Tractatus

by Róbert Gál, David Short (Translator)

A delirious Wittgenstein, a disgruntled Gracián. With the Tractatus Róbert Gál gives us an axiomatic philosophy perplexed by its own doubts and uncertainties.
—Eugene Thacker

Tractatus is a book like no other – often funny and touching and always intellectual, written in the form (and spirit) of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It blends philosophical aphorisms with poetic sensibility and creates a unique and beautiful narrative of self-observation of a person from the 21stC. An elegant kit of thoughts for readers looking for witty meditation in our turbulent times.
—Matthias Göritz

Róbert Gál, paradoxologist extraordinaire, has written a wildly intractable, mournful, erotic, proud and honest Tractatus, whose axioms comprise no system but the performance of a system, a danse macabre of numbered masks.
—Joshua Cohen

Filled with wisdom, wit, and boundless imagination, Tractatus is a masterpiece.
—John Zorn

81 pages, Paperback

First published June 16, 2021

About the author

Róbert Gál is a Slovak-born writer and editor living in Prague. He is the author of several books of aphorisms, fiction, and philosophical fragments available in English translation, including Tractatus (Schism Press, 2022), Naked Thoughts (Black Sun Lit, 2019), Agnomia (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), On Wing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), and Signs & Symptoms (Twisted Spoon Press, 2003).

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Róbert Gál's latest work, may be his shortest (or a close tie with Naked Thoughts), but this little treatise is a surprisingly dense axiomatic exercise, with a nod to Wittgenstein, that examines what we can know about experience. Leaving room for uncertainty, anecdotes and, of course, aphorisms, the reader is invited to engage with their own assumptions about truth, memory, thought, emotion and much more. I want to suggest this is his most accessibly serious philosophical work—challenging but not heavy, wise but not dogmatic—and as ever, deceptively playful.

A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/10/05/an...

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Róbert Gál's latest opus is deceivingly called "Tractatus",as, if it does contain philosophical musings, it actually goes against the very notion of a "Treatise". Based on paradoxical formulas and fragments that read like prose poetry (a sort of Blanchotian "poetry blanche", if Blanchot had come up with the formula), Tractatus is a sum that reads like a collection of found epigraphs. Sometimes reminiscent of Nietzsche for its obscurity and humor, sometimes echoing Cioran in its despair, Tractatus is nonetheless less nihilistic and existentialist, then purely existential. Trying to circumvent dualistic thought via paradoxes, Róbert Gál flirts with the Taoist view of the world, that is to say that everything existing both proves and disproves its very existence at the same time. "Tractatus" is therefore, in my eyes, neither purely philosophical nor purely poetic, but deeply both in their very essence. A somber and challenging, yet amusing, commentary on language as a primary expression of both life, death and everything in between, it offers neither solace nor despair, but light.

[Jesse Farmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book is to be lost in the labyrinthine, blind drives that create the all too necessary masks of linguistic logic and to find, or possibly rediscover, a communion with them. We are lucky to still have literary experiences like this.

[Ansgar Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Unlike a cause, a reason always has its justification."

A terse philosophical tract, the pretence and heaviness drained out, but not the darkness - backfilled with wit.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I owe it to this review, and anyone who happens to read it, to begin by stating plainly that I am a total dilettante when it comes to philosophy (and even that word probably makes me sound smarter about it than I actually am). I love to read it. I try to make time for it. I always get something out of it. But it's also hard for me. It forces me to slow down, read sentences - if not entire paragraphs - if not entire pages - multiple times (sometimes still to no avail), and do my best to muddle through. It remains my number one academic regret that I never took so much as an intro survey course in college. I think I would have benefitted greatly from studying it with some authoritative guidance. (Or else I would have devolved into madness trying to put it all together). (It's definitely one or the other).

But, putting that paragraph's-worth of caveats aside, I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with Róbert Gál's Tractatus, whose title presumably refers back to Ludwig Wittgenstein's work of the same name (which I just dilettantishly learned from Wikipedia set out "to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science."). This brief-but-dense collection of interconnected aphorisms moves nimbly among topics as broad as the shapeshiftiness of words and writing, the mutability of selfhood, the integrity of imagination, the enduring artificiality of time, and the very nature of truth, and is clearly fording many of the same heady, all-encompassing waters as its namesake, hopscotching from rock to conceptual rock while dragging a wide net behind itself, creating an exponential web of touchpoints between every idea it plants its feet upon. This is writing that encourages your thinking to bloom, as the author puts it, "from one truth to the next."

Indeed, you could engage with each individual entry in Tractatus for a full day or more - and had I more time, that might have been the ideal way to approach it. There's something almost zen about Tractatus. It deserves to not just be read, but considered; sat with; meditated upon. Rushing through it on a busy writer/reviewer's truncated timetable absolutely did it a disservice, but even at my faster-than-ideal clip, bon mots like "Behind every imbalance lies another imbalance trying to counterbalance it," "No word can be in possession of truth," "Inability to compromise is itself a compromise," and "Infinity may indeed have no end, but it does keep beginning somewhere" will surely be rolling around in my brain for time immemorial, turning themselves over, and around, and inside-out as they collide and carom against one another and whatever else gets tossed in there in the years to come.

Gál writes like a man trying to outthink himself; to be conscious of his own unconscious; to know that which he, by definition, cannot know. And yet, there is little here of the madness philosophy sometimes instills in my overtaxed, tryhard brain. Gál, more than any philosopher I've read (which, again, is not by any means an exhaustive or even impressive list), seems at peace with his galaxy-brained subject matter. He never strikes me as taking a hard line, which in and of itself is increasingly rare these days. If he's advocating for anything, it's unfettered exploration and truly open-minded thought. One gets the sense that he would not only welcome all arguments, but even be open to them - to having his own mind changed, even now; that he would love to have someone to discuss all this with endlessly. His Tractatus made me want to read more philosophy, and also made me feel better about not always grasping it as fully as I'd like. And so I'll close with another aphorism from the man himself - one of the easiest and most generous in the book: "If there's something we don't understand, and yet we talk about it, it means that we are striving to understand it one way or another."

[Christopher]

Will have to read this again. Just a surf the first time through.

[Aslı · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book feels like is a contrived book.