264 music, philosophy, and modernity
what can and cannot meaningfully be said. In the passage involving
Beethoven the very fact that Wittgenstein adumbrates the possibility
that music may address things which philosophy fails to address means
that music must be significant in characterising the scope of his project.
The easy way out here is to argue that the later Wittgenstein regarded
differing forms of articulation as good for different purposes – which
is undoubtedly the case – but this does not explain why music so often
occurs in conjunction with central, explicitly philosophical, issues in
his work. What music and poetry may have to teach has not been of
much, if any, concern to many commentators on Wittgenstein, who
consider science and philosophy, but not music, as means of ‘instruc-
tion’. How, then, can one develop an approach that reveals how music
might ‘teach’ us, without just turning music into something to be expli-
cated by philosophy? It is here that connections between Wittgenstein
and Heidegger will become significant.
Logical form and ontological differenceThe remarks about music from the period of the composition of the
Tractatusoffered a way for me to introduce the notion of metaphysics 2.
One of the recurring themes in discussion of Wittgenstein is the rela-
tionship of theTractatusto his later work. Much of the discussion relates
to his move from a position with apparent traditional metaphysical
implications to one which is expressly suspicious of metaphysical claims.
TheTractatusrestricts the scope of meaningful use of language and
engages with very specific points of logic and meaning in the man-
ner of the analytical philosophy that derives from it. However, unlike
some of that philosophy, theTractatusalso addresses broad metaphys-
ical and ontological concerns with very explicit cultural implications.
The question which troubles many commentators is the extent to which
Wittgenstein is responding positively or negatively to these concerns.
This question can initially be addressed by looking at his use of the word
‘nonsense’ (‘Unsinn’).
In its own terms, theTractatusitself comes, as we saw, into the cate-
gory of nonsense. The text consists neither of empirical nor of logical
propositions, which it claims are the only forms of language that have
meaning, and this suggests a link to music, which is also ‘nonsense’ in
this respect. Wittgenstein indicates such a link in the notes preceding
the writing of the text, as well as in certain passages of theTractatusitself,
which discuss ‘logical form’. In the recent collection of essays,The New