276 music, philosophy, and modernity
‘Unsinnig’ relates to ‘Unsinn’, ‘non-/un-sense’, so the translation might
be that they are ‘not nonsensical’, perhaps because they pertain to what
does have sense/meaning as its condition. The word can also have the
stronger connotation of something that is simply ‘absurd’, which would
add an existential dimension to the question of logic: without logic we
would be confronted with an existential absurdity. Wittgenstein says
that tautology and contradiction ‘belong to the symbolism...like “ 0 ”
belongs to the symbolism of arithmetic’ (ibid.), namely as something
without which positive quantities could not be expressed, but which is
itself nothing.
In 1915 , after a remark in which he states that ‘Language is articu-
lated’, which in theTractatusfollows the remark about musical themes
not being jumbles of notes, Wittgenstein asserts that ‘Musical themes
are in a certain sense propositions (‘S ̈atze’). The knowledge of the
essence of logic will for this reason lead to the knowledge of the essence
of music’ (ibid.: 130 ). A bit later he adds: ‘Melody is a kind of tautol-
ogy, it is complete in itself; it satisfies itself’ (ibid.). Soon after this,
reversing the perspective from which knowledge of the essence of logic
would explain music, he ponders whether there ‘is something which
cannot be expressed by aproposition(and which is also not an object)?
That could then not be expressed bylanguage’ (ibid.: 143 – 4 ). This idea
leads him to ask ‘But islanguagetheonlylanguage?’ (ibid.: 144 ), and
thence to the speculative assumption concerning music as a ‘means of
expression with which I can talkaboutlanguage’ (ibid.). Crucially, the
remark is accompanied by the observation that ‘it is characteristic of
sciencethatnomusical themes occur in it’ (ibid.). This observation is
part of the repeated insistence, which also occurs in Heidegger, that
science does not answer philosophical problems. The reason for this
in Wittgenstein is that science consists of empirical propositions, and
philosophy’s concern is with how such propositions are intelligible at
all. The question is, then, how music relates to philosophy.
The remarks just cited admittedly do not find their way into theTrac-
tatus,sothey may just mark a working-out of Wittgenstein’s thinking
which leads him elsewhere. Even regarded as such, the very fact that he
ponders the issues in this way indicates something central to his think-
ing, and the recurrence of related issues in the later philosophy suggests
that more is at stake than merely a discarded idea. Given the disappear-
ance in the later philosophy of the notion of logical form, the idea that
logic will ‘lead to the knowledge of the essence of music’ can no longer
be sustained, and this is what interests me. Let us consider the remarks