wittgenstein and heidegger 289of Adorno’s ideas about music. Before we come to Adorno we need,
though, to look once again at Heidegger.
Music as a ‘manner/melody of human existence’A recurrent theme in our investigation has been the circularity involved
in using language to explain language. The circularity appeared in
Wittgenstein’s idea of music as a ‘means of expression with which I can
talkaboutlanguage’. Such a means would circumvent the circularity
of using language to explain language, so requiring a position which
would have to be both inside and outside language. Wittgenstein’s idea
still depends, though, on a conviction that, although the logical struc-
ture of reality may transcend what we can say about it, this structure
is what must orient philosophy. Music would therefore –per impossi-
bile– play the role of replacing traditional metaphysics. This approach
to music was also seen as related to Heidegger’s contentions about
being as the ground of intelligibility of the ontic disciplines, and logical
form can be connected to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology in
Being and Time.Inboth cases music has to do with the pre-conceptual
intelligibility without which verbal and conceptual forms would be
impossible.
There is an important interpretative issue here. If one reads Heideg-
ger as maintaining that the ‘Existentialien’, the ways of being in the world
that are the ground of the meanings of what we say, are not subject to
historical transformation, and so are rather like an ontological version
of Kant’s categories, both he and the early Wittgenstein can be regarded
as being engaged in a traditional ‘philosophical/metaphysical’ project.
However, the persistence of Wittgenstein’s concern with music suggests
a different perspective. Wittgenstein moves away from a perspective
with metaphysical pretensions by widening the scope of what language
is understood to be, a move already prepared by his early attention to
music as the ‘language of notes’. A reading of Heidegger which regards
theExistentialienas a means of characterising historically changing ways
of being, can then be interpreted as coming closer to the later Wittgen-
stein’s idea of ‘forms of life’. These are equally subject to history, and
are inseparable from the working of language. This approach leads to
an informative perspective on a major question in Heidegger, namely
why he moves away in the mid 1930 s from the perspective of the earlier
work, towards his later concern with something which would no longer
be ‘philosophy’. Heidegger’s move has to do with a radical reassessment