66 music, philosophy, and modernity
because they have not gone through the development from immediacy
to mediation which underlies his basic conception. This questionable
assertion does, though, lead him to a more illuminating idea, which is
also central to theEssay.Hecontrasts seeing, feeling, and hearing. The
eye is the ‘cold observer’ of things from the outside. ‘Feeling’ is the
general inner receptivity of all the senses which is initially too imme-
diate to allow proper discrimination – ‘Humankind stepped into the
world; what an ocean stormed in on it! What difficulty it had in learn-
ing to discriminate!’ (Herder 1966 : 56 ). We are constantly subject to
a mass of sensory input which we feel in some way or other, but what
is vital are the things foregrounded from this input. Hearing is ‘the
most inward, the deepest of the senses’ (Herder 1990 : 555 – 6 ) and
is the mediator between the clear but cold externality of seeing and
the confused internality of feeling. The point of this description of the
working of the senses is to describe ‘reason’ and reason’s relationship to
language in a manner which does not rely on a priori rationalist princi-
ples and which accounts for the genesis of the capacities associated with
‘reason’.
Where does music fit into this conception? Herder does not think
that music arose from the imitation of bird-song. His idea is that lan-
guage and song are essentially co-extensive in the early stages of a
culture because the early development of language is expressive, not
representational. ‘Song’ and music are therefore not the same thing.
Herder’s conception is close to that of Rousseau, for whom melody
based on single notes stands for simple feeling, harmony for reflection
and mediation. Ancient Greek music was ‘born of the language of pas-
sion’ and was based on simple melody with strong accents and much
modulation; contemporary music, on the other hand, is ‘an art of notes
of relationships and of reason’ (ibid.: 563 – 4 ). Music as a specifically aes-
thetic form is therefore linked to a more general modern process of
rationalisation: ‘Song is stilllanguage. People must first forget this, for a
few moments they must forget thought, feeling, the need to designate,
in order to cultivate note as note and sequence of notes as such; from
this moment on the step to the art of notes would be made’ (ibid.:
560 ). The source of what music can express is immediately present
in the earlier forms of language which are the expression of affect,
and then occurs in only a mediated, abstract way in theartof music.
This means that ‘autonomous’ wordless instrumental music is regarded,
not – as it soon will be – as the decisive kind of music, but merely
as a modern result of the splitting up of previously unified means of