wittgenstein and heidegger 265Wittgenstein, the question of whether Wittgenstein changed his philo-
sophical stance as radically as is often assumed between theTractatus
and thePhilosophical Investigationsis seen as germane to understanding
his work. A focus of the discussion in the volume is precisely the inter-
pretation of nonsense in theTractatus. Music is, however, not addressed
by any of those involved in the discussion, even though it plays a role in
the text. I want to suggest that taking music into account offers a way
of understanding the relationship between the earlier and the later
work which may avoid some of the dilemmas that the philosophers in
The New Wittgensteinfail adequately to confront.
An initial difficulty here is whether the interpretation of nonsense is
( 1 ) supposed to establish Wittgenstein’s own view, in order to show con-
tinuity or discontinuity between the early and the late work, or whether
( 2 )itisanexploration of a core issue in modern philosophy, which
appears in Wittgenstein’s texts, but which needs to be investigated in
a manner not limited to the interpretation of one philosopher. Cora
Diamond’s exploration of the issue of nonsense, for example, shifts, in
the same paragraph, between claims such as ‘Wittgenstein...does not
intend us to grasp what can be seen from the point of view of philo-
sophical investigation’, to assertions like ‘TheTractatus...tells us, in
part through its framing propositions.. .’ (Crary and Read 2000 : 160 ).
Similarly, claims about Wittgenstein’s ‘aims’ go along with the perceived
need to ‘read theTractatusright’ (ibid.: 161 ). If doing the latter corre-
sponds to establishing what the former are, there is no problem, but this
could only be the case if there were no serious hermeneutic problems
involved in the interpretation of philosophical texts. Especially in the
case of Wittgenstein, this seems highly implausible. My criticism might
seem rather peripheral to the issue of music and philosophy, but the
combination of these interpretative problems with the authors’ failure
even to mention music is indicative of a stance in relation to language
and meaning that music can be used to question.
Weneed first to identify the core of the claims of the ‘new Wittgen-
steinians’, as this relates directly to issues that Wittgenstein links to
music. Their unifying premise is precisely that the ‘therapeutic’ aims of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy should be understood as being contin-
uous with his aims in theTractatus. The reasons have to do with whether
it is possible, or actually makes any sense, to think that philosophy can
seek or arrive at an ‘external standpoint on language’ (ibid.: 4 ), i.e. at
an account of how language relates to reality. The idea is that theTracta-
tus‘presents us with metaphysical sentences which lead us to participate