34 music, philosophy, and modernity
However, plausible as some aspects of this story are – I shall con-
sider Heidegger and music in thenext chapterand in chapter 8 –it
is instructively one-sided. Modernity has also revealed the fundamental
fragility of the subject, and this suggests a different story, which conveys
a different sense of how metaphysics might be construed. I shall refer to
what is articulated in the first story as metaphysics 1 and in the second as
metaphysics 2.^9 In her book on the ‘intelligence of emotions’,Upheavals
of Thought, Martha Nussbaum points to how this alternative story could
relate to music when she claims: ‘Musical works are somehow able –
and, after all, this “somehow” is no more and no less mysterious than
the comparable symbolic ability of language – to embody the idea of
our urgent need for and attachment to things outside ourselves that
we do not control, in a tremendous variety of forms’ (Nussbaum 2001 :
272 ). The emotions music embodies are, then, forms of openness to
the contingency of our existence in the world, where what we value can
never be controlled by acts of will because we do not reflectively choose
to value it. The symbolic structures in music relate to those emotions
in a way which nothing else does, even if they may have close analogues
in other arts. Nussbaum links music to tragedy, for example (on music
and tragedy see chapters 6 and 7 below). Her aim is to get away from
the image of emotions as arational or irrational and to see them as con-
nected in complex ways to rationality. We may be driven by emotion to
gain control over some aspect of the world which we previously did not
control, and this links emotion to the sciences and to metaphysics 1 , but
we also require resources for articulating our responses to things that
we cannot control which still demand our rational engagement with
them.
Nussbaum’s construal of emotions as judgements of value suggests
a way of linking emotions to questions of truth that adds a dimension
to how one can understand metaphysics. In both cases what is in ques-
tion is compelling because it forces us to acknowledge the resistance
of the world to our will. Clearly, emotions are also the source of self-
deception, but for them to be this they must first possess evaluative
power. This power itself cannot merely be deceptive, precisely because
it is not based on our will – although our will can, in turn, have effects
on our evaluations – but rather on our encounters with aspects of the
9 This distinction is heuristic: were I to try to make it substantive I would put myself in
the position of having to develop a meta-position to adjudicate on the nature of meta-
physics. The point of the distinction is meta-philosophical, in that it asks about the aims
of philosophy as a practice.