wittgenstein and heidegger 281that Schleiermacher regarded as the essential problem in accounting
for primary language acquisition: rules for understanding the gestures
required to learn verbal language cannot be taught except by using
other gestures, and these must precisely be understood without all being
taught. Wittgenstein insists, however, that you cannot ‘replace the most
common sentence by gestures’ (ibid.: 4 , 213 ), because, as Herder sug-
gested, verbal language’s way of picking out something as something
cannot be achieved by gestures. This does not mean, though, that the
two are mutually exclusive: they just play different roles in the practices
in which ‘language’ consists. Language does not have definable bound-
aries, but is rather a term employed with regard to phenomena which
gain meaning via their relationships to their contexts. The important
question for us is the role that music plays in Wittgenstein’s revision of
his notion of language as that which depends on logical form.
In chapter 5 we encountered Wittgenstein’s assertion fromZettelthat
‘If a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you, you don’t have
to be able to explain it. Justthisgesture has been made accessible to
you’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 27 ). The ‘making accessible’ in question is
not the same as learning how to use a piece of verbal language via an
explanation, but it is not wholly different from it either: not all ver-
bal language forms part of the game of explaining, or of referring to
objects. Asked inPhilosophical Investigationswhat a pain sensation is, one
of the interlocutors replies: ‘It is not a something, but it is not a noth-
ing either... The paradox only disappears if we break radically with
the idea that language always only functions inoneway, always serves
the same purpose: conveying thoughts – whether these are thoughts
about houses, pains, good and evil, or whatever’ (Wittgenstein 1984 :
376 – 7 ). The central term in Wittgenstein’s discussions of these issues is
‘understanding’.^8 His assertion that ‘Understanding a musical phrase
may also be called understanding alanguage’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 29 )
needs to be considered in conjunction with his remark that ‘Under-
standing a sentence means understanding a language’ (Wittgenstein
1984 : 344 ). There is no purpose served here by attempting to establish
the limits of the concept of ‘language’ in explicit theoretical terms, i.e.
in seeking to objectify language. The term language can be employed
for an indeterminate number of cases of what Schelling, referring to
rhythm, described as ‘a succession which is in itself meaningless’ being
8 I shall not deal here with ‘interpretation’, which Wittgenstein reserves for situations where
the relevant rules of language are not fully evident.