262 music, philosophy, and modernity
Analytical approaches to Wittgenstein hardly ever discuss music as
an issue in his philosophy. The indices of many of the standard works on
Wittgenstein rarely even specify music as a topic of discussion (see, e.g.,
Sluga and Stern 1997 ), and even if these works do discuss passages from
Wittgenstein involving ‘music’, ‘melody’, etc., when music is mentioned
it is just seen as providing analogies for his supposed real philosophical
concerns.^1 This is a result of the assumptions I questioned in earlier
chapters, which require that music be dealt with by the ‘philosophy of
music’, a branch of analytical philosophy, which, like analytical aesthet-
ics, is of little importance to that philosophy’s central concerns.^2 The
consequence is that for analytical philosophy there is little or no sense
in which music might be said to convey anything about philosophy.
The early Wittgenstein did not accept such a view, and the later
Wittgenstein did not do so either. One of the reasons is that he
questions the substantialisation of concepts like ‘language’ or ‘phi-
losophy’ which implies that their boundaries can be clearly drawn,
as opposed to their being words whose differing uses can be related
in terms of ‘family resemblance’. The same applies to ‘music’, so
the music/language/philosophy relationship cannot be considered as
something fixed, least of all by a specifically ‘philosophical’ approach, of
the kind, for example, that asks in general terms ‘Is music a language?’
Before exploring in more detail how Wittgenstein responds to music, it
is worth briefly demonstrating how odd the neglect of music by Wittgen-
stein’s commentators actually is.
The remarks cited below appear in different kinds of text, from
diaries, to more obviously philosophical texts, and they all suggest how
central music is for Wittgenstein. However, it is worth stressing that I
am not claiming that ‘Music’ is some kind of majorphilosophicalsolu-
tion to key dilemmas in Wittgenstein. Such a claim would repeat from
the opposite direction the problems I am concerned to circumvent,
because it would regard music as a positive answer to philosophical
problems, rather than as something which questions the very nature of
1 Alber ( 2000 )isone of the few philosophers to address the issue directly. A more extensive
treatment is the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation ‘Wittgenstein’s Music: Logic, Meaning,
and the Fate of Aesthetic Autonomy’ by Paulo de Castro (University of London 2007 ),
who has been of great help to me in this chapter. I have also profited from talking to
(and playing jazz with) William Day and reading the manuscript of his ‘The Aesthetic
Dimension of Wittgenstein’s Later Writings’.
2 This might sound a little dismissive, but reference to specific works of ‘analytical aes-
thetics’ in the most significant mainstream work in analytical philosophy is exceedingly
rare.