Would Wittgenstein distinguish between "all that" and "that which"?

May 16, 2015 2:47 PM

I've most often seen the first proposition of the Tractatus quoted as "The world is that which is the case." (The 2014 film and the line in the chorus from The New Pornographers' Chump Change, eg.) But Ogden translates it as "The world is everything that is the case," and Pears/McGuiness as "The world is all that is the case." Is there an important difference here? Asking cuz potential tattoo.
posted by PMdixon to Religion & Philosophy (15 answers total)

Best answer: I think Wittgenstein endorsed the Ogden translation; the last two translations seem interchangeable to me, but the first is different.
posted by three_red_balloons at 3:23 PM on May 16, 2015

Best answer: Although, looking at the original, it seems like the comma might be important. Have you considered getting the tattoo in German?
posted by three_red_balloons at 3:27 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I would personally say that "The world is everything that is the case" is the best translation, but I also think that it's a sentence that isn't really completely translatable.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 3:30 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you're doing a tattoo, I might say that the original German, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist, might be the best. But it's your tattoo! Go with what you like the best. I agree with kinddieserzeit's (and Ogden's) translation, insofar as it is a literal word-for-word translation.

(the comma is kind of anachronistic, but in my experience not uncommon in German.)
posted by General Malaise at 3:45 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Currently, the Hacker/Schulte translation is considered the most accurate. I think their translation is "The world is all that is the case." but my copy is out on loan, so I might be wrong. That being said, I think that even though it's not as precise, that "The world is that which is the case" has a more poetic sound.
posted by alltomorrowsparties at 3:54 PM on May 16, 2015

Best answer: I don't think much of "The world is that which is the case" as a translation. It's an important part of the account that the world is made up of many facts, not just one.

If it were me, I'd go for the Ogden translation. As three_red_balloons points out, this translation has a special status because it had the endorsement of Wittgenstein himself.
posted by HoraceH at 4:55 PM on May 16, 2015

Best answer: > Wittgenstein collaborated on and personally
> approved the Ogden translation ... working
> sentence by sentence with Ramsey, Ogden,
> and GE Moore (as we know from his
> correspondence with Ogden, edited by GH
> von Wright).

From Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition, by Dale Jacquette, pg. xix
posted by HoraceH at 4:56 PM on May 16, 2015

Proposition (or utterance or whatever) 1.1.1 seems to leave no doubt what is meant:
"The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts"
posted by thelonius at 5:23 PM on May 16, 2015

Best answer: (the comma is kind of anachronistic, but in my experience not uncommon in German.)

I believe German needs that comma.
posted by hoyland at 6:41 PM on May 16, 2015

Best answer: I agree with the reasons given above for favoring Ogden. Also, the original German is rhymed, and while none of the English translations have that particular trait, Ogden's is in iambic pentameter which (to me, at least) gives it a comparable formal poetic sound in English.
posted by aws17576 at 7:14 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Ogden translation is by far the most common one. Source: philosophy prof.

Cool tattoo!
posted by persona au gratin at 2:00 AM on May 17, 2015

Best answer: I would go for the German, since it's punchier. As David Marjanović said on my blog a few years ago (responding to someone who wrote "Much later, I skimmed the Tractatus in German. No point in evaluating the style of gnomic utterances"):

Those gnomic utterances come across like I’m told psalms come across in the original Hebrew!

Take “The world is all that is the case.” That sounds like “bla bla bla bla blah”. But in the original, it sounds like a weather god sitting on a mountaintop, surrounded by black clouds, and thundering from on high: 1.0. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Every stressed syllable reverberates in your ears — and there are only three really unstressed syllables in this one.

posted by languagehat at 9:42 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Hi.
posted by wittgenstein at 11:08 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the input folks - the "wrong" English version is the one that's personally meaningful, so I'm gonna mull some more. Probably either the Ogden or stick with the wrong one and just leave off the '1.'
posted by PMdixon at 11:39 AM on May 17, 2015

Weighing in late: an additional plus to using the original German is that you'd than have an authentic justification to use a teutonic blackletter font like fraktur for the tattoo. More of a justification than many who sport blackletter have, since fraktur was a standard font for typesetting text in the Austria of Wittgenstein.
posted by bertran at 12:26 PM on May 22, 2015