wittgenstein and heidegger 2711984 : 145 ). In a less obviously metaphysical vein, he says, coming closer
to Heidegger: ‘The artistic miracle is that there is a world. That there
is what there is’ (ibid.: 181 ), which has to do with what he intends with
the idea of ‘the mystical’ ( 6. 44 ibid.: 84 :onthis see Bouveresse 1973 ).
Elsewhere he talks of his task as being to ‘explain the essence of the
proposition’, and, in the same context, of ‘explaining (‘angeben’) the
essence of all being’ (Wittgenstein 1984 : 129 ): the two are in some sense
inseparable. Heidegger’s lectures from the middle to the late 1920 s
similarly spend a great deal of time on the nature of the proposition as
a way of approaching the question of being. Some of Wittgenstein’s
questions seem to demand metaphysical answers, but the kind of
answers which he gives to them at this time are the source of the dif-
ferences we have outlined concerning how to interpret nonsense. He
frequently brings up music in relation to these issues, and it is in this
context that the remarks cited in chapter 1 occur.
Wittgenstein’s concern is with music as something which is intelligi-
ble in ways that cannot be verbally articulated. This concern is related
to his remarks regarding what cannot be said about the intelligibility of
propositions, which depends on their ‘logical form’: ‘The proposition
is not a jumble of words. – (As the musical theme is not a jumble of
notes)’ ( 3. 141 ibid.: 18 ). When he says that ‘Whatcanbe shown,cannot
be said’ ( 4. 1212 ibid.: 34 ), there are therefore grounds for thinking of
both music and language in relation to whatever is intended by the
notion of showing. Dewey’s example of Van Gogh’s painting suggests
an obvious way of grasping the difference between showing and saying
‘desolation’, and examples of desolation from music, like parts of the
third act ofTristan,orparts of Shostakovich’s symphonies and quartets,
can be regarded in similar terms. A verbal account cannot replace the
experience of the music itself, although a verbal account still affects how
we hear music, and the music can, in turn, affect how we understand
the verbal account.
Both logic as ‘a condition of the world’ (ibid.: 172 )–‘world’ in
the sense of that which involves an intelligible order – and music have
to do with what is ‘unsayable’, but both also are construed as show-
ing what makes meaning possible. Wittgenstein implicitly links the two
when he claims that ‘ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic’
(ibid.), and that ‘Ethics and aesthetics are the same’ ( 6. 421 ibid.: 83 ,
172 ), because they have to do with why the world is intelligible at all.
The ‘meaning of the world must lie outside of it’ ( 6. 41 ibid.: 82 ),
because everything within the world is contingent and is expressed in