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 would like to explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. Let us begin our discussion with a beautiful passage, which Wittgenstein wrote in 1931: Music, with its few notes & rhythms, seems to some people a primitive art. But only its surface is simple, while the body which makes possible the interpretation of this manifest content has all the infinite complexity that is suggested in the external forms of other arts & which music conceals. In a certain sense it is the most sophisticated art of all. (CV 11) 1 To fully appreciate this passage, we need to consider it as a point of intersection of three distinct trajectories in the development of Wittgenstein's philosophic thinking. The first, which is the most apparent in this passage, carries over familiar themes in Romantic philosophy of music, in particular the quintessentially Romantic evocation of metaphors of depth, inwardness and interiority. As Bernd Sponheuer pointed out, depth is one of two ideal types of the "German" in music, which have reached full maturity and distinctiveness in the writings of philosophers, critics, music analysts and composers around mid-nineteenth-century, and can be traced back to the writings of Johan Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. It persevered almost without change well into the mid-twentieth-century. The other ideal type, which both contrasts and complements the first, is the conception of the "German" in music as something "universal" that brings the "purely human" to its fullest expression. 2 Metaphors of depth were initially used to articulate an anti-French, anti-rationalist 1 I use the following abbreviations for the standard print editions of Wittgenstein's work: BT Big Typescript CV Culture and Value, revised edition
One need not be a confirmed Humean in order to observe the effects of habit. When it comes to the contingencies of history, the conjunction of facts and a propensity to relate them to one another might indeed give rise to philosophical confusion. The practice of yoking Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schoenberg as intellectual comrades-in-arms of sorts seems to have already become commonplace. The prima facie appeal of such a practice is undeniable, and, indeed, one could hardly find a text on Fin-de-Siècle Vienna that does not underscore at least some similarity between the two great men-their biography, their cultural background, their intellectual projects, their personal fate. In such collage works, historians and philosophers alike often share an enthusiasm for bold brush strokes, which certainly serve a purpose within their overall perspective: to paint a picture of a cultural period to highlight common themes. Yet the thrust of the present essay is, in this sense, antithetical. This is an essay about differences and some of my brush strokes will be cautious and inevitably tentative. I contend that what sets Wittgenstein and Schoenberg apart from one another is much more interesting philosophically than the historical contingencies that seem to force them together.My discussion is divided into four parts. I pay a modest tribute in the first section to the historical leads and impasses that serve, so to speak, as a color palette for all those who paint with bold brush strokes. I then move, in the second and third sections, to explicate the various grounds for Wittgenstein's dissenting attitude toward the contemporary music of his time, which I take to be a necessary step in any argument whose conclusion pertains to any relation between the respective ideas of Wittgenstein
s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: 'felt time' and 'clock time'. For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is 'time made audible'. However, Langer also postulates a 'strong suspension thesis': the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this essay, we take issue with the 'strong suspension thesis', its philosophic foundation and its implications. We argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding, and that it rests on a contested presupposition concerning the conceptual primacy of memory-time.
This article explains Wittgenstein's distinction between good, bad, and vacuous modern music which he introduced in a diary entry from January 27, 1931. I situate Wittgenstein's discussion in the context of Oswald Spengler's ideas concerning the decline of Western culture, which informed Wittgenstein's philosophical progress during his middle period, and I argue that the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, and Wittgenstein's critique thereof, served as an immediate link between Spengler's cultural pessimism and Wittgenstein's threefold distinction. I conclude that Wittgenstein's distinction between bad and vacuous modern music is analogous to Schenker's distinction between the compositional fallacies of the progressive and the reactionary composers of his time. Concomitantly, Wittgenstein's philosophically problematic notion of good modern music transcended the conceptual framework of both Schenker and Spengler. In this context, I examine Wittgenstein's remarks on Gustav Mahler as well as his remark on the music of the future as monophony, which, I conclude, should be understood ultimately as an ellipsis of his much later view of musical meaning and intelligibility.
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