wittgenstein and heidegger 293InBeing and Timethe problem which results from this view of lan-
guage is that both the account ofDaseinand the account of language
get into difficulty. The difficulty becomes apparent in Heidegger’s fail-
ure to clarify the precise status of language. As we have seen, language
can be regarded in ‘ontic’ terms: it exists in the form of things in the
world and can be the object of the science of linguistics. For the things
of which language consists to mean anything they must, though, also
have ‘ontological’ status. Lafont points out that the combination of
existing ontically and yet having an ontological status that generates
significance is precisely what is supposed to distinguishDaseinfrom
all other entities, as the entity that ‘is concerned in its beingwiththis
being’ (Heidegger 1979 : 12 ). Consequently, ifDaseinneeds language
to understand the world, and language is part of the world,Daseincan-
not have the ontological status required for it to be the foundation of
the understanding of being. Moreover, it is therefore not clear either
how language can be encountered as an entity in the world and yet in
some sense be a condition of possibility of the world being intelligible to
Dasein. The subject–object split consequently just reappears. The cen-
tral issue for our investigation is the scope of the notion of ‘language’
and how this relates to pre-conceptual aspects of subjectivity and to the
kind of non-verbal forms of articulation that we encountered in the
later Wittgenstein.
It may well be that one should grant Lafont’s case with regard to
the interpretation of Heidegger’s own aims in the earlier work. This
would mean that he is really still engaged in the sort of foundational
project that his teacher Husserl failed to accomplish, in which, instead
of attempting, as Husserl does, to ground meaning in the constitutive
mental acts of the subject, the meaning of being is sought in ‘the basic
forms of a possible articulation (‘Gliederung’) of the meaning of all
that can be understood’ (ibid.: 166 ). It is, though, evident that the
influence ofBeing and Timeon subsequent philosophy and other areas
of modern culture does not derive wholly from its attempt at this kind
of phenomenological ontology, and this is where Besseler is important.
Like others in the 1920 s, Besseler understood Heidegger as offer-
ing a new way of thinking in a crisis-ridden era when many assumptions
about the function of art in modern societies no longer seemed defensi-
ble. The fact that his first essays which use Heidegger for thinking about
music were already written in the mid 1920 s suggests the urgency felt
at the time. These essays are, though, occasioned as much by musi-
cal developments as they are by his understanding of Heidegger. The