wittgenstein and heidegger 269to an ideal’, where there need be nothing in common between the kinds
of ideal in differing practices, from cooking, to music, and beyond.
He maintains that ‘When one describes changes made in a musical
arrangement as being directed to bringing the arrangement of parts
nearer to an ideal, the ideal is not before us like a straight line which
is set before us when we try to draw it’ (Wittgenstein 1982 : 37 ). In the
terms of theTractatusthe concept of ‘the ideal’ is therefore nonsense,
because it does not refer to something which could be true or false and
which is empirically available. The question is whether being nonsensi-
cal in this sense means that something can play no meaningful role in
how we understand the world. Novalis asserts that the ‘ideal’ can never
be achieved because ‘it would destroy itself. To have the effect of an
ideal it must not stand in the sphere of commonreality’ (Novalis 1978 :
170 ). The fact is that the words ‘the ideal’ can be essential to certain
kinds of musical practice, and can only be regarded as a meaningless
sequence of noises if one employs a very restrictive conception of mean-
ing. Anyone who is involved in music is likely to find this use of ‘the
ideal’ apposite, and it is invidious to claim, as the austere conception
would have it, that they are not ‘thinking anything’.
The austere reading’s rejection of any account which would describe
how language relates to the world ‘from outside’ does pose interesting
questions about what has generally been assumed to be the representa-
tionalist stance of theTractatus.Atthe same time the position seems, via
its conception of what constitutes having a ‘thought’, to regard some-
thing akin to representationalism as a criterion of meaning, given that
everything that does not fulfil this criterion is nonsense in the austere
sense, rather than a use of language of a different kind that has to be
understood in an appropriate way. InArt as ExperienceDewey contrasts
‘expression’ and ‘statement’: ‘Science states meanings; art expresses
them’ (Dewey 1980 : 84 ). He cites the example of Van Gogh describing
his attempt to picture ‘utter desolation’ in a letter to his brother, where
the words ‘taken by themselves are not the expression; they only hint at
it. The expressiveness, the esthetic meaning, is the picture itself’ (ibid.).
Does the austere position wish to claim that the meaning of the picture
is nonsense, and what is the gain from such a restriction of meaning to
propositionally articulable ‘thoughts’? Dewey elsewhere suggests of the
material of art that ‘it is used to express a meaning which is other than
that which it is in virtue of its bare physical existence: the meaning not
of what it physically is, but of what it expresses’ (ibid.: 201 ). The same
must be true of language itself, which, as airwaves, marks on paper, etc.,
is able to express the world of which it also forms an ‘ontic’ part in