260 music, philosophy, and modernity
one denies this possibility, might not the unattainable standard against
which musical consolation is being measured actually point in the direc-
tion of what sounds suspiciously like a metaphysical conception of the
true world?
Music’s capacity for consolation offers a large spectrum of possibil-
ities, from individual existential consolation, to ideologically charged
collective misuse of music for the purposes of consolation: think of the
Nazis’ use of Bruckner adagios at staged funerals. A blanket rejection
of music as consolation would, though, just take away from the already
often meagre resources for hope in a secular world, with little evidence
that this would lead to Nietzsche’s brave new world after the transval-
uation of values. Wagner’s work has so far both survived Nietzsche’s
attacks and its deeply problematic historical reception, and continues
to offer possibilities for the future, and this seems to me the central
issue with respect to his music’s relationship to philosophy. The dan-
gers and possibilities inherent in the modern awareness of freedom
which we considered in chapter 6 are, as Nietzsche was sometimes well
aware, exemplified in Wagner perhaps as strikingly as in any figure in
modernity.
The present discussion of Wagner has revealed a tension between
seeing music ( 1 )asacultural practice in which people engage, which
has a whole series of functions, from consolation to protest, and ( 2 )
as an objectifiable sign or symptom of wider historical, cultural and
philosophical issues. The two sides of this tension evidently cannot be
strictly separated in concrete cases, but the idea of the two sides does
help to situate differing philosophical responses to music. A related
tension is present in the differences between expressive and represen-
tationalist conceptions of language in the twentieth century, where the
former regards language as a multi-faceted form of human action, and
the latter regards it as an object of analysis. By bringing music into
consideration of this tension thenext chapterwill try to reveal new
perspectives on the twentieth-century philosophy of language.