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

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

Philosophy

The story behind the card

This is proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) published in his lifetime. The Vienna-born thinker drafted it in notebooks while serving as a soldier in the First World War; it appeared in German in 1921 and in English in 1922. The book is a chain of short numbered statements. Its central idea is that a meaningful sentence works like a picture of a possible fact. What cannot be pictured in this way, such as ethics or the meaning of life, cannot be said, only shown. So the line is not about the size of one's vocabulary: the edges of what I can meaningfully say are the edges of the world as I can think it. Wittgenstein later rejected much of the book in his Philosophical Investigations, published after his death in 1953.

Türkçe oku
Dilimin sınırları, dünyamın sınırları demektir.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

Bu cümle, Ludwig Wittgenstein'ın (1889–1951) hayattayken yayımladığı tek felsefe kitabı Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'taki 5.6 numaralı önermedir. Viyana doğumlu filozof kitabın taslağını, Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda asker olarak savaşırken tuttuğu defterlere yazdı. Eser 1921'de Almanca, 1922'de İngilizce yayımlandı. Kitap numaralanmış kısa önermelerden oluşur. Temel düşüncesine göre anlamlı bir cümle, olası bir olgunun resmi gibidir. Bu şekilde resmedilemeyen şeyler, örneğin ahlak ya da hayatın anlamı, söylenemez; yalnızca gösterilebilir. Yani cümle, bildiğimiz kelimelerin sayısıyla ilgili değildir: Anlamlı biçimde söyleyebileceklerimin sınırı, düşünebildiğim dünyanın da sınırıdır. Wittgenstein sonraki yıllarda bu kitaptaki görüşlerinin çoğundan vazgeçti; yeni düşüncelerini topladığı Felsefi Soruşturmalar ölümünden sonra, 1953'te yayımlandı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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