wittgenstein and heidegger 275as it is in written and mechanically recorded verbal language: the use of
computers in the manipulation of music and language makes this obvi-
ous. It might therefore sound as though ‘logical form’ were just a way
of talking about what we now think of in relation to digitisation. Two
things are, however, not explicable in this manner. ( 1 ) Why are there
such correspondences between differing means of encoding sound that
make possible the realisation of the same music? ( 2 ) Why is the result of
this something which we understand as music or language, which is not
just a physical phenomenon to be explained in empirical propositions?
Wealready encountered Merleau-Ponty’s arguments on this topic in
chapter 1 , and the point is fundamental to a variety of phenomenolog-
ical positions, as Husserl’s remarks on conditions of intelligibility also
showed. As Dewey argued, art ‘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’. Wittgen-
stein’s use of ‘language’ to refer to music means that when he says ‘The
proposition [which is, remember, an ‘image’ of reality, of the kind also
present in the score, etc.] can represent the whole of reality, but it can-
not represent what it must have in common with reality in order to
represent it – logical form’ ( 4. 12 ibid.: 33 ), the scope of the remark
can be seen to be wider than sometimes assumed. This affects the inter-
pretation of the question of ‘showing’ and of nonsense, and in fact
suggests the kind of continuity between the work of this period and
the later work sought in the austere reading. The employment of the
phrase ‘the language of notes’ will be the key here.
The upshot of Wittgenstein’s investigation of ‘logic’ is that logical
statements are in fact all tautologies. They do not mean anything,
because they do not state anything determinate about the world: ‘But
all propositions of logic say the same. Namely nothing’ ( 5. 43 ibid.:
54 ). At the same time, without them the world could not be artic-
ulated at all because it would lack structures that render it intelligi-
ble and make possible what we can say. Unlike an empirical proposi-
tion ‘The tautology has no truth conditions, for it is unconditionally
true’ ( 4. 461 ibid.: 43 ); like the contradiction it is therefore ‘meaning-
less’/’nonsensical’ (‘sinnlos’). Tautologies are, however, not what he
calls ‘unsinnig’( 4. 4611 ibid.). This raises a revealing question of trans-
lation. The meaninglessness of tautology is explained by the fact that
meaningful propositions are not unconditionally true, being bivalent:
‘The grass is green’ depends on its truth conditions in the empirical
world, i.e. on whether the particular grass in question is green or not.