music, freedom, and metaphysics 205from the aesthetic, to the ethical, to the religious ‘teleological suspen-
sion of the ethical’. The last stage is exemplified by the account in
Fear and Tremblingof Abraham’s preparedness, against ethical norms,
to sacrifice his son because he has heard God’s command to do so,
even though there can be no guarantee that he is not simply mad. It is
worth reflecting here that Wagner’sRingalso depends, via the incest of
Siegmund and Sieglinde, on either a suspension or a transcendence of
the ethical, but this time associated with the attempt to establish a new,
freer social order. Kierkegaard’s religious stage involves a higher kind of
immediacy, based on faith, which results from the transcendence both
of the immediacy of the aesthetic, and of the mediation involved in the
ethical. What is meant by the aesthetic and the ethical becomes clearer
when it is suggested that Mozart’sThe Magic Fluteis weakened because
‘Ethically determined love, or conjugal love is posited as the goal of the
development. This is where the main failing of the piece lies; for what-
ever else, speaking morally or in bourgeois terms, such love means, it is
not musical, rather it is absolutely unmusical’ (ibid.: 85 – 6 ). The incest
between Siegmund and Sieglinde which results in Siegfried in theRing
could in this sense be seen as confirming Kierkegaard’s view of the musi-
cal. If one wanted to mediate ‘sensuous geniality’ so that (and here the
thought is straightforwardly Hegelian) it is ‘reflected in another’, the
result would be that it ‘falls under the dominion of language and from
then on is subordinated to ethical determinations’ (ibid.: 67 ), becom-
ing a normative matter for a community. The ethical and language are
therefore in certain respects co-extensive; the musical is separate from
the ethical and consequently, in this respect at least, divorced from lan-
guage. There is also, though, a fundamental connection between music
and language.
The issue of language is presented in terms of the relationship
between the sensuous and the spiritual: ‘language appears as the com-
plete medium when everything sensuous is negated in it’ (ibid.: 70 ).
The argument should be familiar from Hegel’s account of the idealisa-
tion involved in language’s separation of meaning from its contingent
sensuous embodiment that we considered in chapter 4. The author also
maintains, however, that ‘This is also the case for music. What should
reallyand principally be heard constantly frees itself from the sensuous’
(ibid.). However, even though it may appear that the difficulties of giv-
ing an aesthetic account of music in language make language a ‘poorer
medium’ than music, this is not the case. ‘Music constantly expresses
the immediate in its immediacy’ (ibid.: 72 – 3 ), but