182 music, philosophy, and modernity
the boundaries between merely mechanical order and mere incoher-
ence depend on the shifting historical and social contexts of musical
practices.
This last point is crucial, because one difficulty with the way Schelling
talks about freedom is that he can be seen as making an ontologi-
cal claim which renders all the differing historical manifestations of
what he means by freedom essentially identical, as manifestations of
the same groundless will. It is for this reason that such conceptions can
be regarded as encouraging a mythologisation of the nature of human
existence, and this issue will be crucial in assessing Wagner. Schelling’s
conception need not, though, be thought of in these terms, precisely
because there is no way ofdescribingthe ‘rule-less’. This is what leads
to the idea that human existence is based on an ‘unground’ which
opens up a world that offers possibilities which can be both creative
and threatening. The differing ways in which music relates to the cul-
tural articulation of human existence, from reflecting a religious sense
of order, to evoking madness while not itself being mad, need not,
therefore, be regarded as manifestations of a determinate ontological
foundation. Music can, then, relate both to conceptual ways of structur-
ing the world and to what cannot be articulated in conceptual form. It
is the interaction of these possibilities which alters music’s significance
in changing historical circumstances.
Music, will, and tragedy: the return of DionysusSchelling’s ideas derive in part from the mystical ideas of Meister Eck-
hart and of Jakob B ̈ohme, which arguably inform some of the worst
‘irrationalist’ and mythologising aspects of the history of modern Ger-
man philosophy. In the light of such a heritage is it appropriate to talk in
terms of the ground/unground of ‘freedom’ at all? This way of talking
about the fundamental contingency in human existence should indeed
make one wary. Ostensible prescience about the terrible possibilities
created by modernity’s revelation of the potential of radical freedom
may indeed be achieved at the price of ontologising the idea of ‘free-
dom’, and so implying that economics, sociology, psychology, etc. lack
the resources to deal with ‘deeper’ questions rooted in the fundamental
nature of being. This danger is a real one, which vitiates certain parts
of the German philosophical tradition, particularly in the first half of
the twentieth century (see Bowie 2003 b), and is the frequent target
of Adorno, especially in his assessment of Wagner. However, even as