Wittgenstein and the Tractatus: How Far Does Language Reach?

A personal reading and interpretation of a book that tries to trace the boundary of what can be said.

I read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a few months ago, and it is a work with some peculiarities: on the one hand, it is an extremely austere text, almost “mathematical” in its form; on the other, it is packed with philosophical concepts that extend far beyond the text itself. It is not a long book, but it is dense: every proposition is compressed to the maximum, as if the author was trying to say “only what is necessary,” without a single extra word.

The central aim of the Tractatus is to draw the limits of language: what can be said meaningfully (and clearly), what cannot be said, and why so many philosophical discussions end up as a tangle that, for Wittgenstein, is not “false” but nonsensical.

1) A detail that seems minor, but isn’t: translations

My reading came with a practical complication: the copy I used was bilingual (German–English). It’s a great idea… until you realize that in philosophy, a bad translation can can change the entire framework.

The edition I used was the bilingual Logostar Press version, translated by Daniel Deleanu. I mention this because the issue I ran into was not just the usual, unavoidable shift that comes with translating philosophy: my copy contained specific terminological errors (for instance, “states of matters” where one would reasonably expect “states of affairs”). These are not minor nuances — they can genuinely distort the meaning of the text. For that reason, reading this edition makes it almost necessary to cross-check with the German original or with more reliable translations.

And this is not a merely aesthetic detail: if the book is about the limits of language, then translation becomes part of the philosophical problem itself.

2) The structure: seven propositions and a hierarchical numbering system

The Tractatus is organized around seven main propositions (1 to 7). They are not “chapters” in the traditional sense; they function more like conceptual axes. Each axis unfolds into numbered sub-propositions using decimals (for instance 2.01, 2.012, 2.0123…). The numbering is meant to display logical relations and levels within the system.

That very way of writing is already a philosophical stance: the text aims to be a logical skeleton, not a narrative.

3) “The world” not as a collection of things, but as the totality of facts

The book opens with the famous line: “The world is all that is the case.” In Spanish, that translation felt odd to me, because caso, at least in everyday usage, tends to refer to something particular — “a case” — rather than to a totality. In German, the sentence reads Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist, and Fall can be understood closer to “fact” or “what occurs.” For that reason, within what Spanish allows, it seems more faithful to read it as: “the world is the totality of facts.”

This difference is not minor, because it marks a central idea of the opening: the world is not the sum of objects, but the sum (or totality) of facts.

What makes there “be a world” is not isolated things, but configurations: specific ways in which things occur, relate, and are arranged. Things are there, but what constitutes “the world” is how those things are configured — what happens, and which relations actually obtain.

Along these lines, Wittgenstein insists that “what is the case” consists in the existence of certain states of affairs (or “states of things”). The intuition I take from this is that an object, by itself, explains very little; what explains is the fact — the configuration, the relation, the “this way and not otherwise.”

Another idea the book develops is that if we know an object, we also know its possible combinations. Put more freely: to know something is to know its field of possibility — the limits within which it can be configured with other things. It is not a “scientific” claim in the modern sense, but it does have a structural tone to it: reality is not absolute chaos; it has form.

4) Logic, representation, and the limits of what can be thought

There is a central nerve running through the Tractatus: if something contradicts logic, then it cannot be meaningfully represented. It is not merely that “I cannot draw it” or “I cannot imagine it”; rather, language — when it works — already presupposes a logical structure.

Wittgenstein uses comparisons along these lines: it would be like trying to assign coordinates to a figure that violates the rules of geometry. It is not that “we haven’t yet found a way”; it is that you are asking for something that does not fit within the framework of representation.

This has a strong consequence: many philosophical statements seem profound, but by failing to respect the conditions of sense within language, they turn into sentences that sound like something without actually saying anything.

At this point, one of the book’s most provocative propositions appears: that a large part of traditional philosophical questions and statements are not false, but nonsensical — because they are badly formulated (or because they demand from language something it cannot do).

5) Ambiguity: when one word refers to different things

Throughout the book there is a constant concern with linguistic ambiguity: the same word can refer to different things, and that generates confusion. This is just as common outside philosophy: many disagreements are not real disagreements at all, but semantic mismatches — each person is using the same word with a slightly different meaning or scope.

And when that gets transferred into writing — without tone, without pauses, without gestures, without the “atmosphere” of a voice — nuances get lost and misunderstandings multiply. Written language is useful, but it is also more “dangerous” when it comes to nuance.

From this, a personal reflection opens up: the problem does not only occur in a conversation or a message — it becomes amplified once time enters the picture. Language is alive; it changes, shifts, and that is perfectly fine. But when a work attempts to survive in the long term, meanings mutate, nuances erode, and interpretation becomes increasingly tied to different eras, languages, and contexts. In that sense, the idea of a system capable of transferring information unequivocally — one that preserves meaning without distorting it and without being at the mercy of historical change — would be genuinely revolutionary. Not to replace living language, but for anything that seeks to endure with fidelity.

6) Language as a limit: not only what we think, but what we can refine

All of this connects with an idea that is often read in a rather blunt way: that language determines what we think. I believe it is worth qualifying that.

To say that language shapes our thinking does not mean that we are absolutely trapped by it. Language is also a social product: it has been historically shaped by what a community needed to distinguish, name, and coordinate. In that sense, we do not merely “inherit” a framework; that framework exists because, over time, a society found it important to talk about certain things more than others — and therefore consolidated words, nuances, and distinctions accordingly.

And when a specific word does not exist, it does not mean the idea is impossible — it often simply requires a longer route. You have to use several words to approach something that, in another language, might have a short and stable label. That difference does not determine what we can think, but it does affect ease, precision, and even the naturalness with which certain thoughts become communicable — and therefore shareable, debatable, and “livable” in everyday life.

