208 music, philosophy, and modernity
effects of the Will of which it is the image, and as the manifestation
of the ‘power of nature’ in Don Giovanni. Words cannot express this
power, ‘only music can give us an impression, a feeling of it; for reflec-
tion and thought it is unsayable. What sort of a power it really is nobody
can say’ (Kierkegaard 1885 : 102 ). Adorno suggests that Kierkegaard in
fact ‘hears out of Don Giovanni the demonic side of the simple power
of nature as it only became musically free in Wagner’ (Adorno 1997 : 2 ,
36 ).
The differing kinds of investment which philosophers make in the
interpretation of music’s unsayability can sometimes be more informa-
tive than the actual claims that they advance about music. For Wacken-
roder and Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and some other Romantic thinkers
unsayability points to a transcendent realm which compensates for
the prose of modern life. But why does music come to function as
compensation, and what is the status of this transcendent realm? For
Kierkegaard such Romantic notions belong to the lesser realm of the
aesthetic, which entails a view of art as a danger to authentic human
existence: ‘every aesthetic view of life is despair, and everyone who lives
aesthetically is in despair, whether they know it or not. But if one knows
it...then a higher form of existence is demanded which cannot be
rejected’ (Kierkegaard 1885 : 484 ). This higher form moves through
the reflective stage of the ethical to the religious. The latter may be
equally ‘unsayable’ because it is also beyond mediation, depending on
a leap of faith by the individual. However, religion offers what the aes-
thetic supposedly does not, namely the chance of an absolute answer
to the meaning of life, albeit one which has no guarantee of reali-
sation. The idea of dangerous freedom we encountered in Schelling
is transferred into the wager of faith. Schopenhauer is closer to Hoff-
mann and the idea of the need for compensation, but music is only
a temporary respite from a form of life whose only real redemption is
Nirvana.
What lies behind such conflicting positions is the search for what can
give human existence value in the face of the changes in temporality
characteristic of modernity and of the issues concerning freedom that
we have been examining. There is no necessity, for the moment, to
adjudicate on the contending philosophical claims which I have high-
lighted via Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard in the light of the idea of
freedom developed from Schelling. The important thing for now is the
radical divergence in the assessments of music on the part of thinkers in
the era in which the idea of the ‘end of philosophy’ first emerges. Music