252 music, philosophy, and modernity
representationalist premises about the functioning of language, which
deny ‘extra-musical’ meaning to music precisely because it is non-
representational. These premises can themselves be seen as metaphys-
ical because they seek to circumscribe truth and meaning in an expla-
nation of the relationship of word or statement to world, leaving no
place for how the musical can both play a role in verbal language itself
and articulate its own kinds of significance. Nietzsche comes to propose
ideas which vary between something akin to formalism and something
very far indeed from it, and the contradiction is once again what is most
informative. As he moves into his quasi ‘positivist’ phase, inHuman All
To o Human( 1878 ) andDawn( 1881 ), he rejects the account of music
and language suggested by his earlier remarks on music as the affective
counter to convention: ‘Music is not in and for itself so meaningful for
our inner life, so deeply stirring that it might pass as the immediate lan-
guage of feeling; rather its primordial connection with poetry [‘Poesie’
in the general sense of creative writing] has put so much symbolism
into the rhythmic movement in the strength and weakness of the note
that we now think it speaks directly to the inner self and comes from
the inner self’ (ibid.: 573 ). The awareness that so much of human life
depends on historical origins that philosophy has forgotten, which char-
acterises Nietzsche’s work on morality, occurs here in relation to music’s
relationship to language. However, this change from his earlier position
underplays the two-way relationship between music and language that
I illustrated by Schlegel’s account of rhythm and conceptual thinking.
Although Nietzsche avoids the wholesale separation of language and
music associated with formalism, he often deals with phenomena that
are best regarded as dialectically related by merely reversing his previ-
ous evaluation, in this case from a superiority of music to language to
a dependence of music on language.
Given the role of evaluation in Nietzsche’s thinking, this tendency
towards reversal is vital in assessing his responses to the issue of music
and philosophy. InThe Gay Science,inasection ‘On the Origin of Poetry’,
he rejects the idea that the rhythmic and musical aspect of language
serves as evidence against a utilitarian view of morality and culture,
claiming that rhythm is rather a means of compulsion, and that ‘long
before there was philosophy one granted to music the power of dis-
charging affects, of cleansing the soul, of pacifying theferocia animi–
precisely via the rhythmic in music’ (ibid.: 2 , 94 ). Rhythm is not some
kind of ‘spiritual’ addition to what is otherwise merely useful, but is itself
useful as a means of control. It can therefore be employed as a tool of