MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

music, freedom, and metaphysics 207

His reason for doing this is that the aesthetic an inferior stage of

human existence to the ethical, as the example of love suggests:^25

While the love of the soul has a certain persistence in time, sensuous

love is nothing but a disappearing in time.But the medium that expresses

this is music. Indeed it is ideally suited to such expression, because it

does not just express the particular, but rather the universal, which is

for everyone, not as something abstract, but as something concrete, in

complete immediacy.

(ibid.: 98 )

This is a version of the model in which the temporality of music,

which manifests the immediacy of the aesthetic, is contrasted with what

resists transience. This contrast is underlined by the description of Don

Giovanni: ‘He pursues, indeed he rushes past in front of us, as he, with-

out justifying himself, suddenly disappears after suddenly appearing,

just like music, which, as soon as it has stopped sounding, is no more,

and is only present again when it is heard again’ (ibid.: 102 – 3 ). A good

deal turns on the implications of these remarks.

Language cannot function without idealisation, which enables dif-

ferent occasions of the use of a word to convey the same thing across

time, and this would seem to be the basis of the contention about music

here. However, the move from this evaluation either to a metaphysical

conception of the timeless, as in Schopenhauer’s ‘Ideas’, or to the eth-

ical or the religious, as Kierkegaard describes them inEither–Or,isby

no means a necessary one. To hear music as music at all, let alone to

hear it at the level required to do justice to a work likeDon Giovanni,

also involves idealisations of this kind, as well as the ability to transcend

immediacy in other ways. Adorno’s judgement onEither–Or’s essential

claim about music, in hisKierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic( 1933 ),

may be somewhat unfair, but it does point to the key issue: ‘all qualitative

differences on which art depends shrivel in relation to the unity of the

“idea” of the empty general concept of “sensuous geniality”, and a mas-

terpiece is left canonically alone as a closed and final totality’ (Adorno

1997 : 2 , 35 – 6 ). While Schopenhauer tries to use music to salvage the

substance of metaphysics 1 , Kierkegaard wishes to use philosophy and

religion to domesticate the power of music. In both cases music is cir-

cumscribed in terms of something else: as a temporary respite from the

25 The relationship of the author A to these contentions suggests the difficulty of inter-
preting Kierkegaard’s texts. A is supposed to exemplify the aesthetic, but he also argues
for its inferiority to the ethical.