272 music, philosophy, and modernity
propositions which can be true or false. If there is to be ‘a priori’ an
‘order in the world’ this cannot be contingent, which is why ethics and
aesthetics lie outside the contingent world, as conditions of its intelligi-
bility. The idea that the ‘artistic miracle is that there is a world’ becomes
easier to interpret in this respect, especially if one thinks in terms of
its analogy to Heidegger’s ontological difference. Wittgenstein is at this
stage still thinking of an essentially metaphysical answer to the fact of
the world’s intelligibility, which leads him to the idea of ‘the totality
of elementary propositions’ ( 5. 5561 ibid.: 66 ), the provision of which
‘describes the world completely’ ( 4. 26 ibid.: 39 ). Famously, though, he
never actually offers us any such propositions, and this failure – the
austere reading would not see this in terms of failure, because of the
meaninglessness of the very idea of such propositions – is part of what
leads him to his later way of philosophising. However one looks at it, the
later philosophy cannot be interpreted as a search for a metaphysical
order of the world.
It is hard to give a precise account of what Wittgenstein means in
this context, because much of what he says refers to technical issues
between himself, and Russell and Frege. If the strictly logical issues
were the real core of theTractatusit would be difficult to explain the
work’s impact in so many areas. It is noticeable, though, that much of
the discussion of theTractatusin the secondary literature does not delve
into the detail of the logical issues. This is not least because the very
statusof logic is part of what is at issue, and this cannot be established
in terms of logic itself. One way of approaching the text which does
not require specific attention to the detailed logical investigations is via
the remarks from theNotebookson music as ‘a means of expression with
which I can talkaboutlanguage’. The point of such a remark relates
to the idea, as Bouveresse puts it, that ‘The first and most important
of the things which language cannot say is the “fact” of language, the
fact that something can be said, i.e. the capacity of certain facts to
“represent” other facts’ (Bouveresse 1973 : 57 ). The discussion both in
theTractatusand in theNotebooksrelates to this capacity to ‘represent’,
and music appears directly and indirectly in both discussions. The link
to Heidegger can help make things clearer here.
A key source of Heidegger’s approach to the ‘question of being’ is
Husserl’s notion of ‘categorial intuition’, from his sixthLogical Inves-
tigation. Husserl’s point is that our perception would not be the way
it is without a whole series of meanings which structure what we per-
ceive. These meanings are not themselves perceivable objects, and so