Source / 来源: Project Gutenberg

Tractatus: Prop. 1-2 (The World)

Ludwig WittgensteinTranslated by C.K. Ogden (1922)

1. The World

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.

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2. Atomic Facts

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.

2.013 Each 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.

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs.

2.0141 The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.

2.02 The object is simple.

2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.

2.021 Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.

2.022 It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something—a form—in common with the real world.

2.023 This fixed form consists of the objects.

2.024 Substance is what exists independently of what is the case.

2.025 It is form and content.

2.0251 Space, time and colour (colouredness) are forms of objects.

2.027 The fixed, the subsistent and the object are one.

2.0271 The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable.

2.0272 The configuration of the objects forms the atomic fact.

2.03 In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, like the links of a chain.

2.031 In the atomic fact the objects are combined in a definite way.

2.032 The way in which objects hang together in the atomic fact is the structure of the atomic fact.

2.033 The form is the possibility of the structure.

2.034 The structure of the fact consists of the structures of the atomic facts.

2.04 The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.

2.05 The totality of existent atomic facts also determines which atomic facts do not exist.

2.06 The existence of atomic facts we also call a positive fact, their non-existence a negative fact.