music, freedom, and metaphysics 203arguments, and reading them is not always best thought of in terms
of establishing ‘what they are really saying’. Kierkegaard’s playing with
authorial roles means that positions which seem unambiguous at one
moment cease to be the next, and the insights revealed derive as much
from the shifting nature of the texts’ construction as from their appar-
ent substantive claims. Indeed, these claims can be rather disappoint-
ing, and frequently quite reactionary. Kierkegaard can therefore be
said to address by his manner of writing some of the issues which have
emerged from my heuristic inversion of the music/philosophy relation-
ship. However, his most influential discussion of music, inEither–Or,
does anything but seek to give music a dominant role in relation to
language. It is impossible here to go into the detail of the polyphonic
connections of his discussion of music to the relationship between aes-
thetics and ethics inEither–Or,ortodiscuss the detail of Kierkegaard’s
authorship. The account of music inEither–Orshould therefore be
taken here as a model that responds to some of the issues which we
have been considering in this chapter.
The question highlighted by the approach to music inEither–Oris
why music might come to be regarded with suspicion in this particular
historical context. Kierkegaard is part of the wider movement against
Hegelianism – he was very interested in Schelling for this reason – that
takes place in the 1840 s. The basis of his opposition to Hegelianism is
sometimes regarded as the irreducibility of the individual’s ethical life
to ‘mediation’. When faced with an ethical dilemma, awareness of how
that dilemma can be understood historically and socially does not touch
the final reality of the individual subject’s free decision, by which they
constitute their very identity. More importantly, the decision through
which an individual can adopt the Christian faith is wholly separate from
the mediation of what Hegel termed ‘Sittlichkeit’, the ethical substance
of a community into which an individual is born. This conception of the
existential nature of freedom, which was influenced by the arguments
of Schelling, relates to the opposition between the aesthetic and the
ethical which structures some of the most important parts ofEither–
Or. The question of mediation is seen, however, in a different way in
relation to music’s immediacy.
Either–Orfamously focuses on Mozart’sDon Giovanni,as‘awork of
which one can say that the idea of it is an absolutely musical one, thus
that the music is not added to it as an accompaniment’ (Kierkegaard
1885 : 67 ). It is for this reason that music is problematic in relation
to philosophical and religious concerns. The idea ofDon Giovanniis