ABSTRACT

The thesis of linguistic idealism, in the version I favour, is the thesis that the world is essentially expressible in language, and that language can express everything. I discuss the question whether music can express things that language cannot express. I agree that music may be able to give us, or exemplify, emotions, say. But in lodging the thesis that language can express everything, the linguistic idealist is not interested in the power of words to give us, or exemplify, emotions, so that the fact that music gives us, or exemplifies, emotions that words cannot give us, or exemplify (and vice versa), does not constitute a problem for the thesis. We can acknowledge that, in that sense, music does things that language does not, and cannot, do. Perhaps language can do similar things (it can be sad, like music), but it cannot do just what music does: no stretch of language can give us the proprietary sadness of a particular piece of music. But, I argue, language’s inability to give us the proprietary sadness of a particular piece of music represents no failure on its part, because language is not in the business of giving us, or of exemplifying, the things it talks about, but rather in the business of exactly talking about those things. The omnicompetence of language lies in its ability to talk about—name and describe—everything.

Sebastian Gardner states that tragedy resists the idea of a ‘moral theodicy’, and presents ‘loss and suffering as the deepest facts about the world’. My argument in this book has been that both points are mistaken. In the first part I suggest that traditional tragedy does give us a kind of moral theodicy, at least in respect of its protagonists. Kafka’s K., who is arrested suddenly one day ‘without having done anything wrong’, is a distinctively modern type. To that extent traditional tragedy is (as Nietzsche thought) an optimistic genre. It says, in effect: here are the mistakes that we can and do make; but mistakes, though we seem to keep on making them with depressing consistency, are not actually inevitable; in particular, there is a remedy for cognitive failure—learn more, know more, think more; know more about other people and how they work; know more about yourself and how you work. In the second part I have argued that the deepest fact about the world that we find expounded in tragic literature is not a moral (let alone a theological) fact, but a linguistic one, and it is that everything, including in particular suffering, can be presented in language. Language has the last word; it speaks (in Wittgenstein’s phrase) das erlösende Wort—the liberating word. In that sense tragedy, though it does not offer us a theodicy in the strict sense of the word (a theological theodicy), does offer us moral, and even more, linguistic redress.