music, freedom, and metaphysics 177madness?’ (Schelling, 1856 – 61 :i/ 8 , 338 ). Dionysus’ wagon, which is
pulled by wild animals, is accompanied by music: ‘For, because sound
and tone only seem to arise in... that battle between [expansive]
spirituality and [contractive] physicality, only music can be an image of
that primal nature and its movement, for also its whole essence consists
in circulation, as it, beginning from a tonic [‘Grundton’], always finally
returns to the beginning, however many variations it may go through’
(Schelling 1946 : 40 ). We saw in chapter 5 how Schelling’s idea of the
vibration which produces the note by an alternation between presence
and absence of the sounding body could be seen as an image of the
move from the One to the manifest Many that gives rise to such dif-
ficulties for traditional metaphysics. Music now expresses the idea of
a ‘Dionysian’ state of being before the emergence of a comprehensi-
ble, ordered world. For it to do so it must be regarded as devoid of
semantic content, its significance deriving from a moving away from
and returning to an opaque state which is prior to any kind of concep-
tual determinacy.^9
However, the battle between expansion and contraction, which in
‘primal nature’ just leads to random replacement of the one by the
other, carries on in the world that emerges from the opacity of pri-
mal nature. Music combines order with the capacity to evoke resistance
to order, and is able to generate pleasure via the evocation of painful
feelings. The tensions in this combination can be understood as a way
of articulating the divided nature of existence, without what is artic-
ulated becoming fixed and so contradicting the contingency of free-
dom. Schelling talks elsewhere of the idea, expressed in the ‘oldest
Greek tragedy’, that ‘it is the mourning/tragedy (‘Trauer’) of every-
thing finite that in itself it is the same as the infinite, but not tobethe
infinite, but rathernotto be it. It is only to be inpotentia’ (Schelling 1969 :
90 ). The remark is about the very nature of temporal existence, but
music’s intrinsic temporality and relationship to feelings suggest how
it can be linked to music. The finite, transient elements of music point
beyond their transience because their combination makes them more
than what they are individually, but this requires them to be ‘destroyed’
for the music to be realised. Even as music may transform one’s affec-
tive relationship to an aspect of existence, so suggesting its relation-
ship to freedom, it can remind one that what has been transformed
9 The conception develops the idea of music as a transition to the semantic that we con-
sidered in chapter 2.