Can Words Capture Truth?

The Kena Upanishad and Wittgenstein arrived at the same boundary, 2,500 years apart.

Kena Upaniṣad vs Wittgenstein. Language can point toward ultimate reality but cannot contain it. The Kena drew the same boundary Wittgenstein would draw 2,500 years later, then walked one step further than he ever did.

The Manuscript in the Pack

November 1918. The Italian front. An Austrian artillery officer named Ludwig Wittgenstein has been carrying a manuscript through trench warfare for most of the war. It travels in his rucksack alongside his ammunition and his copy of Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. He has rewritten it on whatever paper he could find, in pencil and in ink, between artillery fire and night marches. It is short, about seventy-five pages, organized as a series of numbered propositions from one to seven. He thinks it solves every fundamental problem in philosophy.

When the Italians capture him on the third of November and march him to a prison camp at Cassino, he keeps the manuscript with him. He finishes it inside the camp. He writes to Bertrand Russell from prison and asks him to find a publisher. The book will appear three years later under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Its final sentence, the most famous sentence in twentieth-century philosophy, is seven words long.

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.'

Wittgenstein had been working with formal logic, alone, in trenches, to draw a precise line between what language could do and what it could not. He arrived at the line and stopped at it. He spent the rest of his life walking around it, looking for what was on the other side, and never quite finding a way through. He was the first European philosopher in centuries to take the limit of language seriously as a discovery, not as a problem to be solved by sharper definitions.

Twenty-five centuries earlier, on the other side of Eurasia, an unknown rishi had stood at exactly the same line. The text he composed is called the Kena Upaniṣad. It is one of the shortest of the principal Upaniṣads, four small khaṇḍas, the first two in verse and the last two in prose. It takes its name from its opening word, kena, 'by whom?'. The Kena rishi did not stop at the line. He told a story about what was on the other side, and he handed his student a method for getting there.