Abstract
Wittgenstein’s later remarks on music, those written after his return to Cambridge in 1929 in increasing intensity, frequency, and elaboration, occupy a unique place in the annals of the philosophy of music, which is rarely acknowledged or discussed in the scholarly literature. These remarks reflect and emulate the spirit and subject matter of Romantic thinking about music, but also respond to it critically, while at the same time they interweave into Wittgenstein’s forward thinking about the philosophic entanglements of language and the mind, and also his pervasive pessimism as a philosopher of culture. In this essay I explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. I argue that Wittgenstein appropriates the Romantic focus on the specificity of musical expression by means of the idea that gesture consists in complex vertical interrelations between language games. Understanding what a musical passage is about logically presupposes a myriad of correlate moves in the entire range of our language-games. Wittgenstein explicates the notion of musical aboutness in terms of intransitive understanding, which expresses an internal relation conjoining musical gesture and our culture, our entire life in practice, whereupon the related concepts cannot be identified independently of the relation which holds them together. Wittgenstein responds to the Romantic focus on the unique knowledge of human life which is afforded by musical experience with his idiosyncratic later notion of Menschenkenntnis. I conclude that, in the context of Wittgenstein’s late work, ineffability pertaining to musical meaning is not a shortcoming, but rather constitutional of the type of games, which admit what Wittgenstein calls ‘imponderable evidence’, or indefiniteness.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the following abbreviations for the standard print editions of Wittgenstein’s work:
- BT :
-
Big Typescript
- CV :
-
Culture and Value, revised edition
- LC :
-
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief
- LW I:
-
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I
- PI :
-
Philosophical Investigations
- PG :
-
Philosophical Grammar
- PPO :
-
Public and Private Occasions
- PR :
-
Philosophical Remarks
- RPP I:
-
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I
- RPP II:
-
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II
- Z :
-
Zettel
References to the Nachlass are by MS or TS number according to G. H. von Wright’s catalog followed by page number. The source for the Nachlass is Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Translations from the Nachlass are my own. (Wittgenstein 2000).
- 2.
See Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing ideal types of the ‘German’ in Music” in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 36–58. (Sponheuer 2002)
- 3.
See Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 22–50. (Watkins 2011)
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. I, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 341. (Schopenhauer 1964)
- 7.
See K. T. Fann (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1967), pp. 67–68 (Fann 1967). See a recent comprehensive discussion of Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein in Severin Schroeder, “Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein” in Bart Vandenabeele (ed.), A Companion to Schopenhauer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 367–384. (Schroeder 2012)
- 8.
See Günter Zöller, “Schopenhauer” in Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth (eds.), Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 121–140. (Zöller 2010)
- 9.
Georg Henrik von Wright, “Ludwig Wittgenstein in Relation to His Times,” in Brian McGuinness (ed.) Wittgenstein and His Times (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 118. (von Wright 1982)
- 10.
See Georg Henrik von Wright, “Ludwig Wittgenstein in Relation to his Times,” in Brian McGuinness (ed.) Wittgenstein and his Times (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 108–120 (von Wright 1982); Stanley Cavell, “Declining decline: Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture,” Inquiry 31, 1988, 253–264 (Cavell 1988); This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989) (Cavell 1989); William James DeAngelis, Ludwig Wittgenstein—A Cultural Point of View: Philosophy in the Darkness of this Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) (DeAngelis 2007); Yuval Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 89–152 (Lurie 2012).
- 11.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), vol. 1, pp. 285–286. (Spengler 1939)
- 12.
This curious historical fact was first introduced and discussed in my doctoral dissertation and explored further in subsequent publication. See Eran Guter, “Where languages end: Ludwig Wittgenstein at the crossroads of music language, and the world,” Ph.D. thesis, Boston University (2004), pp. 109–152, at pp. 192–213 (Guter 2004a); “‘A surrogate for the soul’: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg” in Enzo De Pellegrin (ed.), Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright (New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 117–128 (Guter 2011); “The Good, and bad, and the vacuous: Wittgenstein on modern and future musics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74:4 (2015), pp. 428–433 (Guter 2015).
