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.

中文翻译：

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“废话，其中有方法”：维特根斯坦论音乐与语言

根据路德维希·维特根斯坦（Ludwig Wittgenstein）的逻辑哲学论（Tractatus logico-philosophicus），语言和世界所共有的形式不能通过语言来表达，而是通过语言表现出来。这个陈述对本书的解释构成了一个主要障碍：如果语言和世界所共有的形式不能通过语言来表达，那么维特根斯坦怎么能（通过语言）关于这种形式的任何东西——包括它不能被表达，但可以表明本身？正是这个悖论赋予了他的“声音人物”它的重要性：“留声机唱片、音乐思想、乐谱、声波，都在语言与世界之间的图像内在联系中相互联系” (4.014)。维特根斯坦的留声机类比似乎为语言和世界所共享的形式提供了一种直觉。它似乎表明了《论语》所不能说的。我将论证——参考 Carolyn Abbate 对音乐诠释学和思想形式的神学学说的批判——事实并非如此，但这个类比确实表明了比喻语言如何既可以创造又可以消除哲学混乱。