64 music, philosophy, and modernity
high accents and their ears are delighted by singing’ (ibid.: 567 ), the
oldest languages do not distinguish between singing and speaking. The
historical pattern of linguistic development involves a move from the
sung aspect of ‘Wohlklang’, ‘harmony’, which characterises a language
in its ‘poetic’ phase, to its ‘philosophical’ phase, where concern with
sound is lost and writing comes to dominate. When Johann Georg Sulzer
suggests, in classic Enlightenment manner, that a complete language
should have ‘a sufficient store of words and phrases through which every
concept is expressed clearly and distinctly’, and that it would be useful
to have ‘a universal philosophical grammar’, Herder therefore objects
that ‘Suddenly the treasure of all my lower powers, experiences and
sensuous ideas, is robbed’ (ibid.: 489 – 91 )bythe demand that all words
be clarified in this manner. The clash of the logical empiricist demand
for a logically purified language with the conviction of the hermeneutic
tradition and the later Wittgenstein that these ideas involve a mistaken
conception of the very nature of language is, then, another version of
a concern of the Enlightenment which is closely connected to music.
Herder might seem to be arguing in the direction of the reversal of
the relationship between music and philosophy that we have begun to
explore. However, things are more complex than this. Herder’s remarks
about music itself are scattered all over his work, but the remarks on
aesthetics inCritical Woodsof 1769 are probably most informative.^7 The
problem with his view of music is that in one key respect he tends
to except it from the inferentialist, holist approach which he adopts
with regard to language. Herder makes the valid point that acoustic
and physical descriptions of a note, as well as practical instructions for
the production of musical sounds, do not do justice to the aesthetic
phenomenon of the note. However, he then makes the assumption,
against Pythagorean and Platonist ideas, that the basis of what is to
be understood must be a ‘given’, by insisting that scientific ways of
describing notes ‘explain nothingof the simple note itself; nothing of the
effect of its energy on the faculty of hearing; nothing of the gracefulness of the
note’ (Herder 1990 : 537 ). He wants to get to the inner feeling generated
by the single note which cannot be characterised in terms of physics,
but this desire relies on an immediacy which creates an implausible
distance between music and language.
7 The remarks inKalligone( 1800 ) repeat much of what is said here, and were less influential
because by the time they were written ideas about music had moved on in the ways we
shall see in thenext chapter.