MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

music, freedom, and metaphysics 179

eternally in the ground. Understanding is really born from what is devoid

of understanding.

(Schelling 1856 – 61 :i/ 7 , 360 )

His point is not to undermine reason, but rather to come to terms with

what reason can never finally grasp, upon which it must depend for its

ability to engage with the contingency of the world.^10 The ‘rule-less’

is both a threat and what enables new responses to things which are

not ‘congealed’ and inflexible. Unsurprisingly, then, Schelling adverts

throughout these texts, in a manner which points to the world of

Wagner’sTristan,tothe essential insecurity of human existence:

man learns that his peaceful dwelling place is built on the hearth of a

primeval fire, he notices that even in the primal being itself something

had to be posited as past before the present time became possible, that

this past remains hidden in the ground, and that the same principle car-

ries and holds us in its ineffectiveness which would consume and destroy

us in its effectiveness.

(Schelling 1946 :i, 13 )

In some respects this is indeed just very bold, but not merely irrational,

metaphysical speculation, of a kind which is these days very hard to

defend. However, it seems to me that Schelling is justified in being

concerned with the ways in which the extremes of human life cannot

be understood solely in causal terms.

Such ideas do have, albeit rather indirect, echoes in later thinkers,

like Hilary Putnam, who oppose reductive versions of physicalism (see

Bowie 1993 : chs. 4 and 5 ). If the ground of motivation were merely

concatenations of causes, the reality of the world of human action and

judgement, the intentional world in which we act, suffer, make music,

and so on, would be dissolved into epiphenomenality. The implicit ques-

tion is, to put it in its contemporary form, how to respond to attempts

to reduce the ‘thick’ ethical and aesthetic vocabulary and other forms

of expression of the life-world, which articulate the diversity of human

motivations, to what is now seen by some as being merely the vocabulary

of ‘folk psychology’. In the terms I have been employing: if music is not

to be regarded as something to be explained in terms of metaphysics 1 ,

how can it function as part of metaphysics 2?

10 This aspect of Schelling is what SlavojZiˇzek connects to Lacan’s account of the ‘Real’.ˇ
SeeZiˇzekˇ 1996.