[lit-ideas] "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen": a tautology?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:56:29 EST
Thanks to R. Paul for his comments.
We are considering Wittgenstein's closing utterance to his famous book, The
'Tractatus' -- so-called. As Wittgenstein famously put it -- this was his
D.Phil at Cambridge, incidentally:
(0) Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muB man schweigen.
-- and got an A+ from the examiners: Lord Russell and Professor Moore.
R. Paul provides (a) the C. K. Ogden translation
(1) Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
-- compares it with F. P. Ramsey's dictum,
(1') Whistle and I will be there.
-- and (b) the McGuinness/Pears translation:
(2) What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.
R. Paul does not find either tautologous -- nor the original German; Fjeld
and I disagree. Let's consider more closely the _logical_ form of (0):
For starters: 'daruber' is a trick of a word -- in German, and governs a kind
of unnecesary parallel emphatic and rhetoric sentential structure. That is,
'daruber' is a sort of quasi-demonstrative, and refers to 'wovon'. In logical
terms, 'wovon' and 'daruber' are _co-referential_.
As R. Paul notes, Ogden was certainly being more _literal_ in his
translation, which retains Wittgenstein's metaphorical (we suppose) _spatial_
idiom ('wo'
= 'where' -- hence 'WHEREof'; 'da' = 'there' -- hence 'THEREof'), while
McGuinness-Pears opt for a simpler, less rhetorical, direct-object rendering
('what'), _sans_ antecedent.
In terms of logical form, what looks like a sentence involving subordination
is actually of a simple structure. Thus, (2) seems equivalent to the more
linear:
(3) We must consign to silence what we cannot speak about.
where the grammatical subject is 'we' -- 'one' in (1); 'man' in (0). Ditto, I
would think (0) is equivalent to
(4) Man muss schweigen daruber man nicht sprechen kann.
and (1) equivalent to
(5) One must be silent [of what] one cannot speak.
In fairness to Wittgenstein, it should be noted that his choice of a
_parallel_ syntactic structure reminds one of things like
(6) Where Punch was, there was Judy.
-- which is _not_ (_prima facie_) tautologous. But perhaps -- and this is
Fjeld's point -- (0) is more like
(7) Where the bachelor was, there was the unmarried male.
-- i.e. the _content_ of the utterance's first bit -- "we can not speak" --
and the _content_ of the utterance's second bit -- "we must consign to silence"
-- seem to me to be in a relation of logical entailment.
For, to repeat Fjeld's point:
how *can* (or even *could*) we (possibly) NOT consign to silence about what
we can NOT speak?
I guess Fjeld and I would appreciate an example of a situation
_contradicting_ (or providing a counterexample to) Wittgenstein's (0) -- If a
counterexample
can _indeed_ be found, then, perhaps, as R. Paul suggests, (0) would _not_ be
tautologous, but merely contingential.
Cheers,
JL
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