378 music, philosophy, and modernity
to explain. The connection between the scientistic position and the
way in which analytical aesthetics often approaches music is that both
work in terms which have to be external to what they are examining.
The construal of meaning in this tradition has therefore to rely on
the explanatory aim which Merleau-Ponty denies is achievable. The
structure of exclusion which he points out in relation to perception
is also present with regard to meaning: if meaning makes explanation
possible, it cannot then be reduced to what it itself makes possible. The
consequences of this contention obviously depend on how meaning is
conceived, and this is where many analytical accounts of language show
themselves to be so inadequate to questions of music and language.
The preceding chapters have tried to connect music to the idea that
meaning has to do with pre-conceptual engagements with things, with
embodied ‘being in a world’, where one acts, feels, etc. Otherwise the
ways in which material things can become signs at all are incomprehen-
sible.^2 Wittgenstein’s remarks on the context-dependence of learning
the meaning of gestures exemplify what is at issue here, and his con-
cern with gesture was one of the reasons why music was so important to
him (and vice versa). Analytical accounts of meaning are, in contrast,
modelled primarily on representational assumptions about language,
of the kind which lead to Kivy’s idea that music should be thought of as
possessing inherent affective ‘properties’, as though it were an object
like any other. As we saw, this idea offers no way of comprehending how
these properties could take on the ‘subjective’ aspect of affectivity in the
first place. This aspect can only come about via the interaction between
the notionally subjective and the notionally objective, which takes place
in what Heidegger terms a world of ‘involvements’ (‘Bewandtnisse’).
One effect of the prevailing analytical assumptions is that philoso-
phers who work on ‘aesthetics’ or the ‘philosophy of art/music’ often
think, in the light of the inferior, ‘subjective’ status generally attributed
to these disciplines by the analytical tradition, that they need to legiti-
mate what they do by producing theories which have the same ‘objec-
tive’ rigour as is supposedly present in other branches of philosophy.
They therefore want to establish that there is indeed a domain of
2 This might seem to repeat the problem I pointed out in Pinker, namely that the genesis of
an aspect of culture does not explain its subsequent meanings. However, I am not seeking
to deny that once there is language these pre-conceptual engagements are also changed.
Indeed, as we have seen, some thinking about music suggests that it may sometimes be
understood as a means of restoring what we have lost by the move to the predominance
of verbal language.