Mysticism and Nonsense in the Tractatus

This paper presents a new treatment of the paradox of Wittgensteins Tractatus: a paradox resulting from the fact that the work seems to declare itself to be nonsense. Current approaches assume that the Tractatus is concerned to communicate truths, and thus have to treat the paradox in one of two ways. Either the work is supposed to communicate ineffable truths, or some part of the work is taken not to be nonsense and hence capable of communicating truths straightforwardly. According to the view presented in this article, neither approach is credible and, as a result, the assumption on which both approaches rest must be abandoned. The paper argues that the function of the work is not to communicate truths, but to engender in the reader a mystical experience of the limits of the world