170 music, philosophy, and modernity
itself also changes. Music need no longer be regarded, in the manner
of Hegel, as something which is transcended by philosophy, but at the
same time it need not be interpreted in terms of the sort of metaphysi-
cal ideas encountered in E. T. A. Hoffmann. If attention to feeling is as
essential to a thriving human existence as Feuerbach thinks, the under-
standing of feeling’s relationship to music can change the significance
of music, and vice versa. At the same time, however, misgivings that
will be expressed with regard to music’s relationship to feelings make
apparent a source of some of the concerns to be examined below.
One of the paradoxes of the period during which Wagner’s work
emerges is that an anti-metaphysical approach to music, of the kind
just sketched, can be linked to a Romantic view of it as an autonomous
form of articulation which ‘says’ what verbal language cannot. The lat-
ter view is, as it is in Hoffmann – and in Schopenhauer – often advanced
in the name of a thoroughly metaphysical conception, in which music
is to replace discursive metaphysics as the form of access to the super-
sensuous world. My aim here is not to resolve this paradox, but to see
how the two conceptions inform both thinking about music, and the
production of music, in this period. An underlying issue will be the
relationship to language of the critiques of metaphysics. When the idea
that words can convey substantial metaphysical ideas comes under sus-
picion – Marx’s notion of language as ‘practical consciousness’ sums
up the suspicion – music takes on the conflicting roles in relation to
the understanding of philosophy just outlined.
Wagner’s relationship to Feuerbach and Schopenhauer can be
understood in terms ( 1 )ofmusic as part of what undermines a philo-
sophically conceivedlogosin favour of the primacy of human practices
grounded in our sensuous nature as feeling beings, and ( 2 )ofmusic as
in some sense replacing words as the source of the deepest metaphysical
insights. The first of these approaches can lead in a pragmatic direction,
where the value of a practice depends upon its relationship to human
well-being; the second can lead in the direction of regarding music as
the source of a new kind of metaphysics. Wagner’s move from Feuer-
bach to Schopenhauer is a reflection of the difference between the two
conceptions, but it does not explain all that is at issue here. Dahlhaus
suggests that the more emphatic connection of music to metaphysics
at this time comes about because ‘one no longer believed in a signifi-
cance of metaphysics... for affecting “true reality”’ (Dahlhaus 1974 :
11 ), the reality in question being dominated by the technological and
social changes involved in industrialisation and urbanisation. As I shall