music, language, and origins 69In moods ‘Daseinis brought before its being as here/there (da)’ (Hei-
degger 1979 : 134 ). Moods are not something we choose, they are what
wefindourselves in, and they determine much of how we are. By suggest-
ing that there is an inherent connectedness of inner and outer which
is beyond the exercise of our will, he seeks to get away from the notion
of the subject as an intending ‘inside’ which relates to an objective
‘outside’. (I shall look further at how these ideas might be considered
with regard to music in chapter 8 .) As Heidegger moves away during
the 1930 s from the centrality ofDaseintowards his heightened concern
with language, his suspicion of any philosophical concentration on the
idea of the subject as foundation or source of the world’s intelligibility
grows. However, a further crucial element of his earlier work does, sig-
nificantly, sound very like Herder’s ‘reflection’. Heidegger talks of the
‘as-structure of understanding’, the prior ‘existential-hermeneutic“as”’,
in contrast to the secondary‘apophantic“as” of the proposition’ (ibid.:
158 ). The point of the as-structure is precisely, as in Herder’s reflection,
that it allows things to be manifest in differing ways in relation to our
needs and purposes.
What now troubles Heidegger can be construed in the form of the
question: ‘What do we see language as?’ He thinks any philosophi-
cal approach to this question involves an objectification of the kind
which dominates modernity via the natural sciences: ‘The unfolding
of man as subjectum [is] precondition of real philosophy of language’
(Heidegger 1999 : 51 ). Such philosophical approaches are, then, part
of metaphysics 1. His claim introduces precisely the issue which has
repeatedly concerned us. ‘Philosophical’ approaches to language take
‘“Language” as a whole (‘“Die”Sprache’) as something pre-given, known’
(ibid.: 52 ). Language is therefore an object, rather than something
whose very status is in question, not least because it has to question
itself. He is concerned, then, not withDaseinas the locus of the as-
structure, but with the ‘origin and the secret of the “as”’ (ibid.: 55 ).
The ‘as’ is ‘the hardly graspable abyss [‘Abgrund’, which has, in the
wake of Schelling, the dual sense of ‘ground from which’, and ‘abyss’]
of the word’ (ibid.). Instead of explaining language in the manner
of ‘philosophy of language’, language is to be ‘founded again’ in the
word (ibid.: 57 ), and this leads towards poetry, rather than to philoso-
phy. Using words to explain the origin of words involves the problems
that we have already encountered, so a different path is sought. This
path is not fully developed in the Herder text, but the key elements are
already present.