Within that framework, the following line from the book lands with greater force:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

And in my case, this is fairly literal: I live in Germany and I still do not fully command German. So it is not just a matter of “missing vocabulary” — my ability to move socially and professionally is constrained. I can have the thought, but I lack the tool to express it with the same level of precision I would have in Spanish or in English.

7) Self-reference: a function cannot be its own argument

There is a part that, although technical, opens up very large intuitions: when Wittgenstein develops the idea that a function cannot be its own argument. In the text, this appears through logical formulations and a certain formal apparatus, but the underlying intuition is about the limits of self-reference.

When a system attempts to describe or model itself completely, a problem of self-reference emerges. If the model is part of the very same world it is trying to model, sooner or later it ends up including itself within its own content, creating a loop. The point is not so much the conclusion, but the kind of boundary that appears: there are things that, from within the same framework, cannot be fully captured without leaving a remainder — or without falling into a form of paradox.

8) Identity: why “A = A” tells us nothing (and why “A = B” does not exist in reality)

There is an observation in the Tractatus that strikes me as especially sharp once you bring it down to earth: saying “A is identical to A” adds nothing. It is not that it is “false”; it is redundant. It is the same thing repeated in a different form. It describes no difference, adds no content — it simply names the same thing again.

And saying “A is identical to B” in the real world does not really make sense either, if taken literally. Two things can be extremely similar, almost indistinguishable to us, even extraordinarily faithful copies… but they are not the same thing.

A simple (and very everyday) example would be to pick up two sheets of paper: for us they can “be the same” in practical terms — because, honestly, it makes no difference which one we use — but they are not identical. They are unique: they occupy different locations in space, they have different histories, however minimal, and even if they were manufactured “the same,” they are subject to different conditions. In reality, what we usually mean by “A = B” is something like: “A and B are equivalent under a certain criterion,” “they behave the same in this context,” or “they are interchangeable for this purpose.” But that is no longer absolute identity: it is equivalence, similarity, function, convention.

Now, in the abstract world, things change. In mathematics, for instance, we write “2 = 2” or “A = A” all the time, but there “=” does not describe a physical fact about the world; it expresses a relation within a formal system. And even there, “A = A” is a tautology: it tells you nothing new about A; it merely restates a rule of the formal language.

When we talk about numbers and mathematical objects as if they were “things” that exist out there independently, we forget that they are not empirical entities.

Numbers are not found in the world in the way a table or a stone is found; they function as tools for description, counting, structure, and prediction — within systems we build in order to operate with reality. That does not make them any less powerful (quite the opposite), but it does change the kind of “existence” we are talking about.

9) Solipsism and the subject as the limit of the world

In the final part, Wittgenstein touches on solipsism and the place of the subject. There is one idea I find especially powerful: that the subject is not an object within the world, but rather a kind of boundary of the world.

My personal interpretation here is that, in practice, my world is the set of everything I can access: what I can experience, infer, or receive as information.

Not because the world “is my mind,” but because what counts as the world for me is necessarily constrained by my conditions of access and representation. And this is not a psychological whim: it is a structural limitation.

10) The famous closing line: silence… but understood in context

The Tractatus ends with proposition 7, which is quoted constantly (sometimes as an empty slogan):

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Out of context, it can sound like an invitation not to think, or to censor questions. But within the book, the meaning is different: Wittgenstein is saying that there are things language cannot formulate meaningfully, because they do not fit within its logical conditions.

From that point on, and as a personal reflection (this is no longer in the Tractatus), when we try to speak about what lies outside what can be meaningfully said — for example, “what happens after death,” whether there is an “afterlife,” or what happens to “consciousness” when life ends — we are often not describing a fact (because we have no access to that kind of fact), but exposing a human need: the need to close a gap, to calm an anxiety, to give narrative form to something that exceeds us.

Even if something existed after death, it would not only lie beyond what language can meaningfully say — it would lie beyond our cognitive reach. We cannot experience it, verify it, or test it. And when we try to speak about it, we inevitably use concepts born within this frame of existence to refer to another one (if there is one).

In that sense, those “metaphysical” questions may be logically improper as propositions — not because they are foolish, but because they fail to meet the conditions required to be verifiable, drawable, or representable within the same framework as the facts of the world. And yet, my conclusion is that they are still relevant: not as information about the universe, but as information about ourselves. They speak of fear, of the desire for meaning, of an intolerance of uncertainty, of the need for continuity, of the will for what we consider valuable not to be lost.

And this is what is interesting: the limit of language does not cancel the question; what it cancels is the pretension that the question can be answered as if it were just another fact of the world. In many cases, the most honest gesture is not to “explain” the inexplicable with recycled concepts from everyday life, but to recognize that, at that point, language begins to function more as a symptom of our anxieties than as a description of an accessible reality.

That does not mean that those things “do not matter.” In fact, one possible reading of the book is that Wittgenstein is drawing the boundary: showing what can be meaningfully said, while pointing to — without turning it into a badly formulated theory — what is lived, intuited, valued, or experienced, but does not fit neatly into propositions about facts.

Personal epilogue: why these books matter to me

I did not come to Wittgenstein through a philosophy degree, but through a more basic need: to question the world, try to understand it, locate its limits, understand why certain debates seem to go nowhere, and discover that many ideas one believes to be original have already been explored with enormous depth.

The Tractatus is a book that forces you to sharpen your ear: to distinguish when a sentence has meaning, when it merely sounds meaningful, and when you are trying to say something that language itself is not equipped to say.