278 music, philosophy, and modernity
between the unconditionality of the tautology and the self-sufficiency
of a melody which has no need to refer beyond itself.^6 Wittgenstein
will frequently explore this kind of relationship between music and ver-
bal assertion in his subsequent work. The aesthetic sense of something
which is self-justifying, like a tautology, is echoed when he says that ‘the
happy life justifies of its own accord that itisthe only right life’ (ibid.:
173 ), and so requires no external legitimation. The same sense of that
which is self-justifying occurs when he maintains of logic that ‘People
have always suspected that there must be a realm of questions whose
answers are – a priori – symmetrical, and unified into a closed regular
structure (‘Gebilde’)’ ( 5. 4541 ibid.: 55 ). This idea of logic points to the
hope for a metaphysical account of the world’s intelligibility, which
Wittgenstein will later give up. However, the connection to melody
points to what is unsayable but still shows a coherence whichcannot
be said to be meaningless in the way in which logic might be said to
be. The two aspects here make the austere reading questionable in key
respects.
Logic must ‘take care of itself’ ( 5. 473 ibid.: 57 ): nothing we say can
affect it, because our ability to say anything at all depends on it, so it is
transcendental in Kant’s sense. Music need not, though, be regarded in
such terms, even though Wittgenstein at this time has an investment in
it as something which is equally self-contained. In this respect he does
come close to Schopenhauer, and to the problems I tried to show in
Schopenhauer’s position, in which all music comes to have the same
significance. So what does all this tell us about how to read theTractatus
and about its significance for modern philosophy? Nothing I have said
gives a decisive indication of the extent to which the austere reading is
defensible, but it can affect the way the issues are framed, because so
much depends on how one conceives of meaning and interpretation in
the first place. The conception of ‘showing’ is inseparable from the way
the issue of nonsense is presented in theTractatusand in the other texts
of the period. Consequently it is only on the basis of a very circumscribed
‘rational reconstruction’ of theTractatusthat Conant’s argument that
the task of elucidation ‘is to show that we are prone to an illusion of
meaning something when we mean nothing’ can be regarded as the
whole story. If what is conveyed by musical forms of expression matters,
the notion of ‘meaning’ which Conant employs is not adequate to the
6 Something similar is involved, as we shall see in thenext chapter,inAdorno’s idea of
music as ‘intentionless’, and as a form of ‘judgementless synthesis’.