wittgenstein and heidegger 263philosophy. Here, then, are just four examples – there are very many
more – which should inform any discussion of this topic. M. O’C. Drury
reports that, while working on the second part ofPhilosophical Inves-
tigations, Wittgenstein said to him that ‘It is impossible for me to say
in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How
then can I hope to be understood?’ (in Rhees 1984 : 160 ). This may be
only a reported remark (there are similar reports from others: see, e.g.,
Bouveresse 1973 : 13 ), but consider the following from Wittgenstein’s
diary in 1930 :
I often think that the highest thing I would like to achieve would be to
compose a melody. Or I wonder that, given my desire for it, one has
never occurred to me. But then I must say that it is impossible that one
will ever occur to me, because I am lacking something essential orthe
most essential thing for it. For this reason it hovers before me as such a
high ideal because it is as though I could summarise my life and could
present it crystallised. Even if it were only a little, shabby crystal, it would
still be one.
(Wittgenstein 1999 a: 21 )InCulture and Value, Wittgenstein says in 1931 : ‘There are problems
that I can never get close to, which are not in my line or in my world.
Problems of the Western world of thought that Beethoven (and per-
haps in part Goethe) got close to, but which no philosopher has ever
confronted (Nietzsche perhaps went past them). And perhaps they are
lost for Western philosophy...’(Wittgenstein 1980 : 9 ). He also asserts
in the same collection, coincidentally echoing Friedrich Schlegel, that
‘People today think that scientists are there to instruct them, poets,
musicians etc. to give them pleasure.That the latter have something to
teach themnever occurs to them’ (ibid.: 36 ). Examples from his more
well-known philosophical texts will be examined in the rest of the
chapter.
These remarks make it hard to regard music as just a topic which
sometimes appears in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, as an example, say,
of a more general philosophical issue. Unlike his imagined melody,
Wittgenstein does not think that philosophy could be what might ‘crys-
tallise’ a life. Indeed, much of his work consists in the effort therapeu-
tically to ‘cure’ us of philosophical problems. If Wittgenstein’s failure
to convey what music has meant to him means that we are unlikely
to understand him, music cannot be peripheral to his thinking, not
least because a major part of that thinking is concerned precisely with