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Submitted October 21, 2025
Published 2025-10-27

Artículos de investigación y ensayos filosóficos

No. 5 (2025): Analítica

Language and “the mystical” in early wittgenstein


DOI https://doi.org/10.48204/2805-1815.8477

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References
DOI: 10.48204/2805-1815.8477

Published: 2025-10-27

How to Cite

Torres-Vindas , J. A. (2025) “ Language and ‘the mystical’ in early wittgenstein ”, Analítica, (5), pp. 136–152. doi: 10.48204/2805-1815.8477.

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between language and "the mystical" in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, emphasizing its opaque nature and its ethical-epistemic implications. First, it analyses the pictorial theory of language: propositions are logical figures (Bild) that share a logical form (Logische Form) with worldly facts, yet their limits prevent the expression of an "ultimate meaning." Second, it explores "the mystical" as the ineffable: the very existence of the world (6.44) and its perception as a bounded totality (6.45), which can only be shown (6.522), not stated. Third, it derives ethical-aesthetic consequences: the metaphysical subject, as the limit of the world (5.632), attains happiness through an aesthetic contemplation that accepts the world without intervention (will outside the world, 6.373). Ethics and aesthetics converge in a contemplative stance toward the mystical, whose logical inexpressibility demands silence (7). Thus, the Tractatus transcends positivism by pointing toward the transcendental through its own self-limitation.

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