416 music, philosophy, and modernity
than the merely theoretical side of those to whom it speaks. Whatever
doubts one may have about giving music a more emphatic role in this
respect, it does at least demonstrably address real needs in many differ-
ent kinds of society in a way that much professional philosophy often
does not.
The example of self-consciousness and music can serve, then, as a
model for a philosophical approach that engages with some of the con-
cerns about philosophical argument and its role in cultural life which I
have considered in this section. In order to understand the significance
of the simultaneous development in the latter half of the eighteenth
century of an intense concentration on self-consciousness, which, as
Frank has shown ( 1991 ), anticipates many aspects of contemporary
debate in the philosophy of mind, and the – in many ways culturally
more significant – flowering of musical expression from Mozart to
Wagner, we need an approach that can do justice to interrelations
between domains of cultural life. Arriving at a true ‘theory of self-
consciousness’ cannot be decisive in this respect, because the theory
will not comprehend what we only have access to by actively engaging
with the music of this era. This self-understanding may sometimes do
more for us than a theory, though it does not preclude the kind of
illumination which theories provide.
An example from another philosophical domain can elucidate what
is intended here. Cavell has contrasted two kinds of moral philoso-
phers, the ‘legislators’, and the ‘moral perfectionists’. The former think
that the problems of moral philosophy would be resolved by establishing
the right moral or political rules, and the latter, while acknowledging
the need for the legislators, insist, as Putnam puts it in a discussion
of Levinas, that ‘there is a need for somethingpriorto principles or
a constitution, without which the best principles and the best consti-
tution would be worthless’ (Critchley and Bernasconi 2002 : 36 ). This
contrast between what can be achieved by propositionally expressed
rules and what needs to be in existence before those rules can be felt
to be compelling echoes some of the reasons why music comes to be
philosophically significant in new ways in the modern period.
In the same discussion Putnam considers the Hebrew word ‘hine’
which ‘performs the speech-act of calling attention to, orpresenting, not
describing’ so that ‘hineni!(‘here am I!’) performs the speech-act of pre-
senting myself, the speech-act of making myself available to another’.
He links this to Levinas’ distinction between the ‘saying and the said’,
such that ‘if by a “said” we mean the content of a proposition, then