MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

414 music, philosophy, and modernity

of the Hegelian position, but we would then be faced again with the

problem that reflexivity does not encompass all that is at issue in self-

consciousness. One is, therefore, confronted with a situation in which

the theoretical form cannot represent the content in question. As we

have seen, though, it is mistaken to think that reaching the limits of

what is articulable in conceptual form means that one is left with mys-

ticism or mere indeterminacy. Dahlhaus gives an example of the alter-

native to this view of conceptuality when he contends that Hanslick’s

equation of music’s untranslatability into verbal language with its inde-

terminacy and lack of an object is mistaken, because ‘translations [of

music into language] do not aim at objects or states of affairs which can

be designated by words or sentences, but at the meaning and sense’ of

music itself. The point is that there is no ‘relationship of representa-

tion between represented feeling and representing music’ (Dahlhaus

1988 : 333 ), which means that other sorts of relationship between lan-

guage and music, of the kind apparent in metaphor’s enabling of non-

representational connections between things, or in gesture’s or dance’s

evocation of things, have to be brought into play.

In the preceding chapters we have seen that if we stop thinking of

language as essentially based on description and representation, we

open up other intersubjectively intelligible possibilities for expressing

what is unsayable in a theory. InPhilosophical InvestigationsWittgenstein

offers the following exchange about someone crying out in pain: ‘“So

you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means the crying?” – On the

contrary; the verbal expression of pain replaces the crying and does not

describe it’ (Wittgenstein 1984 : 357 ). This leads to his remark, cited

in chapter 8 , that a pain sensation ‘is not a something, but it is not a

nothing either... The paradox only disappears if we break radically with

the idea that language always only functions inoneway, always serves the

same purpose: conveying thoughts – whether these are thoughts about

houses, pains, good and evil, or whatever’ (ibid.: 376 – 7 ). If immediate

self-consciousness is also ‘not a something’, but ‘not a nothing either’,

the sense that the theoretical form of explanation cannot represent its

content need no longer seem so problematic.

Our responses to things that are not a something and not a nothing

either can take a whole variety of forms, but music seems particularly apt

in relation to self-consciousness because of its inherent relationship to

feeling. In discussing the idea of the ‘feeling (of) self’ (‘Selbstgefuhl ̈ ’),^30

30 Sartre bracketed the ‘of’ in ‘conscience (de) soi’ in order to try to get away from the
duality that the term involves. As Novalis puts it: ‘Feeling cannot feel itself.’