Comments on Tractatus: 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

A classic aphorism. Essentially 'Faire et se taire', 'say what you mean and mean what you say, then say nothing else. This I take to be a meaningful aphorism, a truth hidden in it's tautology, that is nothing more than tautologous. I take this as the corollary of Schopenhauer's:

You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; and the trick is possible, because a man generally supposes that there must be some meaning in words

So it's not an empty tautology, but a tautology that can be explored. It has real connotations. It can be acted upon. Stop talking about things of which there is nothing to say (there -is- something to say, but nothing worthwhile is the implication).

As to language, I think this works in English as in the original German, that 'to be silent = schweigen' is the logical opposite of 'to not speak = nicht sprechen', making an aphoristic tautology as profundity worthy of Nietzsche.

A large part of the Tractatus could have been treated this way, a lot of blather that doesn't add anything, neither by its direct statement or by the fact that it is said at all. But W is both sincere and humorless. So he must have thought that what I think is empty BS is in fact really useful, but then, you really need to say that out loud: the aphorism denies itself, but a lot of the TLP text really didn't need to be said either implicitly or explicitly. So we don't disagree in principle, just in a large number of the details.