304 music, philosophy, and modernity
and, of course, there would be no need to have the poem to convey what
cannot be stated. The poem that conveys the essence of language ‘has
succeeded in becoming the singing song (‘singende Lied’) of language’
(ibid.: 173 ). It would seem, therefore, that we experience language’s
essence when it becomes ‘music’. The poem’s unique combination of
elements cannot be reduced to an explanation of the meaning of the
elements, and so has to be ‘vollzogen’, in Heidegger’s sense of ‘heard’ or
‘listened to’, rather than actively constituted by the subject. Otherwise
the subject would just impose its already existing frameworks on those
elements.
There is not necessarily a great distance here between Heidegger
and Wittgenstein, given their shared concern with poetry as language
which is not reducible to objectifying analysis. The vital difference
between them lies in Heidegger’s particular story of modernity. What,
then, is Heidegger’s investment in his very emphatic conception of
metaphysics and modernity, and how does this relate to his skirt-
ing of music? Heidegger regards the major conceptions of being in
Western metaphysics, from Plato’s thinking of being as ‘idea’, to Aris-
totle’s ‘energeia’, to Kant’s idea of being as the ‘position’ of things rel-
ative to perception, to Hegel’s ‘absolute concept’, to Nietzsche’s ‘will
to power’ (Heidegger 1988 : 9 ), as ‘words of being’ in the subjective
genitive. They are the truth of how being is ‘sent’ (the verb he uses
is ‘schicken’, which he links to ‘Schicksal’, ‘fate’), because this sending
happens in a manner which is not the result of the actions of a sub-
ject. In concrete terms this history of being results in modern Western
technological civilisation, which comes about because truth is reduced
to what can be proved. It therefore cannot be apt toarguefor an alter-
native conception, because this would also depend on the discourse
of proof. Instead Heidegger is left with the need toenactan alterna-
tive by circumventing the objectification characteristic of metaphysics:
even ‘natural language’, he claims, is ‘historical-metaphysical’. Echo-
ing the early Wittgenstein, albeit from a very different perspective, he
therefore ponders a ‘language of thought’ (in the sense of a language
that would say what philosophy cannot) that would ‘make visible the
limitedness of the language of metaphysics’. However, ‘One cannot
talk about this. What decides on this is whether such a saying [‘Sage’,
which is the term he substitutes for ‘language’ in many of the later
texts] succeeds or not’ (ibid.: 55 ). It is in certain poets, like H ̈olderlin,
that this ‘saying’ occurs. What occurs cannot be at the level of the para-
phrasable meanings of the poem, i.e. at the semantic level, because that