"What can be shown, cannot be said"
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A warning shot disguised as a modest sentence, "What can be shown, cannot be said" draws a hard border around language and dares you to cross it. Wittgenstein is not praising silence as spiritual virtue; he is policing method. In the Tractatus, he treats meaningful speech as a kind of logical engineering: propositions picture facts, and anything that can’t be pictured in that strict way isn’t just hard to articulate, it’s not the right kind of thing to put into declarative sentences at all.
The subtext is a critique of philosophy’s favorite bad habit: trying to talk about the scaffolding as if it were another brick in the building. Logic, for early Wittgenstein, is the scaffolding. You don’t state it; it’s already operative in every statement you can make. The rules of representation are not items represented. That’s why "shown" matters. It’s the quiet functioning of grammar, structure, and form - the way a valid inference compels assent, the way a sentence’s syntax reveals its commitments, the way an image or model can disclose relations without narrating them.
Context sharpens the sting: post-Frege and Russell, in the era when logic promised to disinfect philosophy, Wittgenstein turns the disinfectant on philosophy itself. Ethics, aesthetics, even the sense of the world as meaningful: these aren’t denied, they’re relocated. They can be manifested in how we live, judge, react, build, make art - but the moment you try to bottle them as "facts", you falsify them. The line works because it refuses consolation: it offers no vocabulary upgrade, only a limit, and the discipline to respect it.
The subtext is a critique of philosophy’s favorite bad habit: trying to talk about the scaffolding as if it were another brick in the building. Logic, for early Wittgenstein, is the scaffolding. You don’t state it; it’s already operative in every statement you can make. The rules of representation are not items represented. That’s why "shown" matters. It’s the quiet functioning of grammar, structure, and form - the way a valid inference compels assent, the way a sentence’s syntax reveals its commitments, the way an image or model can disclose relations without narrating them.
Context sharpens the sting: post-Frege and Russell, in the era when logic promised to disinfect philosophy, Wittgenstein turns the disinfectant on philosophy itself. Ethics, aesthetics, even the sense of the world as meaningful: these aren’t denied, they’re relocated. They can be manifested in how we live, judge, react, build, make art - but the moment you try to bottle them as "facts", you falsify them. The line works because it refuses consolation: it offers no vocabulary upgrade, only a limit, and the discipline to respect it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; English tr. C. K. Ogden, 1922). Aphorism commonly rendered as “What can be shown, cannot be said.” |
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