178 music, philosophy, and modernity
is still temporal, as the Romantic idea of longing suggested. Adorno
talks, echoing ideas that develop around this time, which he associates
with Schubert’s question as to whether any music is really cheerful, of
‘the unattainability of joy... which is the case since Beethoven for
all great music’ (Adorno 1997 : 13 , 101 ). Music’s relationship to what
were previously ‘ontotheological’ issues means that, instead of being
a reflection of a mathematically or theologically based metaphysical
order, it becomes an expression of the affective and other significances
that modernity attaches to temporality.
Although Schelling himself makes little of these ideas in relation to
music, his wider conception can help to interpret the notion, which
becomes so important in this period, that music gives access to what
is inaccessible to conceptual thinking. This notion can take a variety
of forms, not least in relation to links between music and ‘the uncon-
scious’. It is, of course, difficult to find a coherent way of talking about
the unconscious. However, one way in which it can make sense is via
Schelling’s idea that madness is inseparable from the very possibility
of creative thinking, at the same time as always threatening to over-
whelm it. His conception might be regarded as relying on questionable
anthropomorphic metaphors of music’s effect on the mind, but that
would make things too simple. If what is at issue is inherently resistant
to literal explanation because it is not conceptual – in the sense of ‘infer-
entially determinable’ – such objections only hold water if one denies
world-disclosing possibilities to metaphors, and to music. The question
is therefore whether music is able to convey what a discursive metaphys-
ical argument cannot, which cannot be answered in terms of assent to
or disagreement with a philosophical argument. The answer depends
rather on what is evoked or disclosed by the particular articulation in
varying historical, social and intellectual contexts. What is disclosed in
this way cannot be reduced to what is said about such evocation or
disclosure.
In theFreedomessay Schelling says that even after the emergence of
an ordered world
the rule-less (‘das Regellose’) still lies in the ground, as if at some time it
could break through again, and nowhere does it seem as if order and
form were what is original, but rather as if something originally without
rules were brought to order. This is the ungraspable basis of reality in
things, the remainder that never comes out, that which can never, even
with the greatest exertion, be dissolved into understanding, but remains