206 music, philosophy, and modernitydeveloped language has reflection as its basis, this is why it cannot say the
immediate. Reflection kills the immediate, that is why it is impossible to
say the immediate in language. But this apparent poverty of language is
precisely its wealth. The immediate is what cannot be determined; that is
why language cannot incorporate it. That it is what cannot be determined
does not constitute its completeness, but rather a lack which is inherent
in it.
(ibid.: 73 )The position is close to that of Hegel (and Brandom), and this proximity
is underlined when the author admits that ‘I have never had real sym-
pathy for the more sublime music which thinks it does not need words.
Such music generally appears with the pretension of being more sub-
lime than the word, although it stands below the word’ (ibid.: 72 ). The
main point, which makesDon Giovannicentral to the argument, is that
music’s ‘absolute object...falls outside of spirit’ (ibid.), being pre-
cisely the ‘sensuous geniality’ which only emerges as an independent
principle with Christianity.
The author rejects the traditional idea in some forms of Christianity
that music is ‘the work of the devil’, but, as we saw, he does suggest that it
is ‘demonic’.^24 The text’s contentions rely on the account of what music
is excluded from. He admits that his enterprise is paradoxical, insofar
as ‘I wanted to prove by thought that sensuous geniality is the essential
object and content of music, but this can really only be proven by music
itself, and I personally only arrived at this insight in this manner [i.e. by
the experience of music]’ (ibid.: 78 ). Like Schopenhauer, he is in the
situation of mediating what can only be immediate, that is, attempting
to say in words what only music is supposed to be able to say, although
his aims are clearly different. This difference becomes apparent by the
way in which he seeks to establish the autonomy of music: ‘What I...
want is in part to illuminate the idea [of sensuous geniality] and its
relation to language from as many sides as possible, and so limit ever
more the territory in which music has its home, so to speak, to force it
to unfold its splendour to me without me being able to say any more
while it makes itself heard, than: listen!’ (ibid.: 88 ). By doing this he
can defuse what he sees as the danger of music, which results from its
lack of mediation.24 Goethe sees this difference as between a Christian conception of evil, and a Greek
conception of ‘Daemon’, which has to do with inspiration, but in the form of a
compulsion.