To me it means "don't speak about something you have no knowledge of"...which I don't Angel, so I googled...:2razz:
As with any Wittgenstein quote, it’s difficult to work out exactly what he meant. All we know is that he found all his enigmatic epigrams so completely obvious that asking him for direction sometimes drove him into a rage. And, while he refused to explain much of what he said, he had a zero tolerance policy for anyone who misconstrued his words.
His stated aim in this little book (you’ll have it read inside an hour if you want to) is to take down philosophy as a discipline forever. He’s not joking about that. He really felt that if everyone took these ideas on board, philosophy would stop.
As all comprehensive philosophy should, he starts at the very start, as you can see from the opening line. But even then, he says that “this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it”, which at that stage, of course, was only Wittgenstein.
If you doubt it, a quick skim through the renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell’s introduction will reveal that he seems to have missed the point entirely. He wasn’t alone. A tragic but understandable misreading of the Tractatus led to the establishment of one of the most influential schools of thought of the 20th century, the Vienna Circle.
The last line of the Tractatus is: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The Vienna Circle misinterpreted this as Wittgenstein’s intention to nail down philosophy to only things which can be measured, catalogued, or “spoken about” in some observable way, such that discussions about [god, love, poetry etc.] were avoided as irrelevant and meaningless. Wittgenstein himself was horrified by their interpretation, as he had meant something entirely different: that [god, love and poetry etc.] were the only things worth a damn in the human animal, but that due to their profoundly subjective significance, it would be impossible for any discussion to illuminate anything about them. In fact, attempts to discuss them could only degrade our intuitive understanding of them. Which is a curious position for a philosopher to adopt (“let’s not talk about it”), but Wittgenstein was no ordinary philosopher.
Further, after stating that no one who isn’t living inside his head will understand it, Wittgenstein claims that “the second thing … this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problem are solved.” In other words, even a discussion of why philosophy is worthless is worthless.
In later years (or immediately after publication, depending on your mileage), he would completely denounce this book in favour of the ideas he outlined in his Philosophical Investigations, which is more hard philosophy than the Tractatus, but doesn’t suffer for it.
In both books, his main concern is to work out what it means to “mean” something, how we put meaning into the words we throw into the air from our heads, how we take symbols and make them mean things, and how we engage with others using these symbols. As with much of Wittgenstein’s output, it sounds very complicated, but it’s not.
Much of the time, the only sensible solution he can come upon is a variation on “It is what it is,” which is a depressing sort of conclusion for any philosopher to read, but, you know, it is what it is.
https://www.quora.com/Whereof-one-c...at-did-Ludwig-Wittgenstein-mean-by-this-quote
