music, freedom, and metaphysics 193of music’ (ibid.: 2 , 1112 ), and he claims that ‘when I described
Dionysian music I described whatIhad heard’ (ibid.), rather than
Wagner’s actual music. This is just retrospective self-justification, but
the contrast that emerges from Nietzsche’s conflicting positions lies at
the core of modern questions concerning music and metaphysics.
So what could be meant by ‘Dionysian music’? The answer has to
do with Nietzsche’s response to the demise of redemptive metaphysics.
His problem lies in the indeterminate nature of what he proposes as
an alternative in music, which depends on his discursive ideas about
the fate of philosophy. Despite his desire to undermine the pretensions
of philosophy, Nietzsche will in certain respects be less interesting than
the Romantic thinkers who had the idea of using music to question phi-
losophy. The questions here have to do with the relationship between
metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2. The Kantian revolution depended on
the idea of philosophy as critique, which helped to undermine the idea
of philosophy as substantive metaphysical explanation of the mean-
ing of existence. Metaphysics had variously sought to function as: an
account of an inherent order of things, a moral compass, consolation
for the troubles of a transient existence, and the promise of redemption
from that transience. These were often expressed in precisely the kind
of teleological terms that gave rise to the contrast between Hegel and
Nietzsche. As Dahlhaus suggested, metaphysics then comes up against
the concrete reality of modernity. Disputes over music in this period
and since often arise because it is regarded as potentially taking over
some or all of these functions.
The situation is changed further by the connection between music
and ‘freedom’. This connection creates a tension between the idea
that music can compensate for what is destroyed by the decline of sub-
stantial metaphysics (hence the link to teleology), and the idea that
such an attribution of an extra-musical role to music detracts from the
new autonomy of ‘absolute music’ (a term which seems to have been
coined by Wagner). These issues finally bring us to Schopenhauer, who
is often seen as the most significant philosopher to examine the ques-
tion of philosophy and music, but who, I want to argue, in fact merely
tries to make a questionable version of metaphysics 1 into metaphysics 2.
He is therefore not the radical representative of an inversion of the
music/philosophy relationship as which he is often presented.^1919 I have also discussed Schopenhauer and music in Bowie 2003 a. For a concise, if rather
a-historical, exposition and critique of Schopenhauer on music, see Budd 1992 , ch. 5.