80 music, philosophy, and modernity
broader question of how the ‘external’ phenomenon of verbal language
can articulate both the subject’s apprehension of an objective world
and its inner feelings. One advantage of such a dialectical relationship
between the internal and the external is that it obviates the need to give
an essentialist account of what music is, because music cannot be music
at all outside of changing contexts which modify what it is. The same
can be said of language.
Kant was regarded by many as having failed to complete his
philosophical project because he gave no account of how and why
objectivity-generating forms of thought developed in the first place.
Herder tried, as we saw, to address the transition to forms of articu-
lation which are rooted in our existence as part of nature, but which
cannot be explained in purely naturalistic terms. Rorty’s argument is
that this transition can be circumvented by dropping representation-
alism, for which language is supposed to be essentially different from
the forms of coping with reality which preceded it. For Rorty discur-
sive thought is one way of using articulations to achieve certain kinds
of goals, and other kinds of articulation can be used to achieve other
goals. The capacity to use metalanguage, which he sees as defining the
specifically linguistic, is highly significant in this, but it need not be
regarded as the foundation of everything else. The important thing is
rather how we evaluate these goals and means of articulation in relation
to human flourishing. This view offers ways of thinking about music as
a social practice relating to the idea of metaphysics 2.
Music relates to discursive thought via its proximity to verbal lan-
guage, but is not usable for many of the tasks for which we use verbal
language. The borderline between music and natural sounds or human
language is an issue in both modern and pre-modern societies, but it is
with modernity that this borderline really becomes crucial. If we reject
transhistorical answers to the question of what belongs to music and
what does not, we are still left with the question as to why certain forms
of production of organised sound, which cannot be wholly assimilated
either to natural sound or to verbal language, become so important
in all human cultures. This question is particularly vital in relation to
Romanticism, because these forms are regarded by some Romantic
thinkers as either more significant than philosophy, or even as being
themselves a kind of philosophy. However hyperbolic such ideas may be,
they point to one important way in which music gives rise to questions
about the limits of philosophy.