Logical Silence: The Things of Which Language Cannot Speak

On Wittgenstein’s Concept of Silence and the Limits of Language

Photo by on

“Words can’t express how much I love you.”

The idea that there is a limit to what language can express is nothing new. From pop songs to greeting cards, we often express our deepest emotions by saying how language falls short of describing how we feel. In philosophy, it is the same. While many philosophers have argued for limitations to language, few have given as strong of an account as Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where in the introduction he states,

“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

This statement by Wittgenstein gives rise to the question: what is silence? Further, and perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for silence to be a limit to language? Many have taken silence to denote the inability of language to convey certain truths like our emotions as described before. However, a question that has not been asked is whether silence is in fact a limitation on language. This is because I think the concept of silence in Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been largely…