Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Wittgenstein drafted most of the Tractatus while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, and finished it in 1918. He had the manuscript with him when he was taken prisoner in Italy. It was published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922, in this translation by C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell that Wittgenstein thought missed the point.

The book is seven numbered propositions, each with decimal comments beneath it: 1, 1.1, 1.11 and so on, down to the last proposition, which has no comments at all. It begins, “The world is everything that is the case.” It ends, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In between, Wittgenstein sets out how language pictures the world, what logic is, and where sense runs out. Ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life, he concludes, lie past that edge. They cannot be said, only shown.

He thought he had solved philosophy, and acted on it. He gave away his share of a very large family fortune, trained as a schoolteacher and taught children in rural Austria. Later he went back to Cambridge, submitted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis, and is said to have told his examiners, Russell and G. E. Moore, not to worry, since he knew they would never understand it. He spent the rest of his life taking much of it apart.

None of that makes the book less worth reading. It is short, strange and exact, and it has the rare quality of meaning more on the second reading than the first. Near the end, Wittgenstein calls his propositions a ladder, to be thrown away once climbed. You still need the ladder.

At 134 pages this is the thinnest book on the list. It is also the densest.