wittgenstein and heidegger 295employs Heidegger’s distinction between ‘Zuhandenheit’ and ‘Vorhan-
denheit’–between the being of things which we use in our world with-
out needing to reflect on what we are doing, and the objectification
which occurs when something no longer functions as we expect and
we seek to explain its failure in order to make it work again.^17 He does
so, however, in a manner which does not require all the philosophical
baggage which Heidegger attaches to the distinction.
For Heidegger the very possibility of modern science and of all that
he associates with it rests on the distinction being fundamental, as part
of his account of ontological difference. What iszuhandenrelates to
what he means by the ontological, without which things would not
be intelligible at all, and what isvorhandento the ontic. We saw the
difficulty this gives rise to in relation to language andDaseinabove.
It is not, however, that all conceptions of ontological difference are
indefensible: versions of the notion play a crucial role in certain areas of
modern thought, for example, in opposing scientistic conceptions, that
regard scientific descriptions as foundational for all other descriptions
or as the only candidates for truth. The problem is the status attached
to distinctions like that betweenzuhandenandvorhanden, given that we
move from one to the other of these notional relationships to objects all
the time. A rigidification of the distinction in relation to natural science
therefore merely brings about a reduction of the historical complexity
of scientific research to a questionable philosophical story. There is,
though, a crucial difference between using a philosophical distinction
to try to circumscribe science, and using it to show, in the manner we
saw Wittgenstein doing, that science does not encompass a great deal
that is fundamental to our existence.
Besseler’s historically specific, more pragmatically oriented point is
precisely that music can be related to in bothzuhandenandvorhan-
denways at differing times and in differing contexts, and can also be
related to in both ways at once in some circumstances. The essays ‘Basic
Questions of Musical Listening’ ( 1926 ) and ‘Basic Questions of Music
Aesthetics’ ( 1927 ), from which the remarks cited above are taken, have
a polemical socio-political intent, which is linked to Besseler’s ideas
ofGebrauchsmusikand of music as a form of everyday social ‘involve-
ment’ (‘Umgang’). However, the interest of his argument lies as much
in his account of the transitions between kinds of musical hearing17 None of the standard English translations of these terms, such as ‘ready to hand’ and
‘present at hand’, really covers all their connotations.