68 music, philosophy, and modernity
He concentrates on one aspect of Herder’s account at the expense of
other aspects of that account. In doing so he never uses the word music,
though he uses many words associated with it. This is peculiar, because
Herder’s text is unthinkable without music. Herder lists, for example,
a whole range of human feelings, commenting that ‘There are as many
forms of feelability (‘Fuhlbarkeit ̈ ’) sleeping in our nature as there are
also kinds of sound/keys [‘Tonarten’, which now almost exclusively has
the musical sense of ‘key’]’ (Herder 1966 : 7 ). Admittedly Herder then
suggests the limitations of this kind of articulation, and we have seen
how he regards music in the aesthetic sense as losing the affective imme-
diacy of the earlier forms of expression, but he does sustain a role for
phenomena one can term ‘musical’ as part of our being in the world.
Heidegger concentrates particularly on Herder’s account of ‘reflec-
tion’ (‘Besonnenheit’), which he fits into his version of the story of
metaphysics 1 as the transformation of philosophy into natural science.
The account is insightful, and yet overly schematic. He argues that
Herder’s use of the term derives from Leibniz’s notion of reflection,
which involves ‘apperceptive’ awareness – reflective awareness of hav-
ing one’s thoughts and perceptions – and is the constitutive element of
‘egoity’. This might seem odd, because Herder is clearly critical of ratio-
nalism, but the point is convincingly made that he cannot be interpreted
as rejecting Enlightenment rationalism. The further step in Heideg-
ger’s argument is more debatable, namely that, even though Herder is
not a Leibnizian, his argument remains within the same ‘western meta-
physics’ (Heidegger 1999 : 44 )asLeibniz. This is because of the way
Herder presents the relationship between ‘sensation’ (‘Empfindung’)
and ‘reason’. For Herder language is the external, and reason is the
internal, feature of humankind which differentiates us from animals
(Herder 1966 : 43 ). Herder’s link between ‘To n’, ‘sound’ or ‘note’, and
sensation relies, though, Heidegger claims, not on ‘reason’, but ‘on a
deeper basis... theattunedness(‘Ge-stimmtheit’)of being and its truth’
(Heidegger 1999 : 44 ). The idea is that the subject’s capacity to link
a sound to a visual or other perception is not grounded in the sub-
ject’s capacity for reason, but in the fact that being is intelligible at
all in these different perceptual forms. Heidegger’s conception here
has some similarities to what Wittgenstein intended with the notion of
‘logical form’.
The word for mood, ‘Stimmung’, retains the sense of musical ‘mode’
and ‘attunement’ which has been lost in English. In his earlier work
Heidegger regarded moods as essential to the understanding ofDasein.