Wittgenstein on his Tractatus

This is a startling find. Wittgenstein, referring to his book Tractatus, said in a letter to an editor:

"The book's point is an ethical one...My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one" (In Edmonds, D. & Eidinow, J. (2001). Wittgenstein's Poker. NY: HarperColins Publishers. pp. 158-159).

What else could he be meaning to say with "all that I have not written" if not the metaphysical, ethical/moral, aesthetic, and spiritual?

So, the unsayable or unknowable is after all more important--and not devoid of meaning--than what the logical positivists thought are the only utterances that are sensible (i.e., empirical and analytic statements).

But, perhaps, this is nothing earth-shaking for those who are afflicted hitherto with the disease that is logical positivism. The quotation however proves that the logical positivists, during the time of Wittgenstein, the early one, saw only what they wanted to see in his Tractatus.

It's odd, nonetheless, for logical positivism to have held sway on the the question of linguistic meaning for a number of years though they don't deserve the following they enjoyed even for a smallest fraction of a millisecond. Okay, let's just say that logical positivism, despite its spartan narrow-mindedness, was not an utter waste of time as we learned anyway a great lesson from its humongous mistake: requiring the use of a principle (verification) that cannot meet its own demand.

If only those who nodded to them realized that it's inhuman to confine language to what is either true or false alone, the world could have been spared the trouble of dealing with one unnecessary irritant.