386 music, philosophy, and modernity
terms, and these connections will be regarded differently, depending
on how linguistic representation is evaluated. What is most significant
in our context is that the historical changes in the significance and
nature of music in early modernity parallel the shift in perceptions of
language associated with the sceptical problematic as it is envisioned by
Cavell. However, although music is always part of Cavell’s explorations,
it does not in the main play an explicit central role in his image of
modernity. InPhilosophy the Day After Tomorrow(Cavell 2005 ), where
aesthetic issues are regarded as essential to what has been neglected
by the science-oriented concerns of analytical philosophy, he addresses
some of the topics we have dealt with, but still links them more indirectly
than directly to music. It is therefore worth attempting to spell out some
implications of his ideas via what has been established in the preceding
chapters.
The echoes of the idea of metaphysics 2 in Cavell should be evident
from the following, referring to the notion of the ‘end of philosophy’
in Wittgenstein: ‘It would follow that philosophy is only over on the
assumption that philosophy is exhausted by metaphysics and that meta-
physics is exhausted by the attempt to solve problems generated by
the skeptical process. But if metaphysics is to tell us how things are,
then philosophical procedures otherwise motivated – let’s say by won-
der – may count as metaphysics’ (ibid.: 211 ). In my terms this means,
then, that music can count as ‘metaphysics’. Beethoven, for example,
challenges the previous orders of things by establishing new kinds of
expressive relationship to the world. These can change ‘how things are’
by, for instance, dynamising temporality and linking it to emotion in
ways which affect one’s sense of how time can be structured and expe-
rienced, or by showing how expressive material can be integrated into
a rationally structured temporal whole. How Cavell’s idea might be fur-
ther connected to music is best shown via his account of limitations in
J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterance. First, though, Cavell’s
questioning needs briefly to be situated in the wider context in which it
occurs. It is not that he just offers an addition to Austin’s theory, rather
he shows how what that theory lacks points to an essential lack in the
tradition to which Austin belongs.
Cavell’s claim that ‘the ability to praise guards against the threat of
skepticism – as in religion the acceptance of God may be attested less in
the reciting of creeds than in the singing of psalms’ (ibid.: 3 ) suggests
how his approach connects with our themes. Praise has a particular
performative status (rather like that of ‘encourage’, discussed below);