38 music, philosophy, and modernity
music in contexts where the supposed original occasion for the practice
is absent.
Objections to scientistic visions of the future need not, then, be
couched in terms of the damage such visions do to our self-esteem.
John McDowell sees the problem with scientism as follows: ‘When we ask
the metaphysical question whether reality is what science can find out
about, we cannot, without begging the question, restrict the materials
for an answer to those that science can countenance’ (McDowell 1998 :
72 ). Moreover, it is not clear that the description of what we understand
in terms of intentional vocabulary in terms of non-intentionally con-
ceived causes of intentional states is intelligible at all (see Farrell 1996 ).
Whatever we find out about the brain and cognition is at a different
level from what we experience as subjects in a world. As phenomenol-
ogy maintains (see Merleau-Ponty 1945 ), the modes of attention to
the objective world, such as memory, anticipation, direct perception,
as well as affectively coloured modes of attention – which play a crucial
role in music – are not part of the objectifiable world, even if they are
also inseparable from it. This is because the very idea of objectivity is
generated by experiences of truth and falsity in intentional relations to
objects of all kinds, from chemical elements to musical notes.
The decisive issue in the present context are the relationships
between emotion, cognition, and music. These can suggest ways in
which the contemporary significance of what is considered under the
heading of ‘metaphysics’ is not exhausted by Heidegger’s story. Anthony
Cascardi has claimed that ‘Feeling nonetheless remains cognitive in a
deeper sense; affect possesses what Heidegger would describe...as
“world-disclosive” power’ (Cascardi 1999 : 50 – 1 ). Wolfram Hogrebe sug-
gests, linking the idea to music, that ‘In feelings... everything is already
wordlessly full of meaning.’ Hogrebe characterises this kind of mean-
ing in terms of a ‘pre-linguistic existential semantics’ that is present in
‘Stimmung’, ‘mood’, or ‘attunement’ to the world (Hogrebe 1996 : 10 ).
InPhilosophical Investigations,after passages exploring the close rela-
tionship between understanding sentences and understanding phrases
in music, Wittgenstein says: ‘If longing speaks out of me “If only he
would come!” the feeling gives the words “meaning”’ (Wittgenstein
1984 : 444 ), and he wonders at the fact that part of the very semantics
of such utterances depends on feeling.
It is the idea of this world-disclosive, intersubjective power that leads
in the direction of a possible alternative interpretation of the signifi-
cance and fate of metaphysics in relation to music. If what is disclosed