302 music, philosophy, and modernity
If one is looking at it for its relationship to philosophical conceptions
of language, rather than for its world-disclosing readings of poems by
Georg Trakl and Stefan George, or for its attempt to enact what it has
to say about language,On the Way to Languagedoes not in fact add a
great deal to the ideas we considered in chapter 2. What matters is how
Heidegger spells out a story about the nature of modernity as the basis
of this enactment. The story seems to point to music, but once again
does not engage with it. Heidegger’s version of the story undoubtedly
has a reactionary side to it, but it is important for us because it is closely
analogous to Adorno’s story of modernity, in which music is central.
Consider one of the handful of passages inOn the Way to Language
where Heidegger does talk about ‘the musical’ in language. In a discus-
sion of the sensuous aspect of language and its relationship to mean-
ing, he says: ‘One points... to the melody and the rhythm in lan-
guage and thereby to the relationship between song and language. If
only there were not the danger of also thinking of melody and rhythm
from the perspective of physiology and physics, thus in the broadest
sense in a technological-calculating manner’ (ibid.: 205 ). This is pretty
odd. Is the first thing that one thinks about when considering melody
and rhythm in language really the question of how science describes
them? What lies behind Heidegger’s peculiar response is his concern
to avoid an account which could be construed as being part of Western
metaphysics, as that which makes the world into what can be technologi-
cally manipulated. Attempts to circumscribe language are consequently
manifestations of metaphysics as an ever more totalising objectifica-
tion of being. The objectification of the sensuous element of language,
of the kind that takes place in acoustics and phonetics, for instance,
involves the hierarchy of sensuous and supersensuous that constitutes
metaphysics.
However, his stance would seem to imply that hearing music as music,
rather than objectifying it in terms of physics, or even regarding it in
terms of the history of music, or music-analysis, is precisely the kind of
thing which does not objectify meaningful articulation. Music is both
‘sensuous’ and ‘intellectual’, and a separation of the two is likely to
result in a failure to appreciate it as music. Heidegger is reluctant even
to use the word ‘language’ for what he is talking about because this
would have connotations of the kind he associates with the ‘language
of metaphysics’. This reluctance would seem to lead us into similar
territory to that explored in the later Wittgenstein’s remarks on music,
but, significantly, Heidegger does not consider the issue that way.