270 music, philosophy, and modernity
Heidegger’s sense (see below), because it is in this respect an entity like
any other.
How can we talk about language’s ability to express the world, if we
are therefore always already employing what we seek to explain? As we
have seen, this problem is one of the sources of the importance of music
for thinking about language in modernity. Music’s difference from mere
noise offers an ‘unsayable’ experience of meaning which connects to
what it is to ‘inhabit’ a language. In the austere view the circularity of
using language to explain language means that an external viewpoint
on language is a mirage. However, this assumption need not entail that
exploration of how language may show what it cannot state will actually
be just an account of ‘meaning nothing’. It suggests, rather, that the
(Frege-influenced) conception of thought and meaning involved in
the austere conception is useful only to analytical philosophers with a
representationalist agenda.
Let us now look more closely at some aspects of theTractatusand the
1914 – 16 Notebooks. The difference between sense and nonsense in the
Tractatuscan be put in terms of the difference between propositions
about contingent states of affairs in the world that can be true or false
because they are based on empirical evidence and are logically coher-
ent, and propositions about the world as a whole or about the forms that
make the world intelligible which in some way ‘express’ what cannot be
propositionally articulated. The latter cannot involve contingency and
are not bivalent because they are the condition of possibility of speaking
intelligibly about the world at all. This division involves a version of what
Heidegger calls ‘ontological difference’, the difference between ‘ontic’
statements about ‘entities’, particular things in particular contexts, and
ontological statements about ‘being’, the fact that things are intelligible
at all. The latter have to do with such issues as the immediate sense that
something is music, because it is not, as we shall see Wittgenstein saying
in a moment, ‘just a jumble of notes’. This base-line intelligibility is the
condition of possibility of assertions about them as entities.^4
In theNotebooksWittgenstein talks in terms which appear to locate
him firmly in the metaphysical tradition, but the existential implications
of remarks like the following also suggest something different: ‘The big
problem around which everything turns that I write is: Is there, a priori,
an order in the world, and if so, in what does it consist?’ (Wittgenstein
4 Even someone who denies that a particular collection of notes is music relies on a prior
understanding that some collections of notes are not just a jumble.