music, freedom, and metaphysics 175The idea of this groundless contingency relates to an influential way
in which music comes to be understood during this phase of modernity.
The contingency is both felt as a danger and yet is also the source of
new potential for expressive meaning in a world which is more and
more known to be determined by natural laws. I will suggest in thenext
chapterthat Wagner’s best work can help give us access to what is at
issue here. Wagner does so, not on the basis of his texts, which can
in some respects be construed as echoing questionable philosophical
conceptions, but on the basis of the interaction between the texts, the
drama, and the music, an interaction which can never be resolved into
the conceptual ways in which we may describe it.
In theFreedomessay and in theAges of the World(see Bowie 1993 :
ch. 5 ) Schelling aims to come to terms with the fact that there is an
articulated, comprehensible world, rather than a mere physical chaos
that never reaches the point of being manifest as a world of truth and
falsity, of good and evil actions. Any understanding of the emergence
of an intelligible world cannot be couched in causal terms, because
causal explanation leads to endless chains of causes. These can never
account for why such chains should result in an intelligible, rather than
an opaque, ‘world’ – an opaque world is, of course, arguably not a
world at all. His objective is to get away from an ‘idealist’ view of the
world – in which rational order is assumed always already to be integral
to the world and which therefore neglects what he sees as the dynamic
nature of living existence – towards a conception in which the always
fragile order of the world emerges from conflicting forces. The source
of these conflicts is itself to be understood as ‘freedom’ in a particular
ontological sense. The existence of the manifest world is not of the same
order as a fact within that world which requires an explanation based on
the principle of sufficient reason. It should already be clear, therefore,
that the notion of ‘freedom’ here cannot be defined, because the aim
of the notion is precisely to point to the possibilities of a world which is
not predetermined from the beginning. Freedom has to do both with
self-determination, and with feeling and intentionality. These relate in
turn to the ways in which the world is manifest to us that cannot be
understood in purely causal terms, and it is these ways which can be
linked to a new understanding of music.
There is consequently a close relationship in Schelling between
human freedom, as the active ability to do good or evil, and the fact of
manifest being. Both involve a fundamental contingency which resists
explanation, but which is also the condition of possibility of change