266 music, philosophy, and modernity
in an imaginative activity of articulating the structure of the illusion of
an external standpoint on language – an imaginative activity through
which we can come to recognize that illusionasan illusion’ (ibid.: 13 ).
What appear to be assertions about how language represents or ‘pic-
tures’ reality will therefore turn out to be nonsense, in what they term
an ‘austere’ sense, that is no different from them saying, in Diamond’s
phrase, ‘piggly wiggle tiggle’.
The New Orleans clarinet player, Johnny Dodds, made a record with
the title ‘Piggly Wiggly’ in 1929 , where the rhythm and melodic con-
stitution of the record’s theme are the source of the title. This link of
music and language suggests the need for a conception of ‘meaning’
that makes it possible to understand why Dodds’ record might be called
what it is. The capacity of language and music to share such rhyth-
mic and melodic structures will be vital to Wittgenstein. Diamond’s
argument, though, is that because of its notion of meaning – which
presumably excludes anything of the kind just mentioned – theTrac-
tatusbecomes an assault on traditional metaphysical claims, such as
the book’s own opening assertion that ‘The world is everything that
is the case.’ The reader is led to the point at the end of the book where
the transcendental conditions of intelligibility of the world which they
thought they were supposed to be grasping disappear like a mirage –
hence the famous concluding image in theTractatusof the ‘ladder’
formed by its propositions that should be thrown away if one is ‘to see
the world right’.
In this view the book becomes, as P. M. S. Hacker argues, a kind of
Hegelian dialectic: each particular moment of it is revealed as negative
by the succeeding moments. There is, though, no culmination in the
form of ‘absolute knowledge’, in which the negative moments become
part of a self-describing whole. As we saw, Hegel’sLogiccan, if its sys-
tematic claims to grasp the nature of being are found unconvincing,
be seen as in some respects analogous to Beethoven’s music (see also
Bowie 2003 b). Something similar might in certain respects therefore
be said of theTractatusif the austere reading is accepted. That is, how-
ever, not how theTractatusis actually regarded in this reading. At the
end of theTractatuswe are, then, seen as having had the experience
of a structure of negations that add up to something which cannot be
said to refer to the world. The conception is somewhat analogous to
what we observed in Schlegel’s and Novalis’ conception of the absolute,
where art became the means of understanding the absolute’s resistance
to philosophical articulation (see Frank and Soldati 1989 ).