‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls

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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A New Translation

“Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was undergoing an oral examination by two of Cambridge’s eminent philosophers—and he had the cheek to tell them he was smarter than they were. But then, the slender book that became his doctoral dissertation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, already chided one of his examiners, Bertrand Russell, for the inadequacy of his theories.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus became foundational for 20th century philosophy, but as Stanford humanities professor Marjorie Perloff implies in her forward to the book’s new edition, previous translations often bordered on gibberish. The new translation by Damion Searls puts “the Tractatus as we have known it in a genuinely new light,” she writes. Not that it becomes easy reading, just clearer, less tangled, in keeping with one of Wittgenstein’s maxims: “ordinary language is all right.”

Like recent translations of Homer, of Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures, and of Dostoyevsky, Searls’ work breathes life into a text whose earlier English language versions often distorted both form and content. Since Wittgenstein was writing about the relationship between language and how we can think about the world, getting the words right is imperative. And his words addressed the limits of language. “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent,” he wrote, a few lines following: “Of course there are things that cannot be spoken. They show themselves, they are mystical.” And to the distress of logicians, he also pointed to the limits of logic itself. Philosophy is not the end of knowledge. “In the end they are nonsensical,” he wrote of proposition, describing the ladder toward understanding that one must climb, only to “throw away” after reaching the summit.