conclusion 399consequences of the death of God. This might sound rather melodra-
matic, but I don’t think that it necessarily is.
If one regards the task of post-metaphysical thinking as primarily
therapeutic, in the sense that it should enable people to emancipate
themselves from ways of thinking and acting which hinder their capac-
ity to make sense of the world and of their lives, music of many kinds
can offer therapeutic resources. These range from the psychological,
where some of music’s beneficial effects can be scientifically demon-
strated, to the existential, where they cannot. In the latter case music
may involve a change in the meaning of many interrelated aspects of
someone’s life, and this can include leading them into the more dis-
tressing sides of engagement with music.^21 Furthermore, music’s ability
to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers make it one of the few forms
of expression which can bring people together who may share little in
other respects. Scott Burnham’s conjecture that ‘the secret of music’s
power’ may lie in its being ‘the art form that most successfully mod-
els the human integration of mind and body’ (Burnham 1997 : 328 )
points in the right direction because it sees what is generally regarded
as a philosophical problem in terms of the practice of music. Instead of
answering the ‘mind-body problem’ music may, for example, as praise
does for scepticism, be able to address what gives rise to the putative
problem so that we relate to it in a new way. There is, one should add,
no reason in these terms to give up pondering whether issues involving
music can be better dealt with by argument than by other practices.
Burnham’s comment is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s concern to over-
come the very philosophical model which frames things in terms of
mind and body, as though the idea of a mind that is not always already
embodied makes any sense. The point here is quite simply to ques-
tion some increasingly untenable assumptions about the nature and
consequences of supposed answers to philosophical problems, like the
‘mind-body problem’. I shall give a further example of what I mean at
the end, when I consider the issue of self-consciousness in relation to
music. First, though, we need to take account of some objections to my
approach.21 When I gave a paper relating to these ideas at Princeton Michael Jennings asked me
whether I thought the famously harsh and dissonant (but often ecstatic) jazz of Albert
Ayler, who committed suicide, made sense in terms of my idea of metaphysics 2 .My
answer was, yes, because such music is generated by the refusal of the world as it is, in
the name of something else, and that may require the journey through torment. Making
music is hardly an easy option at the best of times. What Ayler would have done without
his music seems to me the real question.