Wednesday, 23 September 2020

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS & Zen

I struggle to follow the logic of Wittgenstein’s tractatus all the way through to the end, but can’t help but see some some parallels with Zen in these last few propositions right at the end of his magnum opus. What do you think?

6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked. For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.

6.52 We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)

6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphys- ical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be un- satisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.



Submitted September 24, 2020 at 12:42AM by skininthegame87 https://ift.tt/2EsbV81

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