- 13.
Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought, p. 25; see also pp. 163–191. (Watkins 2011)
- 14.
Heinrich Schenker, Counterpoint: Volume II of New Musical Theories and Fantasies, edited by John Rothge (New York: Schirmer, 1987), 1:xxi. (Schenker 1987)
- 15.
Guter, “The good, the bad, and the vacuous.” (Guter 2015)
- 16.
See Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretative Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 145–150. (Snarrenberg 1997)
- 17.
Consider, for example, Wittgenstein’s last two remarks on Gustav Mahler (MS 120, 72v from 1937 and CV 76–77 from 1948). For a detailed discussion of these remarks see Eran Guter, “Wittgenstein on Mahler,” in D. Moyal-Sharrock, A. Coliva and V. A. Munz (eds.), Mind, Language and Action, Contributions to the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2013), pp. 169–171(Guter 2013); and also “The good, the bad, and the vacuous,” pp. 433–435. (Guter 2015)
- 18.
See Anat Biletzki, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Middle works,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy. Oxford, 2011. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0138.xml. Accessed 8 September 2015. (Biletzki 2011). An excellent recent addition to the growing literature on this topic is Mauro Luiz Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development: Phenomenology, Grammar, Method, and the Anthropological View (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2013) (Engelmann 2013a).
- 19.
David Stern, “The ‘Middle Wittgenstein’: From logical atomism to practical Holism,” Synthese 87 (1991), pp. 203–226. (Stern 1991)
- 20.
Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development, p. 162. For Wittgenstein, forms of life consist in taken-for-granted social and practical ways of action, which make language possible.
- 21.
P. M. S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein’s anthropological and ethnological approach,” in Wittgenstein: Comparisons and Context (Oxford, 2013), Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674824.001.0001/acprof-9780199674824-chapter-5. Accessed 10 September 2015. (Hacker 2013)
- 22.
See Mauro Luiz Engelmann, “Wittgenstein’s ‘most fruitful ideas’ and Sraffa,” Philosophical Investigations 36 (2013), pp. 155–178. (Engelmann 2013b)
- 23.
Engelmann, “Wittgenstein’s ‘Most fruitful ideas’ and Sraffa,” p. 162. (Engelmann 2013b)
- 24.
- 25.
See Guter, “The good, the bad, and the vacuous,” pp. 430–433. (Guter 2015)
- 26.
Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 136. (von Wright 1982)
- 27.
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 2. (Moyal-Sharrock 2004)
- 28.
For Wittgenstein’s early treatment of aspect dawning in mathematics and the evolution of as- and aspect-phrasing in his work see Juliet Floyd, “On being surprised: Wittgenstein on aspect perception, logic and Mathematics” in William Day and Victor J. Krebs (eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 314–337 (Floyd 2010); and also “Aspects of Aspects” in H. Sluga and D. Stern (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) (Floyd forthcoming). For Wittgenstein’s early treatment of aspect dawning in music see Eran Guter, Where languages end: Ludwig Wittgenstein at the crossroads of music, language and the world, pp. 29–36 (Guter 2004a); and also “Wittgenstein on Musical Experience and Knowledge” in Johann Christian Marek and Maria Elisabeth Reicher (eds.), Experience and Analysis, Contributions to the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2004), http://wab.uib.no/ojs/agora-alws/article/view/1336. Accessed 21 January 2013. (Guter 2004b)
- 29.
I follow here an important distinction, suggested originally by Jaakko and Merrill Hintikka, between “primary” and “secondary” language games in Wittgenstein. See in particular Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Ch. 11, pp. 272–304 (Hintikka 1989); and “Different Language Games in Wittgenstein,” reprinted in Jaakko Hintikka, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths. Jaakko Hintikka Selected Papers, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 335–343 (Hintikka 1996). A similar observation is found in Michel Ter Hark, Beyond the Inner and the Outer: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 33–42 (Hark 1990); and also in Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 45–52 (Mulhall 1990). Mulhall speaks of a “parasitic relationship between linguistic techniques.” I opt for Ter Hark’s terminology of “horizontal” vs. “vertical” relations.
