ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein was so depressed that he spent the next ten years as a gardener in a monastery, a teacher and in building a house for his sister. In Paul Engelmann’s words: the difference between the Positivists and Wittgenstein is that ‘they have nothing to be silent about’ and he had a great deal. In some ways Wittgenstein was his worst enemy where intelligibility is concerned, unless he was hell-bent on being misunderstood. Wittgenstein returned to the notion of running up against the boundaries of language in a lecture on ethics which he gave to ‘The Heretics’ three years later, in 1929, when he had returned to Cambridge. Wittgenstein’s lasting message is first, the inexpressibility of religious belief, ethical principles and aesthetic judgments in empirical terms and hence, second, the absurdity of attempting to give an empirical account of them.
