music, language, and origins 71mediator between seeing and feeling, for example, ‘hehas an inkling...
of the in-between and the in-the-middle-of of the clearing (‘Lichtung’)’
(Heidegger 1999 : 113 )–thus of the ‘space’ within which intelligibil-
ity comes into being – but he fails to grasp its significance. Heidegger
notes, again without any reference to music, that, for Herder, hearing
‘exhilarates and makes vibrate/swing (‘beschwingt und bringt ins Schwin-
gen’)’ (ibid.: 122 ). He then links hearing to Kant’s idea of the tran-
scendental subject as the ‘unity of a manifold’ across time. The need
for unity in multiplicity is the source of the need for the ‘formation of
characteristics (‘Merkmale’)’, as a means of holding on to what other-
wise passes away: ‘Hearing gives one sound/tone/note (‘To n’) after the
other. The single sound/tone/note is profiled, has a certain duration,
and wants to be sustained. A certain togetherness comes about in which
the sounds/tones/notes assert themselves. In their succession they also
stand in a certain unity’ (ibid.: 199 ). The echo of Descartes’ remark
that ‘when we hear the end we recall at this instant what there was at
the beginning and in the rest of the song’ and the reference to ‘To n’
seem to suggest that this must have to do with music. Indeed, read in
isolation, it seems to be about music. However, Heidegger moves the
argument in a direction which is actually at odds with a link to music,
focusing instead on the semantic dimension of reflection. Characteris-
tics result from reflection, the central aspect of Herder’s view of reason,
so that ‘The characteristic is the inner word itself’ (ibid.: 174 ) which
is arrived at by linking sound and perception: ‘in hearing [‘Geh ̈or’, i.e.
the sense] lies thenecessity of the formation of characteristics’ (ibid.: 199 ).
The impression that Heidegger is moving towards music as the source
of an alternative to the idea of language as something essentially classi-
ficatory dissolves, and the possibility of seeing identity and coherence
in terms other than those of metaphysics 1 dissolves with it.
Heidegger wants to get away from the idea that the empirical sense
of hearing is the ground of reason which orders the manifold of the
senses. He instead thinks in terms of a grounding silence which opens
up the space for things to be present, rather than demanding that they
be classified as entities. Such an approach would mean that reason
and language cannot be connected in the manner which he regards
as constitutive of metaphysics 1. Reason, as what, for Herder, makes the
chaos of sense impressions clear, is therefore dependent on the ‘clear-
ing’. Heidegger points out that the word for ‘bleat’, ‘bl ̈oken’, is not an
onomatopoeia, which would be ‘M ̈ah’, so that ‘what is really said is not
what is sounded, echoed’ (ibid.: 137 ). The sense perception is not what