music, language, and origins 65The note is supposed to be experienced without being related to
other notes: ‘Ear as ear feels a relationship as littleas the eye immediately
sees a distance and the sense of smell feels a surface’ (ibid.: 539 ). Herder
fails to see that a single note without a context can be of no immediate
significance; indeed, without the background context of the relation-
ships between pitched sounds, it is not a note at all. It is when a note
occurs in an expressive context, where it may then strike the listener
with great force that the ‘energy’ Herder invokes can be manifest. Even
the effect of hearing a beautifully played single note will require a con-
text in which its nature is able to emerge: in the wrong context even a
superb single note played by a great violinist might, for example, just
sound irritating. His claim that because its effect depends upon sin-
gle, simple sensations ‘the essence, nature and effectof music cannot be
explained by relations and proportions’ (ibid.: 541 )isfalse.
Herder’s misapprehension is not of any great importance in itself,
being both a result of a widespread empiricist tendency at the time, and
part of his and Hamann’s insistence that our primary encounters with
the world are sensuous and affective before they are conceptual. How-
ever, his conception does have a paradigmatic significance, exemplify-
ing an influential evaluation of the development of thought, language,
and music that recurs in various guises in modernity. This evaluation
involves reference to the loss of a more immediate state and is implic-
itly or explicitly critical of the tendency towards abstraction in more
developed societies. What Herder claims is, then, not irrelevant to the
growth of the importance of music to philosophy at this time: the sense
that something is being lost which the ‘language’ of music may be able
to restore should not simply be dismissed as misplaced nostalgia. It
all depends on the context of the claim. Herder’s evaluative scheme
does, though, get in the way of an approach to language and music
that does justice to the complexity of the perception of the historical
relationship between feelings and concepts, and so between the realms
of metaphysics 2 and metaphysics 1.
The main problem in Herder’s approach appears when he apos-
trophises the ‘muse of the art of notes’, suggesting ‘what inspirations
(‘Eingebungen’) are in your hand to solve the puzzle of the human soul’
(ibid.: 550 ). His question is why the sense of hearing has the most direct
connection to human feelings. The answer again has to do with the sim-
ple beauty of the sound of the single note. The person blind from birth
may, he claims, feel in the experience of a single note ‘millions of times
more than we do in the bright confusion of a whole piece’ (ibid.: 551 ),