“Nonsense, wherein there is Method”: Wittgenstein on Music and Language

Abstract

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, the form shared by language and the world cannot be said through language, but rather shows itself in language. This statement has posed a major obstacle to interpretations of the book: if the form shared by language and the world cannot be said through language, then how can Wittgenstein say (through language) anything about that form—including that it cannot be said but shows itself? It is this paradox that lends his ‘sound figure’ its importance: “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world” (4.014). Wittgenstein’s gramophone analogy seems to provide an intuition of the form shared by language and the world. It seems to show what the Tractatus cannot say. I will argue—with reference to Carolyn Abbate’s critique of musical hermeneutics and the theosophical doctrine of thought-forms—that this is not the case, but that the analogy does show something about how figurative language can both create and dispel philosophical confusion.