288 music, philosophy, and modernitycontingent, relating to his particular background and temperament.
His approaches can, though, be connected to the positions developed
by Adorno and his successors.
This connection depends on understanding how the communicative
resources of a culture affect its social and political nature. Wittgenstein
often has recourse to music as a means of emphasising the role of ‘feel-
ing’ – in a broad sense, which involves sensitivity for tone, etc. – in proper
understanding. The point is not to say that speaking thoughtlessly is the
sameas playing thoughtlessly, but rather to illuminate each via its family
resemblance to the other. This illumination cannot take the form of a
theoretical explanation because understanding of the propositionally
constituted activity of speaking is added to by the non-propositional
activity of playing, and vice versa, without the former being regarded as
the ground of the latter. Both depend on how we always already respond
to the world: without these responses neither words nor notes would
mean anything.
It is this conception which can have broader cultural and political
implications. The earlier Heidegger claims that words ‘accrue’ to mean-
ings. This claim does not, however, require understanding to take place
without forms of articulation. Instead it presupposes that for forms of
articulation to convey something there must be prior involvement in a
world where responses and actions are holistically connected to a hori-
zon of saliencies which always transcends our ability to describe it in
propositions.^13 From this perspective much of the analytical philoso-
phy of music is based on mistaken premises because it seeks to isolate
phenomena whose significance cannot be understood in isolation from
their contexts. Wittgenstein makes it evident that theories which fail to
take account of the diversity of the means whereby we understand and
practise music will be unable to substantiate their claims. Moreover,
even if he does not explicitly make a great deal of it, the holism of
understanding he describes leads to a rejection of the idea of music
as an object that somehow relates to a feeling subject. This dimension
of his explorations will link him most clearly to the more plausible13 Albrecht Wellmer ( 2004 ) makes the point that the so-called ‘private language argu-
ment’ – which Wittgenstein presents in a manner that seems almost designed to obscure
any unambiguous ‘real argument’ (see e.g. Eldridge 1997 )–does not entail contest-
ing the privacy of feelings. It is concerned rather with how what is privately often dif-
fuse or unarticulated comes to be publicly communicable. There is in this view no
reason to exclude music from the attempt to articulate what may indeed be unique
feelings.