74 music, philosophy, and modernity
idea of language losing something in the move to modernity, when he
talks of the ‘language of metaphysics’ as the ground of the objectifica-
tion brought about by modern science and technology, and adverts to
other kinds of language as offering a way of questioning the supposed
‘language of metaphysics’?
Why, though, does Heidegger repress the issue of music, and what
effect does this have on his own project? In Heidegger’s work on Niet-
zsche of around the same period a possible reason for his neglect of
the issue of music in relation to Herder’s text is apparent. Discussing
Nietzsche’s view of Wagner, Heidegger claims that the fact that it is
music in Wagner that takes on the status of the highest art, rather
than the words of the drama, ‘already has its basis in the increasingly
aesthetic attitude to art as a whole; it is the conception and evalua-
tion of art from out of the naked state of feeling, and the increasing
barbarisation of the state of feeling itself into the naked seething and
surging of feeling which has been left to itself’ (Heidegger 1961 : 105 ).
In Wagner the ‘dominance of art as music is... the dominance of
the pure state of feeling’ (ibid.: 102 – 3 ). Heidegger extends his con-
cern to develop an approach that does not rely on the ‘unfolding of
man as subjectum’ to the idea thatany‘subjective’ state is part of the
domination of being, which therefore goes from technology to music.
What makes this so puzzling is that we have also seen that feeling can
have cognitive, world-disclosing functions, of the sort which Heidegger
attributes to works of art. If emotions are construed as kinds of judge-
ment and as bound up with the symbolic resources of a culture, music
is essential to the ways in which individuals articulate their being in
the world. Furthermore, Heidegger’s insistence on listening – being
open to being, rather than determining it – is part of what comes to
be so important in the new role of music in modernity. Music’s lack of
semantic determinacy, which Hegel construes as its essential limitation,
can in these terms be regarded as a challenge to the dominant philo-
sophical concern with explanation. Explanation can involve a failure
to ‘listen’ to what escapes the frameworks upon which explanations
rely.
Heidegger’s philosophical case depends on the idea that the ground
of intelligibility is what is addressed by exploring the meaning of being.
The question is how we are able to understand what Heidegger seeks
to show by his adverting to poetry and to the idea that only the essen-
tial philosophers speak the ‘words of being’, in the dual sense of words
which are about being and of words which come from being itself. We