wittgenstein and heidegger 303In chapter 2 I cited Heidegger’s criticism of Wagner, which is one of
the few places in which he actually discusses a musician. The criticism
was based on the Hegel- and Nietzsche-derived idea that the music in
Wagner’s music dramas led to the ‘dominance of the pure state of feel-
ing’. Heidegger associates feeling with subjective taste, and thus with
aesthetics as a part of modern philosophy’s subjectification of being,
in which the art work becomes ‘an object of [merely subjective] feel-
ing and ideas (‘des Vorstellens’)’ (ibid.: 139 ).^23 His response to Wag-
ner is based both on a reaction against modernism in art and on the
story of modernity as subjectification. It should, however, be clear from
Besseler’s conception of the role of subjective feeling in music that the
basis of Heidegger’s judgement is a specific historical phenomenon, not
something inherent in music per se. Moreover, the exclusion of feeling
from world-disclosure is itself, as we have seen, implausible. The main
source of Heidegger’s story of modernity is the idea that conceptuali-
sation is objectification, which is what makes him unwilling to use the
word language as a classifying concept. He has no doubt, though, that
the relationship between word and thing is central to his concerns, and
therefore has to seek a way of conceiving of the word which does not
involve ‘a relationship between the thing on the one and the word on
the other side’ (ibid.: 170 ).
Heidegger’s exploration is carried out via his reading of George’s
poem ‘Das Wort’ (‘The Word’), which we encountered in his text on
Herder. The initial idea is that ‘The word itself is the relationship that
in each case so holds the thing within itself that it “is” a thing’ (ibid.).
The essential experience with language in the poem does not, however,
simply consist in a theoretical insight into the fact that words disclose
the world by allowing things to be. The experience is contained rather
in the line ‘No thing shall be where the word is lacking.’ Heidegger
reformulates what he thinks is experienced in the poem as ‘An “is” gives
itself up [‘ergibt sich’] where the word breaks [‘zerbricht’, which has to do
with the word’s return to the silence whence it emerged]’ (ibid.: 216 ).
When the word for what concerns us is lacking ‘language itself has from
afar and fleetingly touched us with its essence’ (ibid.: 161 ), revealing the
nature of being. A space of meaningfulness which demands articulation
is opened, but not filled. If it were filled with a determinate concept
that would be a case of the objectification characteristic of metaphysics,23 This construal of aesthetics is adopted by Gadamer inTr uth and Method, and is highly
selective (see Bowie 2003 b).