form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 33being seen as musical. The ability of mathematics to describe the move-
ment of the heavenly bodies is here substantially connected to the
assumption that the harmonic series can be described in mathemat-
ical terms. It is no good, as I have already argued, just dismissing such
theories because we now do not think them true: the universe made a
specific kind of sense for that culture when seen in the light of music.
Given that music involves patterns of intelligibility based on relations
of identity and difference, and that the conceptualisation of nature
also involves analogous patterns, the idea that the kinds of intelligibil-
ity are substantially connected is a rational, if in this form mistaken,
inference. Ramberg’s comment that ‘We can, if we like, interpret all
kinds of things as speaking’ if we can ‘correlate some identifiable com-
plex state of our chosen subject with some identifiable state of the
world’ suggests a more defensible way of linking forms of intelligibil-
ity. If we now consider an influential version of the question of meta-
physics in a bit more detail, an instructive way of thinking about music
emerges.
One story about metaphysics – the story told by the later Heidegger –
begins with the idea that, from the ancient Greeks onwards, metaphysics
is the attempt to map out the place of humankind in the universe by
giving an account of the true nature of being. Modernity is inaugurated
by the move towards the idea that we ourselves, qua thinking subjects,
are the foundation of the true account, an idea occasioned not least
by the growing success of scientific activity in arriving at more reliable
descriptions of the world. As this success extends ever further, the role
of philosophy shrinks in relation to the natural sciences. Heidegger puts
it like this: ‘The development of the sciences is at the same time their
separation from philosophy and the establishment of their indepen-
dence. This process belongs to the end/completion (‘Vollendung’) of
philosophy’ (Heidegger 1988 : 63 ). He regards this end as the culmina-
tion of the ‘subjectification of being’ initiated by Descartes’ founding
of philosophical certainty in the I: ‘The modern (‘neuzeitliche’) free-
dom of subjectivity is completely taken up into the objectivity which
accords with it’ (Heidegger 1980 : 109 ). He is thinking of what has
now become the aim in artificial intelligence of recreating the sup-
posed essential capacities of subjectivity via objective mechanisms. Meta-
physics is therefore construed by Heidegger as itself becoming modern
natural science, which increasingly determines the fate of humankind
by objectifying nature in the name of predictive laws that enable us to
control it.