[lit-ideas] On Objects: Obby Propper has entered the building (Was: Elem Propper has left the building)
- From: Henninge@xxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Henninge)
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 05:21:00 +0200
The discomfiture concerning objects is evident on the first page of the
first edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
2.01 Der Sachverhalt ist eine Verbindung von Gegenständen. (Sachen,
Dingen)
2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects
(things).
"The world is everything that is the case" (1), i.e. ". . . it is the case
that . . . ." "What is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of
affairs (Sachverhalten)" (2). Sachen, Dingen: In the translator's note
preceding the Ogden/Ramsey translation of 1922, the "obvious difficulties
raised by the vocabulary" are cited as one reason for presenting the English
translation on the righthand pages facing the German original on the left.
This arrangement has allowed "a certain latitude . . . in passages to which
objection might otherwise be taken as over-literal." The "difficulties
raised by the vocabulary" must refer to the difficulties the various
translators have with German vocabulary (and it is really just a
straightforward vocabulary with considerable repetition of terms through
their calculated employment in a number of slightly differing sentences. In
fact the Tractatus resembles in this respect the only other book that
Wittgenstein every published during his lifetime--a dictionary for
schoolchildren in southwestern Austria--in which an attempted
comprehensiveness and concommitant avoidance of superfluous vocabulary terms
results in a relatively short list of the minimum vocabulary necessary for
his charges to express every aspect of their daily lives (the Sachverhalten,
the states of affairs).
Ogden and Ramsey could and perhaps should have erred even more in the
direction of literality: Then, perhaps, they would not have placed
"entities" beside "things" as apparent specifications of what Wittgenstein
meant by objects. "Things" is fine, and Pears and McGuinness did well to try
to indicate to the reader not interested in checking the German (and in the
case of their translation, of course, not having the German to hand) . . .
well, check that, I'm sorry, they did *not* do well in their indication
to the reader that "Sachverhalt" and "Sachen" have a root in common,
"Sach(en)," which O and R render misleadingly as "entities." It would seem
that it is Wittgenstein who has wanted to draw attention to the "Sach-" in
"Sachverhalt" by putting "Sachen" together with "Dingen" in the parentheses.
In other words, Wittgenstein has three words that say the same
"thing"--things, i.e. Gegenständen, Sachen und Dingen. P and G reduce this
to two English words, objects and things. The literalist original
translators, trusting that the critical reader could check the German to his
or her left, risked "entities," and who knows what damage, who can assess
the damage that that has caused? Can anyone point to an entity that one
could also unhesitatingly call an object or a thing? Think of a "corporate
entity" or a "god" or a "soul" or any other entity. I don't think anyone can
reasonably imagine such "things" as combining to form a "state of affairs"
or, as Pears and McGuinness add, "a state of things." And to compound the
error, the original translators introduce the word "entity" again at the
bottom of the very first page (it may never appear again, I'm not certain,
at least none of the translators includes it in their indexes--and P's and
M's is especially thorough), to translate "etwas Logisches," something
logical, as "a logical entity."
2.0123 If I know an object, I also know all of the possibilities of its
occurrence in states of affairs.
2.01231 In order to know an object, although I need not know its
external, I must know all of its internal properties. (Elem's brother, Obby
Propper has just entered the building.)
2.0124 If all of the objects are given, then all of the _possible_
states of affairs are thereby also given.
2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of
affairs. I can imagine this space empty, but not the thing without the
space.
2.0131 The spatial object must lie in infinite space. (The point in space
is the position of an argument.)
A patch in my visual field, although it need not be red, must have a
color: it has, so to speak, the color space around it. A tone must have
_one_ pitch, the object of touch _one_ hardness, etc.
2.014 The objects contain the possibility of all circumstances.
2.0141 The possibility of its occurrence in states of affairs is the form
of the object.
2.021 The objects make up the substance of the world.
2.022 It is obvious (Obby Propper) that no matter how different an
imagined world is from the real world, it must have something--a form--in
common with the real world.
2.023 This fixed form consists of just these objects.
2.0231 The substance of the world _can_ only determine a form and not
material properties (Obby Propper is a form!). For the latter are only
presented by the propositions (the Proppers, but eventually just Elem
Propper), only formed by the configuration of the objects.
2.0272 The configuration of the objects forms the state of affairs.
2.03 In the state of affairs the objects hang in each other (hängen .
. . ineinander) like the links of a chain.
2.031 In the state of affairs the objects relate to each other (verhalten
sich . . . zueinander) in a particular way.
2.032 The way in which the objects hang together (zusammenhängen--also
"relate" to each other, together) is the structure of the state of affairs.
2.033 The form is the possibility of the structure.
2.034 The structure of the fact consists of the structures of the states
of affairs.
2.04 The totality of the existing states of affairs is the world.
. . . a world full of Obby Proppers configured into facts by Elem Proppers.
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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