42 music, philosophy, and modernity
of what he thinks philosophy can say, Wittgenstein invokes music as a
means of showing something that cannot be said. He does so, remem-
ber, in a context which gives full weight to the validity of scientific truth
claims. In theTractatusitself Wittgenstein considers the question of
the means of expression that would allow one to ‘talkabout’ language
in terms of what he calls ‘logical form’, which is what allows one to
represent the world. He uses an example from music to explain: ‘The
gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the sound-waves
all stand in that representing internal relationship to each other which
exists between language and world. They all have the logical structure in
common’ (ibid.: 27 ). There is, then, ‘a general rule’ which is the ‘law of
projection’ of a symphony into the language of notes and of the ‘trans-
lation of the language of notes into the language of the gramophone
record’ (ibid.). However, the content of this rule for the transmission
and translation of intelligible structures cannot itself be represented. It
can only be ‘shown’: ‘The proposition can represent the whole of real-
ity, but it cannot represent what it must have in common with reality in
order to represent it – logical form’ (ibid.: 33 ).
There is very little agreement on precisely what Wittgenstein means,
and he later ceased to defend much of the view advanced in theTracta-
tus, although he does continue to make connections between philoso-
phy and music. The notion of logical form is intended to overcome the
problem that, although we can describe nature in scientific terms once
there is language that is ‘representational’, we are unable to describe
inlanguage what it is that makes language able to do this. In grappling
with this question Wittgenstein is led to think about the intelligibil-
ity of forms which do not represent in the manner of the language
which represents the objective world, but which instead reveal mean-
ing in the world in a way philosophy in his restricted sense cannot. This
capacity involves a prior kind of intelligibility, of the kind Heidegger
will soon seek to explore through the question of ‘being’, and this is
what Schn ̈adelbach intends with the idea of negative metaphysics. The
danger of linking ideas about what cannot be said to music is that they
can just invoke some underlying – positive – metaphysical principle,
like Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’. This leads Schopenhauer, as we shall see in
chapter 6 ,toattribute the same basic significance to all music, namely
that it conveys in a tolerable form the inherently riven nature of all
being. Schn ̈adelbach, however, insists on theparticularityof that which
‘must show itself and be experienced’. If music were just endlessly to
show the same thing there would be no point to its kind of intelligibility.