music, language, and origins 67articulation. The same loss of sensuous immediacy supposedly occurs,
as we saw, in the history of a verbal language.
Much of this is either just confused – Herder tends anyway to set little
store by consistency – or is based on his mistaken fixation on Rousseau’s
notion of the power of immediate expression of melody as opposed to
the mediation of harmony that derives from his opposition to Rameau.
Sometimes, however, this fixation seems to begin to fall out of the con-
ception, for instance when Herder equates poetry and music.^8 In the
sequence of words in poetry there is a ‘melody of ideas and notes’;
poetic forms involve ‘a melody of thoughts...from the chain of such
dissolvings and flowings away... arises the effect of music... where
every single moment is nothing in itself and the effect of the whole is
everything’ (ibid.: 607 ). The holism which disappeared when Herder
considered music is now common to both music and poetic language.
If one takes away his Rousseau-like view of harmony, an illuminating
conception which attempts to grasp different temporalised structures
and articulations of intelligibility based on the differing roles of and
links between the senses now emerges. His attention to the more fun-
damental structures and relationships shared by language and music as
responses to the human need to constitute a world suggests why concen-
tration on representation as the basis of language is inadequate to the
diversity of what language is. What now matters most about Herder’s
ideas in our context are the assumptions involved in how music and
language relate to ‘reason’, above all with regard to the relationship
between the original state of a particular form of articulation and what
succeeds it.
Heidegger’s Herder: reason and the repression of musicHeidegger produces his work on Herder’sEssayin the phase during
which he becomes concerned with H ̈olderlin’s poetry and with lan-
guage as the ‘house of being’, rather than, as it had been inBeing and
Time,asapragmatic means for dealing with the world. As in his work
on Schelling around this time, Heidegger interprets a thinker from
the past in such a way that they just become a further confirmation
of his larger conception of metaphysics as the ‘forgetting of being’.
8 Herder is often more interested in trying out where an idea will lead than in whether he
thinks the idea is true. This attitude is consistent with the notion that language is in some
sense ‘constitutive’, rather than representational.