Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The early Wittgenstein: language as a picture of the world, up to the limit where it must fall silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — first published as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921. English translation: trans. C.K. Ogden (with F.P. Ramsey), London: Kegan Paul, 1922; standard modern translation, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.
Seven numbered propositions, each but the last branching into a decimal tree of sub-propositions, running from the world as the totality of facts out to the edge of what can be said. Its core is the picture theory: a meaningful proposition is a picture of a possible fact, and it can depict the world only because the two share a logical form. Language mirrors reality; whatever can be said can be said in that exact form, and the rest is not false but nonsensical.
This is the early, symbolic Wittgenstein — and the ambition is a cousin of the perfect language of Umberto Eco - The Search for the Perfect Language, and of every formal ontology since: a notation that lays the world out without remainder. It is the instinct behind “symbolic scaffolding” in the misplaced manifesto.
But the book draws its own limit. Where the logical form gives out, so does saying: you cannot state the ethical, the mystical, the sense of the world — you can only run up against the edge. The seventh proposition stands alone, unelaborated:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
That silence is the point the misplaced manifesto keeps “an ear for”: the boundary of what a symbolic system can represent at all. The later Wittgenstein would tear the picture theory down and begin again from use — see Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations.