music, language, and origins 59of modernity. Underlying both positions are metaphysical assumptions
about nature, human and non-human. These assumptions give rise to
analogous problems to those involved in philosophy’s relationship both
to language and to music, where initial assumptions determine the rest
of the investigation. Why should anything be regarded as being lost at all
when what is seen as music and what is seen as language become more
separate? The separation might, for example, equally be seen as giving
rise to new possibilities for both, and the history of music immediately
following these texts would appear to confirm this.
The eighteenth-century tendency to link the question of the origin
of language to music has, as we saw, to do with the problem that char-
acterising the origin of language within language depends on some-
thing which is not yet language. One has to say in language what it is
that begins when language begins. The assumption in much analyti-
cal and other philosophy that language is the means by which human
beings seek to represent the true world gives rise precisely to a ver-
sion of the problem for Condillac and Rousseau which led them to
employ music as the bridge between the pre-conceptual and the con-
ceptual, the non- or pre-linguistic and the linguistic. How is the move
from the absence of true representation to its presence intelligible
at all?
Richard Rorty has suggested a way of trying to circumvent the prob-
lems that result from representational assumptions: ‘May we not think
of true beliefs as reliable guides to human action, rather than as accu-
rate representations of something nonhuman?’ (Rorty 1999 a: 268 ).
He asks, in the light of Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein: ‘At what
point in biological evolution did organisms stop just coping with reality
and start representing it?’ His answer is: ‘Maybe they neverdidstart
representing it’ (ibid.: 269 ). In consequence, ‘there was no decisive
moment at which language stopped being a series of reactions to the
stimuli provided by the behaviour of other humans and started to be
an instrument for expressing beliefs’ (ibid.: 74 ). The idea of language
as representation is, then, just a metaphor which we might be better off
without. It is not that Rorty thinks that we do not use words to repre-
sent things. The point is rather that such representation cannot be said
to correspond to differentiations between the things which pre-exist
their articulation in language. Moreover, the approach itself does not
lay claim to being the truth about language – which would just reinstate
representationalism – but instead asks whether a different view of the
practices which constitute language might not be more productive.