58 music, philosophy, and modernity
origins as a move away from the musical, so that ‘language becomes
more exact, more clear, but more listless, more dull, and more cold’
(ibid.: 73 ), and writing ‘substitutes precision for expression’ (ibid.: 79 ).
Language moves in ever more deadening directions with the develop-
ment of ever more ordered forms of social life.
Whereas Condillac accepts the necessity of the move from sensation
to conceptual thinking as the condition of possibility of knowledge, for
Rousseau the move involves a kind of ‘fall’, a regrettable loss of a way of
being that corresponds to what he thinks is humankind’s real nature.
Further evidence of this fall are the facts that ‘poetry was found before
prose; that had to be, since passions spoke before reason’ (ibid.: 115 ),
and that music began as melody before becoming dominated by har-
mony.^5 Music is an art of ‘imitation’, in which ‘melody does in music
what draughtsmanship does in painting’ (ibid.: 118 – 19 ). The funda-
mental aspect of music is that ‘it will not directly represent things, but
will arouse in the soul the same sentiments that one feels when see-
ing them’ (ibid.: 133 ). The modern period is characterised by music’s
becoming ‘more independent of words’ (ibid.: 139 ), so that song finally
becomes ‘limited to the purely physical effect of the conjunction of
vibrations’, and music ‘finds itself deprived of the moral effects which
it had produced when it was doubly the voice of nature’ (ibid.: 142 ).
Language also suffers from a similar loss of motivating power, being
no longer capable of appealing to a large crowd because of its loss of
sonority.
Herder writes his text on the origin of language in opposition to
both Condillac and Rousseau. The key point is that, even though both
Condillac and Rousseau agree that music is fundamental to the origin
of language, they interpret what is lost in the emergence of language in
paradigmatically conflicting ways because of their different evaluations
of the role of conceptual thinking. The value of what was supposed
originally to be there can therefore be regarded in both positive and
negative terms, either as something which reveals a desirable state that
we cannot recover, because language and concepts have destroyed it,
or as something which had to be overcome for the achievements of the
modern world to be possible. The positive and negative assessments can,
though, easily be conflated or can co-exist in relation to different aspects
5 The argument is directed against Rameau’s privileging of harmony over melody in their
bitter dispute about music. Rameau, as Thomas shows, tries to derive a whole metaphysics
from the supposed mathematical foundations of harmony.