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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 The world is everything that is the case.* 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same. 2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. 2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things). 2.011 It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact. 2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing. 2.0121 It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be made to fit. If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them. (A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.) Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things. If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context. 2.0122 The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connection with the atomic fact, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and m the proposition.) 2.0123 If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts. (Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot subsequently be found. 2.01231 In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities. 2.0124 If all objects are given, then thereby are all possible atomic facts also given. 2.013 Every thing is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space. 2.0131 A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is a place for an argument.)
* The decimals figures as numbers of the separate propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the emphasis laid upon them in my exposition. The propositions n. 1, n. 2, n. 3, etc., are comments on proposition No. n; the propositions n.m 1, n.m 2, etc., are comments on the proposition No. n,m; and so on.
Excerpted from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Tractatus
Logico Philosophicus (Routledge
Classics),
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