form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 45task – there is a problem in adopting current philosophical assumptions
in the name of a metaphysical determination of the status of music. At
the same time, the practice of philosophyitselfis also part of what it is
to be human, which, like music, may play a world-disclosive role: think,
for example, of the effects of Kant on the wider cultural development
of Romanticism, which have no immediate connection to whether his
arguments are ultimately defensible. To this extent interest in how peo-
ple have attempted to establish and answer philosophical questions is
also self-legitimating. Both philosophy and music have, then, played
a historical role in articulating what it is to be human and to be part
of a world that we can never finally control. What makes their rela-
tionships interesting in modernity is suggested by the tension between
metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2. The method I shall adopt in the coming
chapters therefore involves considering the ‘entanglement’ of philoso-
phy and music in modernity.^12 Rather than offer an exhaustive history
of modern music aesthetics, or an alternative kind of philosophy of
music, each chapter that follows will examine a constellation or con-
stellations in which the entanglement of philosophy and music has led
to new questions about the nature of each.
Wittgenstein’s friend, Frank Ramsey, famously asserted in relation
to the argument that an infinite conjunction could not be considered
to be a proposition because it could not be written out, that ‘what we
can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either’. One simple answer
to Ramsey lies in the fact that one can express an infinite conjunction
like. 3 recurring as the fraction 1 / 3 (see Holton and Price 2003 ). It
can, moreover, be that one form of expressiondoeswhat another can-
not. Friedrich Schlegel once claimed in relation to verbal language
that ‘communication and representation must be added to; and this
happens throughmusicwhich is, though, here to be regarded less as
a representational art than as philosophical language, and really lies
higher than mere art’ (Schlegel 1964 : 57 ). Such a hyperbolic remark
only becomes possible in the light of aesthetic and conceptual changes
which are rooted in some of the deepest challenges posed by modernity.
My claim will be that it is worth taking remarks like this more seriously
than many modern writers on philosophy have tended to do.12 I adopt the term from Hilary Putnam’s insistence, against the tradition of logical posi-
tivism, that fact and value are inextricably entangled, which is in certain respects part of
what I have to say about music and philosophy anyway. Another way of thinking of this
is in terms of the ‘interference’ between music and philosophy.