pass over in silence."

To be silent is a non-action. To speak is an action. Silence is the cessation of speaking.

However, to "pass over in silence" gives silence an agency as though silence is a movement that one chooses.

Then there is the first half of the sentence: What one cannot speak of. How does one decide on the subjects that one cannot speak of and what is the criterion of speaking?

Given that the sentence is within the preface to the Tractatus, there is the standard of pure logic which Wittgenstein is laying out. This would limit very much what one could speak of. However, in Culture and Value (and I assume elsewhere) are attempts by Wittgenstein to conceptualize and explore various problems without coming at a clear logic immediately. Culture and Value is riff with numerous attempts at the same problems, a stuttering of the subject. Wittgenstein wrote many times of how he felt he repeated the same topics over and over.

Simultaneously, Wittengstein writes of the limits of language, of the lack of communication. In many ways, the preface to the Tractatus might be said to be mostly concerned with the inability to communicate, whether the problem lies with the subject, the speaker, or the reader (or a combination of the three).

Visualizing Thoughts

One of Wittgenstein's logic movements in the Tractatus is from picture to thought. As someone who almost never uses visualization unconsciously (but almost always with an intent to visualize) I had to ask a friend who is more visually-inclined whether her thoughts are visual. She confirmed that her thoughts are visual and that she could not imagine how it is to think without the visual component. For me, the majority of my thoughts are either language or mood based.

It also recalls an interesting conversation I had with a couple of friends at a bar where among the three of us I was the only one who did not visualize scenes while reading. Even when I am reading a description of a setting, I do not visualize but aim to understand the function of the setting within the scene. In the same way, if someone talks about a red dress, I won't even visualize the color red. I cognitively understand what is being said but there is no visual component unless I consciously decide to think about the dress as red visually.

It would be interesting to find out if there are different brain pathways in the way people think based on what their thought associations are, whether it's visual, aural, language, smell, taste, etc. For me, my thoughts are mostly a combination of language, mood and the not yet articulated. As such, the most frustrating part of this is the limits of language and seeking out the exact words that express what I am thinking. I wonder if this is part of the reason why words and books have such primary importance in my life as it is the vehicle of thought and communication. I wonder whether for those who have a sensory component to their thoughts if language is the dressing of thought rather than the thought itself.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus preface

I am moving between Wittgenstein's Culture and Value and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I find Culture and Value more conducive to the brief morning commute when my brain is not up to the more pure and sustained logic of the Tractatus. However, as Tractatus was conceived as a whole work by Wittgenstein, and the only one such work published during his lifetime, it has a formal beauty not found in the brief thoughts that make up Culture and Value. Tractatus was written while he was in a prisoner of war camp in 1917 (by the way, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for bios of philosophers).

In his brief preface, Wittgenstein concludes with the following:

If this work has any value, it consists of two things: the first is that thoughts are expressed in it, and on this score the better the thoughts are expressed--the more the nail has been hit on the head--the greater will be its value.--Here I am conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible. Simply because my powers are too slight for the accomplishment of the task.--May others come and do it better.

On the the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of hte problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.

In 1930, in one of the tidbits collected in Culture and Value, he wrote:

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

Perhaps all writing should be judged by the preface of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that even if one should fail to meet the overall aim of the ambition posed by the question, one should still have communicated something unassailable and definitive. While I was reading Wittgenstein's preface, I was reminded of Henry James' preface for the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, his first novel:

...the private history of any sincere work, however modest its pretentions, looms with its own completeness in the rich, ambiguous aesthetic air, and seems at once to borrow a dignity and to mark, so to say, a station.

To strive for an organic unity and organic completeness in writing is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a writer. It requires patience as well as the discipline to cull away any word that is not part of the organic unity. It is impossible to define organic unity except to say that one notices when it is lacking. Organic unity is such a cohesion within a work of art that each part of it seems necessary. One of my musician friends once said about Mozart's works that it is impossible to conceive any note having been written differently in his compositions. Such is organic unity. And it is not applicable only to harmonic music but a criterion to all music, to all works of art.

As far as I have read in Tractatus (which admittedly is not far enough as it is a work requiring an abstract level of thought that I find difficult to sustain), there is a beautiful composition. It seems almost unearthly...odd to say about a work of philosophy, but there's an airiness to it. Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value of thought as flight: it [thought] is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is -- observing it from above, in flight.