#8217;s points are ordered in a recursive numerical way, without explanation or elucidation. Concise and patterned, the Tractatus reads like a mathematical proof, except that proofs contain more justification. “What can be said at all can be said clearly.” We must assume that any attempt at further clarification Wittgenstein believed would have obscured the veracity of his presentation. Lack of enlightening exposition in this case is enlightening since we can deduce that nothing more need be said: the Tractatus must be able to speak for itself, in a sense.Showing, not saying: ‘Some things cannot be said; they show themselves’. As one of Wittgenstein’s major contentions, he tends to abide by it, systematically refusing to explain where an example will do instead. Thus many general assertions are left unjustified, leaving to the reader to see the logical form of an argument from specific instantiations (how a painting pictures the world cannot be explained, etc.). This is nearly as indirect as communication can be – leaving a reader to infer the author’s point from facts about the world.Saying things which admittedly cannot be said: Over and over in different ways, Wittgenstein states that what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence. Yet the Tractatus was written despite the full knowledge of its author that the premise of the book is that such a book cannot be written; if what the Tractatus says is true, the Tractatus is nonsense since it says the very kinds of things it claims cannot be said intelligibly. How much more of a perplexing contradiction can a work contain? Any attempt at direct communication of the truths in the work must inevitably fail; the author must ‘spout nonsense’, so to speak, in order to show the reader that what he says (and therefore, what many others say) is in fact nonsense. The reader is left to see how what he says is nonsense, rather than havin...
