wittgenstein and heidegger 273cannot be expressed in empirical propositions: they are the forms of
relationship in which things can stand to other things. Husserl says, for
example, that ‘I can see the colour, not the being-coloured’ (Husserl
1992 : 4 , 666 ). The colour is inferentially related to the colours it is not
and statements about the colour can be true or false, whereas being
coloured in the sense intended here is a condition of possibility of
there being colour talk in the first place.^5 Similarly, ‘I can paintAand
paintB, can also paint both in the same pictorial space; but I cannot
paint theboth,A and B’ (ibid.: 688 ). ‘Sensuous intuition’ sees the white
paper, and A and B; ‘categorial intuition’ is the ‘seeing’, or understand-
ing of the paperaswhite, the grasping of the relationship or ‘state of
affairs’ ‘both A and B’. What is expressed by words like ‘one’, ‘the’,
‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’ and ‘then’, ‘thus’, ‘all’ and ‘none’ cannot be perceived,
but without these words we could not understand the world that we do
perceive. The same applies to ‘being’: ‘Being is nothinginthe object,
not a part of it’, it is not a predicate that may or may not be ascribed
to the object: it is ‘absolutely not something which can be perceived’ (ibid.:
666 ). What Husserl adverts to is, then, in the sense of theTractatus,
‘unsayable’, because it is the condition of possibility of what we do say
being intelligible via its articulation in relationships whose forms have
to do with ‘logic’.
The status of these conditions is crucial, and it will be here that
the role of music becomes central in Wittgenstein’s approach. Are the
conditions thelogicalconditions of all meaningful thought, as Husserl
seems to think? Or are they, as Heidegger comes to argue, a prior practi-
cal horizon of intelligibility that may change in differing circumstances,
which allows us to grasp thingsasthings. Such a horizon can be con-
ceived of in terms of pre-conceptual engagement with the world which
is the basis of how things matter at all. This engagement can be exem-
plified by rhythm, as a pre-conceptual form of ordering that links us to
nature, and we saw how this idea is connected to Kant’s transcendental
philosophy via the concept of schematism. Rhythm in the sense at issue
here cannot be perceived. What is perceived are sonic or other events,
which are understoodasrhythmic (where the understanding may pre-
dominantly take the form of a feeling) if they form certain kinds of
relationship with each other or change people’s relationship to their
world, e.g. by making it possible to dance. Wittgenstein will move from
a position closer to Husserl (and Kant) in theTractatus,toone closer
5 The assumption is that there is nothing in the perceptible world which is not coloured.