What is the case?

Keep quiet. Do not talk about anything beyond the field of facts, that is what young Wittgenstein seems to propose to the readers of his “Tractatus logico philosophicus”.

But how does this hard-liner make assertions about what we may make assertions about? A difficult question, of course. In order to find an answer, it could be worth your while to have a look at how Wittgenstein works. The first three sentences all start with “Die Welt ist …”.  In different assertions, Wittgenstein tries to explain what he wants to talk about. Nothing less than “the world”. In the second and the third sentence he makes a connection between “world” and “facts”. But in the first one?

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Before young Wittgenstein wrote this, he probably considered a series of alternatives, like

(1) Die Welt ist alles, was ist.

or

(2) Die Welt ist alles, was es gibt.

But with the first one the philosopher would have ended up in the middle of eternal philosophical debates about “the being”. The second one would have been metaphysically unfathomable, as Heidegger discovered later on, because the impersonal subject Es could have aroused the question: “Who or what is es?” and because of the verb geben, to give. So how could he possibly express what he wanted to say?

In the next sentence, Wittgenstein uses the word “Tatsachen”, facts. But here, in the beginning? He could have started with:

Die Welt, das sind die Tatsachen.

But he does not. He chooses a metaphor:

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

correctly translated as “The world is all that is the case”. Both in German and in English this is a metaphor deriving from Latin. “Was der Fall ist” is “what the dice says”, more precisely: “when it has fallen”.

The expression in German is kindred with the word “Zufall”, chance. In English it 

derives from French “cas”, but today you probably do not hear the connection between"case" and "chance". Only in “casual” it seems to have survived. What you can not hear in the translation is the antimetaphysical, or, if you like, existentialist, tendency in Wittgensteins words. Just remember Stirner's: we are "mit allem Andern bunt durcheinander herumgewürfelt”: "We are tossed about (like dices) with everything else".  

The world is what is there, Wittgenstein says, and it is there by chance: we just find it and may wonder about it, but we cannot identify a sense or a rule in its being there. 

In other words: the English translation “The world is what is the case” is both right and wrong. It may make you think of law or medical cases, rather than of chance. By reading the first sentence in English, you may find it strange, but you will not find the key to its proper understanding.