conclusion 385My idea here is that Rorty should, as Wittgenstein does, extend the
scope of what is intelligible in the direction of articulations which may
not describe or convey knowledge, but which also need not primarily be
thought of as involving something ‘ineffable’ towards which knowledge
is striving. This idea can be made persuasive by looking again at one
of the main historical manifestations of music. As we have seen, music
in modernity has important effects on what language is taken to be.
Questioning of the idea of verbal language as representation of a ready-
made world leads to a new sense that the uses to which words can be
put do not adequately cover all that we need to express, and that music
is significant in extending what can be expressed.
A further way of approaching these changes is via Cavell’s very par-
ticular (and sometimes exaggerated) take on scepticism as a founding
aspect of modernity, which relates to the questioning of language as rep-
resentation.^9 Essential to Cavell’s position is his claim that ‘the human
creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as
such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as know-
ing’ (Cavell 1979 : 241 ). When, paradigmatically with Descartes, phi-
losophy becomes more and more concerned with using knowledge to
ground human beings’ basis in the world,^10 the philosophical prob-
lem of humankind’s relation to the world becomes acute, and this is
accompanied by the emergence of a new kind of fundamental mistrust
of language. The sort of thing which Cavell means is indicated in Wal-
ter Benjamin’s remark that in baroque allegory ‘Every person, every
thing, every relationship can arbitrarily mean something else. This pos-
sibility passes a devastating but just judgement on the profane world’
(Benjamin 1980 :i/ 1 , 350 ). Benjamin connects this occurrence with
the emergence of opera, which is ‘product of the decay’ of what he
refers to as ‘Trauerspiel’ (which includes German baroque drama and
Shakespeare) (ibid.:i/ 1 , 385 ). He regards the move to opera as a sign
of decay because he adheres to the theological idea of a ‘language
of names’, which would be the perfect representational language (see
Bowie 1997 : ch. 8 ).
Music has precisely to do with connections to the world which often
cannot be characterised in terms of what we know or in representational
9 Rorty ( 1982 )isprobably right to suggest that Cavell tries too hard to connect the unin-
teresting empiricist concern with epistemological scepticism about the external world
in the analytical tradition to the really important issues about human communication
associated with scepticism in Kant, Sartre and others.
10 Hamann, Jacobi, and Schelling, whose ideas have been important for the approach I
have tried to develop, all question the primacy of epistemology that is the consequence
of Cartesianism. See Bowie 1993 , 1997 ; and Schelling 1994.