202 music, philosophy, and modernity
is spread over the whole of nature, the deep, indestructible melancholy
of all life’ (Schelling 1856 – 61 : 1 / 7 , 495 ) that derives from the constant
battle required for the establishing of particular, but transient, individ-
ual existence, rather than lifeless sameness. However, without freedom’s
attempts to overcome the resistance occasioned by this melancholy, we
would live in a dead world: there can be no joy without its opposite.
The greatest modern music often results from the composer or
performer taking on the most demanding tasks, and it nearly always
involves some element of the ‘melancholy of all life’, not least because
music cannot offer any ultimate consolation, of the kind which some
people expect from religion. This failure to fulfil a substantial meta-
physical role is one reason why music is connected to tragedy at this
time. Metaphysics 2 seems to me, then, to be part of the great Viennese
classical tradition, which embodies the tension between a striving for
transcendence of finitude, and the realisation that modernity cannot
attain such transcendence. Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, and
Mahler all create musical worlds which can be heard in terms of what
is suggested by Schopenhauer, but they can be heard as doing far more
than this. Schopenhauer does not appreciate the complex ambivalences
present in great modern music because he needs music to get him out
of the difficulties of giving aphilosophicalversion of metaphysics 1 by sup-
posedly offering direct, non-conceptual access to the ground of being.
He does not understand that modern music’s relationship to modern
philosophy is often negative and critical. It cannot perform the role
of shoring up a dying metaphysics, and so is most significant when it
points to the limits of philosophy and connects us with the world in new
ways, rather than divorcing us from it. Because Schopenhauer gives pri-
ority to traditional metaphysical goals he ends up with the performative
contradiction of attempting to say in words what only music is supposed
to be able to say. This difficulty is, despite his inadequate responses to
it, obviously an important one, which helps to raise the question of
the limits of philosophy in influential ways. I want now to consider a
few points from Kierkegaard’s approach to music inEither–Orwhich
take up issues to do with language, music, and philosophy that we have
encountered in Schopenhauer.
Music, language, and the ethical: KierkegaardKierkegaard’s best writing might itself be said at times to come close to
‘music’. His texts cannot readily be made into a series of philosophical