Word: tractatus
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...language of ancient film, of Eisenstein, Griffith, of the great American avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s and 30s.” The filmmaker is fascinated not just by history but also by this sense of how film and images communicate meaning to an audience. “Wittgenstein Tractatus,” Forgács’s tribute to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a particularly meditative piece about the ways perception and communication affect our world. Forgács clearly enjoys questioning his audience and provoking thoughts and reactions through his documentaries. Despite his clear admiration...
...visitors to the palatial family home, and Ludwig's brother Paul, a concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I, commissioned works for the left hand by Richard Strauss, Ravel and Prokofiev. It was during the war that Ludwig, a volunteer in the Austrian artillery, completed the Tractatus shortly before he was captured and taken prisoner. Always an ascetic, he gave away his inheritance, relying on the generosity of his Cambridge champions, Russell and John Maynard Keynes, to secure academic employment for him, living frugally and in later life being cared for by his disciples...
...know from the moment you open the Tractatus that it is something special. Each left-hand page is in German, facing its English translation on the right, and the sentences are numbered, using a hierarchical system that tells you this is a formal proof. The book begins straightforwardly enough: "1. The world is everything that is the case." (In German, it makes a memorable rhyming couplet: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.) And it ends with an ending to end all endings: "7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...
...between, there is some tough sledding. Wittgenstein draws a distinction between what can be said, using words, and what can only be shown, and this raises the inevitable question: Does the Tractatus, as a text, say things that can't be said? Maybe. The next-to-last proposition is a famous shocker: "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...
...their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts...