54 music, philosophy, and modernity
representational equivalent is being employed when mathematics is
seen as the basis of music, not that the whole model of representation
is mistaken.
It is when the sense that words are essentially representational comes
into question that a great deal else comes into question as well, and
music suddenly takes on very different significances. This change is
closely associated with the shift in the status of wordless music from
being a lower form of music to its being regarded, in some cases, as
the highest form of all the arts. From Saint-Evremond’s declaration in
1678 that ‘The Musick must be made for the Words, rather than the
Words for the Musick’ (Saint-Evremond 1930 : 210 ), one moves by the
end of the eighteenth century to Wilhelm Heinse’s remark in 1776 – 7
that ‘Instrumental music...expresses such a particular spiritual life in
man that it is untranslatable for every other language’ (Heinse 1795 –
6 : 3 , 83 ), to W. H. Wackenroder’s claim in 1797 that music ‘speaks a
language which we do not recognise in our everyday life’ (Wackenroder
1910 : 167 ), and to J. N. Forkel’s assertion in 1778 that music ‘begins...
where other languages can no longer reach’ (Forkel 1778 : 66 ). Some
of the reasons for such a radical change in the understanding of music
can be observed in the work of J. G. Herder, and tensions in Herder’s
work point to some of the most significant questions about music and
philosophy in the modern period.
The origin of language and musicHerder’s own conception of music is neither very original nor very con-
vincing. What matters about his work in our context is how he confronts
the possibility that there is no inherent order of things which is repre-
sented in natural languages. Because Herder explores how humankind
can understand the world on the basis of what he regards as its natu-
rally given powers, he refuses to exclude consideration of the role of
any of those powers. This is one source of his enduring opposition to
Kant, who, he thinks, ignores the historical development of different
human relationships to the natural and social world. Charles Taylor
( 1985 , 1995 ) has argued that Herder’s significance lies in his devel-
opment of the idea that language is primarily ‘constitutive’ of what we
understand, against the idea, which dominates empiricism and much of
the analytical philosophy that derives from it, that language is primarily
‘designative’, in the sense of representing either ideas or objects which
pre-exist their representation. What makes Herder’s ideas revealing is