8 Music, language, and being: Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Explicit and implicit musicThe fact that it took until the work of Karl-Otto Apel in the 1970 s (Apel
1973 , 1976 ) for the affinities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger to
be widely appreciated is a symptom of the divisions between ‘analytical’
and ‘European’ approaches in twentieth-century Western philosophy.
These divisions appear in Kivy’s claim, cited in the Introduction, that
‘Music, of all the arts, is the most philosophically unexplored and most
philosophically misunderstood where it has been explored at all’ (Kivy
1997 : 139 ). This is obviously not the case for the European tradition,
and therefore could be valid only for the analytical tradition. But then
consider the following. Wittgenstein must be regarded as part of the
analytical tradition. However, even in his early writings, which helped to
establish the terms of analytical philosophy, he used music as a means
of asking questions about philosophy. On the other hand, Heidegger,
for many the epitome of a ‘European’ philosopher, wrote virtually noth-
ing about music, although he did think that it was important. Despite
Heidegger’s lack of attention to music, we have already seen that music
plays a role in his work. I want in this chapter to explore this role a
bit further, but I mainly want to argue at greater length that, along
with the explicit role which music plays in Wittgenstein’s thinking, it
plays an important implicit role which has rarely figured in the main
interpretations of his philosophy. My claim will be that the entangle-
ment of music and philosophy is not primarily a philosophical prob-
lem for Wittgenstein, but is instead a resource for exploring the nature
of language and the world. The relationship of both Heidegger and
Wittgenstein to music will also reveal links between them which have
not been evident in many existing readings.
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