Helmut and Stephen, To interpret Wittgenstein (or any philosopher), it's essential to consider all the issues and put them in context. As I said in my previous comment, Russell and Carnap misunderstood the Tractatus. They assumed that LW agreed with them that metaphysics, especially theology, was meaningless and therefore worthless.
But LW wrote the Tractatus while he was a soldier in the Austrian army during World War I. While he was writing those lines, he also carried with him one small book: a German translation of Tolstoy's writings on the gospels. Helmut
He said: "Was sich überhaupt sagen läßt, läßt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muß man schweigen." "What can be said at all, can be said clearly, and what cannot be talked about, one must be silent about". Assuming, that a good philosopher usually does not utter tautologies, I take this for an inquiry-block.
That is what Russell assumed, and he said so in his introduction to the Tractatus. But LW was furious about what Russell wrote and protested against publishing that introduction. However, the publisher insisted on including Russell's intro, because Russell was famous and Wittgenstein was unknown. But a man who carried a book on the gospels while he was writing those words could not have considered the book to be worthless. What he meant was that according to the theory of the Tractatus, it was not possible to assign a meaning to Tolstoy's words. In fact, LW explicitly said, in the Tractatus itself, that the theory of the Tractatus could not assign a meaning to the Tractatus. And therefore, the Tractatus was meaningless. But LW did not intend to say that meaningless implied worthless. On the contrary, he also said in various fragments that what could not be said had higher value than what could be said. In his later theory of language games, LW allowed all possible games with words. In his list of examples, he explicitly mentioned prayer. I recommend the excellent biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. For every stage of LW's life, Monk relates what LW was doing to what he was writing. Monk also goes into detail about LW's relationships with the Vienna Circle and his disgust with Carnap's misinterpretation of what he was trying to say. LW was half Jewish, but his father became Catholic (whether for belief, for convenience, or both is unknown). In any case, LW was baptized as Catholic. When he was dying, his former students Elisabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach asked whether he would like to see a priest. LW said yes. And he was given a Catholic funeral. John
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