wittgenstein and heidegger 283as pointing, Wittgenstein writes: ‘Could one also reply: “I meant some-
thing by this movement, which I can only express by this movement”?
(Music, musical thought)’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 6 ). The issue here is
a kind of meaning which demands a particular gesture, and so can-
not be articulated by an expression which can be replaced by another
expression. InPhilosophical Investigationshe claims that
Wespeak of the understanding of a sentence in the sense in which it can
be replaced by another sentence that says the same thing; but also in the
sense in which it cannot be replaced by another sentence. (As little as
one musical theme by another.)
In the one case it is the thought of the sentence that is common to
different sentences; in the other something that only these words in these
positions express. (Understanding a poem.)
(Wittgenstein 1984 : 440 – 1 )His concern is to escape the picture in which a thought is something that
accompanies the sentence that expresses it, which leads to the question
of what the thought could be independently of the sentence by which it
is expressed. However, this does not mean that the thought simply is the
sentence. When he says ‘We might say: in all cases what one means by
“thought” is what isalivein the sentence. That without which it is dead,
a mere sequence of sounds or written shapes’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 25 ),
such assertions do not constitute a general answer to what a thought is,
but are rather a way of indicating the multiplicity of uses of the term.
The idea is close to his remark about music not being a ‘jumble of
notes’, but he then points out that we would not apply the same idea
to what makes something money, rather than ‘mere printed slips of
paper’ (ibid.). Instead, therefore, of logical form being the universal
underlying ground of intelligibility, intelligibility is now grounded in the
contexts and practices that give things their meanings. Different kinds
of norm are appropriate for different kinds of object, from norms which
relate to what gives life to a sequence of noises, to norms which are rules
for identifying something as money, to norms relating to combinations
of ‘only these words in these positions’.
Such a conception might sound like a recipe for ‘anything goes’,
but this is not the case. The real value of Wittgenstein’s approach often
lies in the detail of his explorations, and nowhere more so than in the
case of music. The vital factors are his refusal to subordinate music
to what we may say about it, and his attention to how the musical is
essential to the linguistic. The words of a poem are, as Schleiermacher