conclusion 379specifically ‘aesthetic’ questions, concerning ‘expression’, the ‘work
of art’, etc., which constitute their own branch of philosophy. This
seems to me to be a mistake. Rorty warns against conflating the con-
trast, essential to the sciences, between the ‘veridical (the “objective”
as the “intersubjective”) and the nonveridical (the “subjective” as the
“merely apparent”)’, with ‘the quite different contrast between the com-
municable (what our concepts catch) and the incommunicable (what
these may, or must, fail to catch)’ (Rorty 1982 : 190 ). The latter is essen-
tial to aesthetics because much that matters in art is not conceptual
and so is not best dealt with as though it can be grasped in objective
terms. It should be clear from what I have said so far that I see no
need to produce a self-justification of the kind sought in analytical aes-
thetics. This is not least because I don’t think that what is at issue can
actually be justified in this way. Attempting to do so would depend on
the representationalist assumption that there is something aesthetic
‘out there’ which is different from other kinds of objectively existing
things out there. This idea depends on the veridical/non-veridical con-
trast, when what is at issue is really the nature of the changing rela-
tionships between the meaning manifest in art, some of which is non-
conceptual, and other forms of meaning. I also don’t think that one
shouldattempt to provide such a justification as the basis of ‘aesthet-
ics’, because doing so would exclude the heuristic reversal of roles
between the musical and the philosophical which is vital to under-
standing the significance of music in exploring the limits of modern
philosophy.
Rather than what is intended by ‘the aesthetic’ being the object of
a specific domain of philosophy, it should therefore be regarded as
one way of addressing what is intended by metaphysics 2 ,namely those
things which have to be ‘vollzogen’, which can only show themselves in
a specific articulation or be understood by participating in a specific
practice. Lawrence Kramer says of interpreting musical meaning that
‘the interpretation does not locate meaning as a recoverable substance
within the work, musical or otherwise, but as an activity or disposition
within the cultural field’ (Kramer 2002 : 19 ). There is nothing mysteri-
ous or unclear about this sort of participation in cultural practices, as
the later Wittgenstein suggests by his avoidance of prescribing limits to
what can count as signifying material or signifying activity. It is only if
one makes the representationalist assumption that answers to questions
about musical meaning have to be couched in terms of a translation of
the musical into a direct verbal equivalent that Wittgenstein’s approach