stence of God over a Christian who believes he or she has all the right answers and need no longer be concerned. It is how one is connected to a topic that is important, rather than the topic itself. This creates a limit to rational thought, in that rational objective consideration only amounts to so much. To wit, since what is most important in one’s life is subjective and not available for public scrutiny, ethics for Kierkegaard are entirely internal; others are not capable of being judged, as we cannot know their subjective apprehension of ethics.Contrast and compare that with Wittgenstein, who believes that ethics cannot be discussed for different reasons. For him, the meaning of the world is not in the world, and therefore ethics are entirely transcendental and hence are incapable of being discussed intelligibly. The idea of the ‘limit of thought’ permeates the Tractatus. The clearest exposition I can find offered in it comes from 4.12:Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it – logical form.In order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to be able to station ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world.This seems to be the most basic contention about concepts unable to be properly expressed in language, that the content of a nonlinguistic fact must somehow pertain to logical form. The logical form is the structure of the simple components in a complex object. So the logical form of a photograph is what it has in common with what it pictures. The logical form of a sentence is what it has in common with the fact it states. To return to the concept of ethics for a moment, we can see that any statement that purports to contain ethical content cannot, since it would necessarily show the logical form of the state of affairs beyond logic and therefore th...
