Wittgenstein's 'Unsayable' and the Epistemological Limits of Apophaticism — Epoche C1
Two silences that look alike The last sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1922 — Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen , "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" — has been read for a century as philosophy's endorsement of the theological tradition that likewise ends in silence: apophaticism, from the Greek apophasis , denial, the practice of approaching God by unsaying what is said of him. The equation is superficially irresistible. Both parties conclude that the most important thing cannot be stated; both stop rather than continue. This essay argues, as the original version of it did, that the equation fails — but the reasons the original gave were not the operative ones, and one of its claims about the Tractatus was simply mistaken. What Wittgenstein supplies is not support for apophaticism but a set of questions apophaticism must answer about its own epistemology, and stating those questions requires first showing where his silence comes from. Why the Tractatus has an unsayable at all Wittgenstein's silence is not a conclusion he reaches by surveying difficult subjects and finding them hard to describe. It is forced by a theory of what a proposition is, and the theory can be laid out in three steps. First, the picture theory. A proposition is meaningful, on this account, because it is a model of a possible situation: its elements stand for objects, and the way those elements are arranged in the proposition asserts that the corresponding objects are arranged that way in the world. "The cat is on the mat" means what it means because it exhibits a structure that the world can either match or fail to match. Second, the crucial constraint, stated at 2.172 and again at 4.121: a picture cannot depict the form it shares with what it depicts. To depict its own pictorial form, a picture would have to stand outside that form alongside its object and compare the two, which is precisely what a picture inside a system of representation cannot do. Logical form therefore shows itself in every meaningful proposition and is stated by none. This is not a metaphor; it is the load-bearing distinction of the book, and 4.1212 puts it flatly: what can be shown cannot be said. Third, the extension from logic to value, which is what makes the book relevant to religion at all. Wittgenstein does not merely assert that ethics lies outside language; he argues for it at 6.4 and 6.41. All propositions are of equal value, because each simply reports that something is the case, and in the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens — that is, contingently. Value, if it existed within the world, would itself be one more contingent fact, and a contingent value is no value at all, since it could equally have been otherwise. So the sense of the world must lie outside the world, and ethics, being about that sense, cannot be put into words. Aesthetics follows by the same route, and so does what Wittgenstein calls the mystical, which at 6.44 he identifies not with any exotic content but with the sheer fact that the world exists rather than the way it happens to be arranged. Notice what this derivation does and does not deliver. It yields a boundary drawn by the structure of representation, and the boundary falls in the same place for logical form, for arithmetic, for ethics, for aesthetics and for the mystical. Nothing in the argument singles out the divine, and nothing in it identifies a region beyond the boundary that has occupants. Nonsense of two kinds, and where the apophatic sentence falls The original version of this essay said that Wittgenstein would treat "God is not a being" as "nonsensical within the framework of logical language". That is right in substance but blurs a distinction the Tractatus insists on, and the distinction matters for the argument. Wittgenstein separates the senseless ( sinnlos ) from the nonsensical ( unsinnig ). Tautologies and contradictions are senseless: they are perfectly well formed and say nothing, because they are true or false whatever the world is like, and so exclude no possibility. Nonsense is different in kind. At 5.4733 Wittgenstein says that any possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and that if it lacks sense this can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to one of its constituents. "God is not a being" is therefore not a well-formed sentence that fails to be true, nor a limiting case like a tautology. It is a string in which no determinate meaning has been assigned to the sign "God" — because to assign one would be to make it stand for an object in the world, which is exactly what the theologian is refusing. The failure is not that the sentence pictures something false; it is that the speaker has not yet made a move in the language at all. This is a sharper and less comfortable result than "language is inadequate to the divine", and it is the first of the questions Wittgenstein poses to the apophatic theologian. The reading on which everything turns Here the original essay made an error of attribution that must be corrected plainly. It described the Tractatus 's self-undermining structure as "a crucial dialectical move characteristic of Western Continental thought, where the method itself embodies the truth it seeks to convey". The Tractatus belongs to no such lineage. It was written in dialogue with Frege's logic and Russell's theory of types, its notation is Russell's, and its ambition — to specify the general form of the proposition — is the founding ambition of analytic philosophy. More importantly, the description gets the ladder passage backwards. At 6.54 Wittgenstein does not say that his book shows what it cannot state; he says that anyone who understands him will recognise his propositions as nonsensical , having used them as rungs to climb beyond them, and must then throw the ladder away. How that sentence is read determines whether the Tractatus can support apophaticism, an