wittgenstein and heidegger 279sense, even in early Wittgenstein, that music tells us something about
our relationship to the world. While Wittgenstein will cease to frame
the question of music in the manner of theNotebooks,hestill gives music
a central role in relation to meaning. We now need to consider aspects
of how his thought subsequently develops.
Playing the language-pianoThe transition to Wittgenstein’s later positions can be suggested by
his assertion in thePhilosophical Investigationsthat ‘Understanding a
sentence in language is much more related to understanding a theme
in music than one thinks’ (ibid.: 226 ) (on this see Ridley 2004 ). In
the terms of theTractatusthis would be the case because the sentence
and the musical theme have ‘logical form’ in common, as that which
allows one fact to ‘represent’ another fact. Hans Sluga sums up the
move to the later philosophy when he talks of Wittgenstein’s ‘rejection
of the idea that our sentences are meant to mirror the logical structure
of the world’ and of his ceasing to hold that ‘language serves a single
function, that of depicting reality’ (Sluga and Stern 1997 : 331 ). The
philosophical motivation for Wittgenstein’s change of conception is
apparent in the ‘Big Typescript’: ‘If there were a “solution” of the logical
(philosophical) problems then we would only have to remind ourselves
that once they were not solved (and then too people had to be able
to live and think)’ (Wittgenstein 1993 : 180 ). This comment points to
a growing sense that what counts is how people actually do live and
think, and that the search for the logical structure of the world may tell
us very little about how language works in everyday life. Rather than go
into Wittgenstein’s move in detail, I want to trace aspects of it which
connect to music, in order to adumbrate a different way of looking at
the relationship between the earlier and the later work.
The theme which underlies the changes in Wittgenstein’s views is
summed up by his assertion in 1930 that ‘One cannot describe the
essence of language in language’ (Wittgenstein 1999 a: 3 , 30 ). The
contrast to his earlier position lies in the scope of the term ‘language’.
‘Language’ becomes any articulation that can be understood, and such
understanding depends upon the place of what is to be understood in
its contexts. This is an inferentialist view, of the sort we encountered
in Brandom. There is, however, space in Wittgenstein’s version of the
view to cater for the objections I made to Brandom concerning non-
discursive forms of articulation. One consequence of Wittgenstein’s