wittgenstein and heidegger 285appropriate response to this situation. Interpretations of this idea vary
considerably, though the historical connection to Schoenberg’s move
away from tonality as a shared social norm suggests once again that
language and music cannot be decisively separated.
In his later work Wittgenstein does not, however, think of poetry
as a critique of the state of language. Instead of following the idea
that language has become somehow worn-out or debased, he looks
at the everyday working of communication without which questions
about language being debased could not be posed at all. He begins
by considering how we interpret behaviour that may or may not be
linguistic. This can be seen either as an exceptional situation, or as
what we do much of the time in some degree, as Quine’s and Davidson’s
discussions of ‘radical translation’ and ‘radical interpretation’ suggest.
In reflections on the relationship of thinking to speaking that connect
to the famous discussion of the builders and their use of language in
Philosophical Investigations,hesays:
Were we to see creatures at work whoserhythmof work, play of expression
etc. was like our own, but for their notspeaking, perhaps in that case
we should say that they thought, considered, made decisions. For there
would be a great deal there corresponding to the action of ordinary
humans. And there is no deciding how close the correspondence must
be to give us the right to use the concept ‘thinking’ in their case too.
(ibid.: 19 )This reflection is then extended to music in the sequence of remarks
which includes the observation about the becoming accessible of a
gesture: ‘Soulful expression in music – this cannot be recognised by
rules. Why can’t we imagine that it might be, by other beings?’ (ibid.:
27 ). We do not apply a criterion to know when an emotion is conveyed
to us by music because any identification of the emotion is secondary to
the fact of having that emotion. Verbal articulation of the emotion may
bring out what was previously inchoate, but it cannot replace the music
which evokes or occasions the emotion. Wittgenstein then imagines
a ‘man who, never having had any acquaintance with music, comes
to us and hears someone playing a reflective piece by Chopin and
is convinced that this is a language and people merely want to keep
the secret from him’ (ibid.: 28 ). He links such a person’s desire to
know the secret to ‘all the innumerablegesturesmade with the voice’
(ibid.), emphasising the fact that meaning cannot be construed merely
in terms of propositional content. Like the gestures employed to teach