music and romanticism 165linguistic turn. Echoing Schleiermacher, Dieter Henrich has claimed
that ‘language can only be understood as a medium, but not as the
instrument of agreement. Subjects cannot agree on the use of language,
because the agreement would itself already presuppose its use. From
this it follows that taking up communication presupposes a real com-
mon ground between subjects who mutually relate to each other’ as
self-conscious beings (Henrich 1999 : 71 ). This real common ground
cannot, then, be reduced to the use of a common verbal language. It
may, for example, be understood in terms of what we share as feeling
beings that can be conveyed by music. In this sense the common ground
would be precisely what the term metaphysics 2 is intended to point to.^8
However, the idea of such a common ground being manifested in
music can be threatened by the idea that music may actually lead to
radicaldivisionsbetween subjects, who therefore need language to over-
come the dangers revealed by music. The contrast between Schleierma-
cher’s desire to reveal an essential unity underlying individual differ-
ences and Nietzsche’s questioning of such a unity highlights a tension
in music’s relationship to the understanding of modernity. This ten-
sion is particularly apparent in perhaps the most startling musical phe-
nomenon in modernity, namely the work of Richard Wagner. Before
considering Wagner in chapter 7 ,Ishall in thenext chapterconsider
how music relates to a series of philosophical developments in the nine-
teenth century that help to illuminate Wagner’s significance.
8 This argument can, though, end in a negative version of metaphysics 2 if nothing is shared
by those who are supposedly relating to each other. Giorgio Agamben cites, against Karl-
Otto Apel’s attempt to ground ethics in the necessary presuppositions of verbal commu-
nication, the case of those in the extermination camps who can no longer be addressed in
language, having been brutally excluded from being human altogether (Agamben 2002 :
64 – 6 ). The limits of philosophy’s dependence on language can in this sense have to do
both with the human and with the inhuman.