form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 41some kind of ‘mysticism’, a positive appeal to something ‘unsayable’.
The question is, then, whether this is the only real alternative to the
dissolution of philosophy into natural science. A possible different view
can be suggested via some remarks in the notes for theTractatuswhich
Wittgenstein made during the First World War. He talks here about
the ‘mystical’, but he does so in a context which gives great weight to
scientific truth.
TheTractatusitself claims that the only meaningful propositions are
tautologous statements in logic, and empirical scientific propositions.
This is echoed in the Vienna Circle’s claims that metaphysical assertions
are nonsense because they cannot be verified. Wittgenstein’s claim –
and the subsequent claims of the Vienna Circle about verificationism –
must, though, themselves be ‘meaningless’ because they belong neither
to the category of logical nor to that of empirical propositions. The
Tractatusconsequently cannot be said in its own terms to speak truly of
what it is supposed to be about. So what is the point of its asserting what
it does, if, indeed, it can strictly be said to assert anything determinate
at all? There is already a sense, therefore, in which the text’s status
comes close to that of music, which Adorno, for example, refers to
as ‘intentionless’ because it does not directly refer to anything. In the
notes of 1915 Wittgenstein claims that ‘The drive towards the mystical
comes from the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. Wefeelthat
even if allpossiblescientific questions are answeredour problem is still
not even touched at all’ (Wittgenstein 1984 : 143 ). However, he goes on
to ask: ‘But islanguagetheonlylanguage?’, and ponders ‘a means of
expression with which I can talkaboutlanguage’, which is something
that his conception seems to exclude via its strictures on what can be
meaningful. He then startlingly surmises that one might assume that
music‘would be such a language: Then it is at any rate characteristic for
sciencethatnomusical themes occur in it’ (ibid.: 144 ). Whereas science
can talk about the world, it cannot talk about what enables it to talk
about the world, namely the very fact that the world is intelligible to us
at all. The implication is therefore that music can ‘talk’ about language
in a way verbal language cannot. This may seem meaningless – which it
is if one subscribes to verificationism – but the point is that what would
‘touch our problem’ could not come from the domain of science, and
would come from a kind of language which provides another kind of
‘meaning’.
I shall try to unravel in more detail how we can understand these
remarks in chapter 8. For the moment the point is that, at the limits