MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

290 music, philosophy, and modernity

of his conception of language, which is why it can be connected to

music.

Heidegger’s ‘turn’ is often seen as being from a position in which

the analysis ofDaseinis the key to the understanding of being, to one in

which language becomes that key, thus from a perspective connected

to the transcendental tradition based on the spontaneity of the subject,

to one which seeks to overcome that tradition in the name of a new

kind of ‘thinking’. This move can also be understood in relation to dif-

fering perspectives on language. In chapter 2 I suggested that there is a

repression of music in Heidegger which is connected to his questioning

in the 1930 sofmetaphysics and its relationship to subjectivity.^14 Much

depends, therefore, on how the relationship of the subject to music and

to language is conceived. I will here just look at some key aspects of how

Heidegger’s earlier perspective can be related to music, and then at a

few elements ofOn the Way to Language( 1959 ), much of which devel-

oped out of the ideas that we considered in Heidegger’s examination

of Herder.

One point of orientation for the Heidegger of before the ‘turn’ is

Kant’s notion of schematism. The aim of the notion for Kant, as we saw,

is to connect the receptive and the spontaneous aspects of the subject,

which have, respectively, to do with the material and with the form of

cognition. As Heidegger puts it, schematism is ‘the making-sensuous

of concepts’ (Heidegger 1973 : 93 ). Schematism is important for him

because it points to the overcoming of the philosophical model based

on the separation of subject and object, which he will seek to achieve via

his notion of ‘being in the world’. An object of what Kant terms ‘pure

intuition’ is pure because the cognitive rules pertaining to it are not

affected by anything sensuous, so that a triangle, for example, can be

described with absolute accuracy. However, it is then hard to compre-

hend how synthetic a priori notions are applicable to a sensuous image

of a triangle or a triangular material object, which are not ‘pure’. How

can concepts, which are inherently general, apply to a world which is

given to us in the form of sensuous particulars? Attempts to answer

this question constitute one aspect of what Heidegger regards as ‘meta-

physics’. What Kant intends with the schema therefore also applies to

empirical concepts, and thence, as Schelling argued, to the very possi-

bility of a word being able to designate different things as the same in

14 Heidegger’s repression of music is also an example of a widespread, questionable reluc-
tance of philosophers to talk about music when they have no specialist knowledge of
it.