music, freedom, and metaphysics 171show towards the end of the chapter, one way of exploring these issues
is to contrast Schopenhauer’s conception of music with remarks about
music in Kierkegaard’sEither–Orof 1843. What will be important here
is how the perceiveddangersof music in modernity emerge from these
differing philosophical approaches. The idea of the dangers of music
is hardly new, as the treatment of music in Plato’sRepublic,orsome of
the suspicions of music in certain forms of Christianity or Islam, make
clear. The question is therefore how the new versions of this idea relate
to perceptions of the role of philosophy in modernity.
These issues emerge in a context where processes of secularisation
progressively undermine the idea of music as reflecting a metaphysi-
cal world-order. This is a radically new development: even the Enlight-
enment doctrine of music as a representation of affects still largely
relied on the assumption of a metaphysical order of things. The under-
mining of music’s metaphysical status now comes to be connected to
the questioning of the foundations of morality which results from the
decline of ‘dogmatic’ religious authority and from the Enlightenment
idea of human autonomy. The idea of autonomy is, of course, beset
with controversy: Rousseau’s and Kant’s claim that self-determination
means avoiding being slave to one’s passions comes into conflict with
the idea that self-determination may be most ‘authentic’ when one is
prepared to explore what freedom from traditional constraints makes
possible, whatever the consequences (see, e.g., Trilling 1972 ). Ideas
about music and the most significant music itself both take on and
create new meanings in relation to conflicting conceptions offreedom.
Music’s ambivalent relationship to metaphysics consequently becomes
very apparent.
The major changes in music in modernity, from Beethoven to
Schoenberg, and beyond, which challenge established musical forms
and musical rules, coincide with the reflections on the nature and limits
of human autonomy that go from Kant to Nietzsche and beyond. The
problem for philosophy is that the attempt to ‘determine’ the nature
of human freedom comes to seem paradoxical. If freedom keeps open
new possibilities for the exploration of the world and of ourselves, a
philosophical description of freedom cannot encompass what can only
ever, as it were, ‘happen’ in the future. Arguments in favour of moral
self-determination, which would make possible an account of accept-
able human conduct, may therefore clash with what can be seen as
giving value to secular human life, namely the possibility of continuous
new exploration, articulation, and expression that is not determined by