music, language, and origins 75cannot understand these kinds of utterance in the way that we under-
stand a philosophical or other explanation, so there has to be some
kind of appeal to Schn ̈adelbach’s idea of what has to ‘show itself and
be experienced’. However, the problem with poetry is that it cannot
escape the fact that it is made up of the words that also get used for the
discourse of instrumental reason. This is one reason why Heidegger’s
notion of the ‘language of metaphysics’ is so problematic: given that he
cannot, despite his employment of neologisms, completely stop using
German himself, it can never be clear whether he really avoids this lan-
guage – or, indeed, whether thereissuch a language. Apart from the
relatively limited emergence of neologisms in a language, it can only
be the re-ordering of words in new configurations that brings about a
substantial renewal of that language. Such re-ordering, as we shall see
Schleiermacher and Wittgenstein contending, arguably brings poetry
close to the irreducibility of the order of the elements of a particular
piece or performance to any other in music. Exactly what this link of
music and poetry means will be explored in the following chapters:
it does not, for example, mean just the beauty of sound patterns in
‘euphonic’ verse, and has more to do with rhythm and the juxtapositions
of elements.
Music would even seem to have an advantage in relation to Heideg-
ger’s concentration on articulation which is not tied to instrumental-
ity, because it can evoke more than can be grasped in terms of the
feelings or intentions of composer, performer, or listener. ‘Musical
ideas’ can have a rightness which is analogous to certain kinds of verbal
truth/rightness. The normative (and technical) demands involved in
the practice of music can therefore hardly be said to have to do with
‘the pure state of feeling’. It is unclear just what this idea means any-
way, given the connection of feeling to being in a world constituted in
terms of symbols generated in part, as Herder argues, by our embodied
contact with reality. It is not, to counter an obvious objection here, that
Heidegger thinks that the forms of world-disclosure which he regards
as allowing understanding of being in a non-objectifying manner must
be inherently verbal. In theOrigin of the Work of Arthe considers archi-
tecture and painting, as well as literature, as world-constituting forms.
In that text he emphasises how art constitutes the intelligibility of a
domain of existence in a manner which philosophy as metaphysics 1
cannot. There seems to be no reason why the same should not apply
to music, especially in the case of figures like Beethoven and Wagner,
who play a world-constituting role in nineteenth-century culture, but