- 30.
The importance of these foundational themes already in the early Wittgenstein has been underplayed by scholars for the most part. For that, see Juliet Floyd’s groundbreaking evolutionary account in Floyd, “Aspects of aspects.” Floyd argues that as part of his attempt to refashion Russell’s notion of acquaintance, Wittgenstein developed early on a simile likening the notion of an “aspect” in logic to the “look” or “character” of a face, a facial expression or feature. This “master simile,” which returned Russellian acquaintance to its everyday home, the sense in which we may be acquainted with a person, has propelled and shaped the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophy ever since.
- 31.
Ibid. The following is a precis of Floyd’s suggestion.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
See Hark, Beyond the Inner and the Outer, p. 187. (Hark 1990)
- 34.
In light of my discussion of the three trajectories in the first part of my essay, it is noteworthy that a distinction between expression language (Ausdruckssprache) and communication language (Mitteilungssprache) is already found in Spengler’s Decline of the West. According to Spengler, we are engaged either in a language “which is only an expression for the world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself” or else in a language “that is meant to be understood by definite beings.” Expression language is an “active transformation” of physiognomic expression, which, strictly speaking, cannot be learned, yet it is the precondition for all forms of language learning. All art, according to Spengler, is expression language; however, he concludes that it is impossible to demarcate an exact boundary between artistic expression language and pure communication language. See Spengler, Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 115. (Spengler 1939)
- 35.
Floyd, “Aspects of aspects.” (Floyd forthcoming)
- 36.
See Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, “Wittgenstein on psychological certainty” in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 211–235. (Moyal-Sharrock 2007)
- 37.
Michel Ter Hark, “‘Patterns on life’: A third Wittgenstein concept” in Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein, p. 140. (Ter Hark 2004)
- 38.
Note that he uses the word Mitteilung here.
- 39.
Hintikka suggested that a “framework of spontaneous expressive behaviour (including facial expressions, gestures, and other bodily movements), will be called a physiognomic framework and a psychological language (or language fragment) based on it will be called a physiognomic language” (Hintikka and Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, p. 258). (Hintikka and Hintikka 1989)
- 40.
It is crucial to observe that doubt is something completely different from the kind of uncertainty that is constitutional of these language games. As I pointed out, this uncertainty is not a deficiency in our knowledge of an “inner” that hides behind the “outer;” Wittgenstein certainly does not adopt an epistemological stance regarding a purported causal relation between such realms. Rather, doubt enters these language games by presupposing, that is, by virtue of being vertically related to the relevant “imponderable evidence;” and it takes a kind of sensitivity, conditioned through experience—namely, Wittgenstein’s notion of Menschenkenntnis—to fully appreciate this verticality.
- 41.
J. Hintikka and M. B. Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, p. 279. (Hintikka and Hintikka 1989)
- 42.
Lydia Goehr, “Improvising Impromptu Or, What to Do with a Broken String” in George Lewis and Ben Piekut (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). (Goehr forthcoming)
- 43.
I modified the translation.
- 44.
Martin Alber (ed.), Wittgenstein und die Musik: Ludwig Wittgenstein und Rudolf Koder Briefwechsel (Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 2000) pp. 37–38 (my translation; my emphasis). I am grateful to Alexander Wilfing for advising me concerning this translation. (Alber 2000)
- 45.
Floyd, “Aspects of aspects.” (Floyd Forthcoming)
- 46.
Ibid. (Floyd Forthcoming)
- 47.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933: From the Notes of G. E. Moore, ed. David Stern, Brian Rogers, and Gabriel Citron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). (Wittgenstein Forthcoming)
- 48.
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, tr. Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), p. 191. (Wackenroder 1971)
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Guter, E. (2017). Wittgenstein on Musical Depth and Our Knowledge of Humankind. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_7
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