7/29/2023 0 Comments Signs of a soulless person![]() ![]() Understanding what a musical passage is about logically presupposes a myriad of correlate moves in the entire range of our language-games. 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. In this essay I explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. 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. 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. I argue that this gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought, a tool with which to think through moral difficulties. Both cases involve propositions that say nothing, but rather shed light on what other propositions say-tautologies, grammatical remarks, and philosophical elucidations on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘think of her as someone’s daughter’ on the other. I compare moral clarification to logical-philosophical clarification. Moral problems can disappear in a way that resembles the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of Jastrow's duck-rabbit when the duck-aspect dawns. ” Such attitudinal changes involve a kind of clarity of thought for Wittgenstein, and his understanding of them can be explained in part by reference to his later discussion about aspect-perception. ![]() But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us. ![]() This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove.” Instead, he says elsewhere: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. He once told his friend Rhees: “One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. In ethics, Wittgenstein, early and late, emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. ![]()
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