music, language, and origins 73namely of how the same intelligibility applies to the different senses,
Heidegger claims that Herder then puts the emphasis on the historical
emergence of language, which leads to the first conception. This con-
ception involves the objectifying model of explaining language within
language, and so never gets to the more fundamental question of what
a wordisthat cannot be answered in terms of its being what constitutes
a characteristic. The reason for this is that a version of the same circle
occurs here as we have encountered elsewhere. What is the character-
istic that constitutes a word as what constitutes a characteristic? Part
of the answer presumably lies in its iterability, but why does repetition
generate significance at all? The same issue appears in music: notes are
only notes when they are in some sense repetitions, but that still does
not make clear what makes them into music, which has to be some
wider horizon of intelligibility.
The specific direction Herder takes indeed does not, as Heidegger
shows, answer the question of the relationship between language and
reason, if reason is restricted to being understood as that which forms
characteristics. Moreover, when Herder argues in relation to the human
species’ place in nature that ‘humankind must either go under or rule
over everything...take clear possession of everything or die! Be nothing
or be monarch of creation through understanding! Destroy or create
language for yourself!’ (Herder 1966 : 88 )itiseasy to regard him as
part of the ‘subjectification of being’ that is essential to metaphysics 1
for Heidegger.
However, Herder is anything but a consistent thinker, and his incon-
sistencies mean that he is not so easily made into what Heidegger wants
him to be. Even if Herder does not succeed in offering a fully artic-
ulated alternative, his rejection of the argument for the divine origin
of language does lead to a new kind of focus on language as human
practice. This focus gives scope for exploring interrelations between
differing forms of articulation, from pragmatic use of language to pick
out objects, to expressive forms, which can either be music, or can be
poetry ‘without content’, much in the sense Heidegger intends. Herder
admittedly tells questionable stories about the loss of sensuous imme-
diacy as languages develop and as music becomes its own form of artic-
ulation. However, the idea that forms of articulation can involve a loss
which leads to other forms developing can be a plausible way of con-
sidering the issue of why music becomes philosophically and socially so
important in Europe soon after Herder writes theEssay. Furthermore,
is Heidegger himself not thinking in a similar direction to Herder’s