176 music, philosophy, and modernity
and development, and neither has its future development inscribed
within it. What makes the fact of there being an intelligible world a
source of value is, then, precisely that its ground can never be fully
comprehended: if it could be, the point of life, with its conflicting forces
and – admittedly precarious – potential for development, would dissolve
into a world of the ‘ever-same’. This view challenges many conceptions
of the task of philosophy as being to establish a timeless metaphysical
picture of reality, and this is important with regard to the changes in
production and reception of the temporal art of music. The threat of
‘nihilism’, suggested by Jacobi in the 1780 s (see Bowie 1997 : ch. 1 ),
that results from thinking of the world solely in causal terms and so
ending in an endless regress,^7 is countered by the idea of a world in
which freedom opens new possibilities that philosophy cannot encom-
pass. Even God is therefore ‘something more real than a simple moral
world-order, and has completely different and more lively motivating
forces in Him than the meagre subtlety of abstract idealists attributes
to Him’ (Schelling 1856 – 61 :i/ 7 , 452 ). Schelling’s heretical ideas, that
God freely subjects Himself to a process of becoming and that He has a
ground in nature that is not fully Himself, are pretty disturbing for the
time, but can they really be connected to music?
In theAges of the Worldboth intelligible being and thought result from
continual conflict, and from unstable moments of balance, between
a contractive force which would, if left to itself, render being a self-
enclosed opaque One, and an expansive force which, if it were not
opposed by something else, would just dissipate itself at infinite speed.^8
Thought can also be ‘congealed’ if it tries to render determinacy com-
plete, but thought without determinacy to anchor it is a mere – ‘mad’ –
chaos of opposed drives. Language is subject to a related dialectic, being
at once what can render that world fixed and immobile, and what can
open up a living, articulated world. Schelling claims that the link in
Greek mythology between Dionysus and music reflects both the funda-
mentally conflictual nature of being, and the precarious relationship
between thought and what grounds it: ‘for in what should understand-
ing prove itself, except in the overcoming, command and regulation of
7 Jacobi’s idea influenced Nietzsche’s claim inThe Birth of Tragedythat the modern sciences’
following of the principle of sufficient reason leads to what will revive a tragic world view,
namely chains of causality leading to an ‘abyss’ rather than to a final explanation of being.
Nietzsche connects this idea to music.
8 Schelling sees these forces as ultimately ‘identical’: for the detailed argument see Bowie
1993 , chapter 5.