Chapter V Wittgenstein and the Composers

Chapter V Wittgenstein and the Composers 1. Not Only Science But Art Also Teaches Writing about the influences on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work, Georg Henrik von Wright remarks that Wittgenstein received deeper impressions from some writers in the borderlands between philosophy, religion, and poetry than from professional philosophers.1 Surprisingly, von Wright does not mention composers of music despite the fact that Wittgenstein also criss-crossed the borderlands between music and philosophy and received nourishing ideas for his line of thinking from composers. The question that recurs, and that I now address from a different angle, is: who are these composers and tone poets whom Wittgenstein took up for his own work and why? What motivates this question is an unexamined assumption in the modern culture of the West about a division of labour: scientists instruct us and artists entertain us. This assumption, as we have seen already in our discussion of Hanslick, is a prominent feature of the scientistic culture that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, became pervasive in the twentieth century and is now part of the prevailing cultural ideology. Wittgenstein rejected this complacent dichotomy between scientists and artists: “People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them”.2 Examining this assumption in light of Wittgenstein’s remarks about the composers he engages in his writings—Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler and Labor—may help us to understand why he read and listened to composers and how the allusions to music and “tone poets” have 1 Von Wright, Wittgenstein, 33. 2 Wittgenstein, Culture, 42. 118 Wittgenstein as Philosopher Tone-Poet implications for his philosophical perspective, style and even for his work ethic. Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance, is admired and aspired to partly because of his immense capacity for work: Bach said that everything he achieved was the result of industry. But industry like that presupposes humility & an enormous capacity for suffering, strength then. And anyone who in addition can express himself perfectly simply addresses us in the language of a great human being.3 To begin, let’s consider composers’ names. As paradigms for referential theories of meaning, the essence of naming has been taken to consist in rigid designation or strict reference. Strange to say, the word ‘this’ has been called, by no less a philosopher than Bertrand Russell, the only genuine name. The paradigm of naming then would be applying the word ‘this’ to a simple object directly in the centre of my visual field. A complex object won’t do, since its complexity would give rise to ambiguity of reference. Applying this to proper names: A proper name means whom it stands for and thus it has meaning only if it has a bearer. But what died when Robert Schubert died was not a name but a person. Alternatively, we might say, as Russell did, that an ordinary proper name can be defined as a fixed definite description that uniquely picks out the person named. I do not have, however, a fixed description that I am prepared to substitute for Robert Schubert, only a whole series of props I am ready to lean on should the one I am leaning on be taken from under me. Wittgenstein provides a classic discussion of this issue in Investigations §39‒47 where he shows in detail why such theories falter and ultimately fail. He uses Moses as an example to make his points, rather than, as we did, Schubert. In a remark in his diary for 1934, Wittgenstein takes up a different dimension than simply reference of our use of proper names. How is it, he wonders, that we have the impression that the great masters [in music or painting] have just the names that suit their work? Sometimes we wonder what name would hit off the character of a particular piece of music much like we wonder what name would hit off a particular person’s character. In such instances, Wittgenstein says, we project an appropriate name on the person or music, taking the method of 3 Ibid., 81..

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