404 music, philosophy, and modernity
It is worth looking here at a slightly different version of a question
that I asked in the Introduction. What would follow if a much worked-
on philosophical problem, such as that of ‘the meaning of music’, were
to be ‘solved’ (which would also presuppose an answer to the further
problem of the ‘meaning of meaning’)? Another way of looking at this
question is apparent if one asks: how is one to react to assertions by
philosophers working on what may even be a circumscribed, techni-
cal issue, that they don’t think they will ever arrive at the answer to
the problem to which they are devoting themselves? (I have heard a
philosopher of science assert this of the problem of induction, and the
stance is common in the philosophy of music.) Is this attitude a tes-
timony to the higher Platonic unity of the philosophical task, which
transcends the immanent real-world insufficiencies of those engaged
in it, or should we rather seek to reinterpret what such philosophical
phenomena mean as a way of reframing the nature of the philosophical
enterprise, by seeing it as in fact more akin to what takes place in music?
What I mean is apparent in Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that ‘In
truth you would be distressed if the whole world, as you demand, were
for once seriously to become completely comprehensible’ (Schlegel
1988 : 2 , 240 ). Music has a similar status to ‘the world’ in Schlegel’s
sense, because the aim with regard to music that matters cannot be
to make it completely comprehensible in a discursive manner, even
though we may wish or need to pursue as far as we can the attempt
to comprehend it discursively. The philosophical worry in this case is
once again that one is therefore heading in the direction of ineffability,
mysticism, or mere mystification. There is, however, often a confusion
here, analogous to the one suggested above by Rorty’s differentiation
between the veridical and the non-veridical, and the communicable and
the incommunicable. The confusion results from a failure to distinguish
between the idea that if something cannot be resolved in conceptual
terms, it leaves us in the realm of mere indeterminacy or mysticism, and
the idea that many things that cannot be resolved in this way are the
motors or, indeed, the very substance of some of the most important
human practices. These do not involve final solutions but do involve a
deep sense of the value of ‘getting it right’ that Daniel Barenboim has
talked about in relation to the ‘meta-rational’, rather than the irrational,
nature of music. How, then, does this view of the limits of conceptuality
apply both to philosophy and to music?
The following example of the significance of trying to get it right
suggests that questions which emerge in the practice of music can have