from Wittgenstein

Continuing from the previous post and discussion about science and ethics, a few paragraphs from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (link goes to the hypertext version of the book)

6.4
All propositions are of equal value.

6.41
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

6.42
Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.

Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.43
If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.

In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.

The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

6.44
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

6.45
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni* is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.



{* from the point of view of eternity}