70 music, philosophy, and modernity
Heidegger considers a poem by Stefan George, claiming that ‘The
poem has no “content”’ (ibid.: 70 ); it cannot be paraphrased without
losing what makes it significant. Referring to George’s line ‘No thing
shall be where the word is lacking’ he claims that it is ‘when the word
is lacking’ that ‘beingdisavows (‘versagt’) itself. But in this disavowal
it reveals itself in its refusal – as silence’ (ibid.: 72 ). Is silence, then,
to be thought of as mere privation of sound, or rather ‘as the basis
of “sound” (‘Laut’)? or even the a-byss [‘Ab-grund’, where the hyphen
again suggests the sense of ‘ground from which’]’ (ibid.: 109 )? We sense
the basis of language’s intelligibility at those moments when the words
for what we really want to say do not arrive, leaving a space which is
pregnant with ‘meaning’ but which cannot be filled. What makes being
manifest and intelligible therefore cannot be explained, and so leads
to silence. Silence is the space into which meaningful articulation can
emerge and it cannot be explained in terms of its opposite, because
it is not just the lack of sound. It is linked in some important way to
listening, rather than just hearing whatever sound there is, because this
can just be a way of objectively registering something. Silence in these
terms is not something that one judges to be present or that one brings
about, but rather something that we can become aware of or open to.
All this would seem to relate closely to music, in which silence can
be as significant as the notes. Think of the pause in Beethoven’sEgmont
Overture, which has to do with death, but does not ‘describe’ death,
and instead enacts a transition which cannot be part of the sayable, con-
sisting of nothing but the relationship between the sounds that precede
it and those that follow it. Silence is, moreover, what makes possible the
relationship between different elements of music. Music also does not
explain anything – though it can make things comprehensible in new
ways: heroism and forbearance may not be the same once one has lis-
tened to the middle Beethoven – and it generally does not function in
terms of the picking out of characteristics. In an apt phrase Roger Scru-
ton talks of ‘a peculiar “reference without predication” that touches the
heart but numbs the tongue’ in our listening to music (Scruton 1997 :
132 ). This would seem to come close to Heidegger’s aim of using poetry
to explore language in a manner which does not reduce it to what can
be explained. However, Heidegger makes no such link. What, then, of
his response to Herder who, as we have seen, regards music as germane
to these issues?
In one sense, all Heidegger does is to fit Herder into the model
he is developing at this time. When Herder talks of hearing as the