form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 43Music is essentially particular and yet is also connected to general ideas
and emotions that are part of living in a world which is intelligible in
ways that cannot be reduced to what can be said about those ways. This is
what makes music’s relationship to philosophy so significant for certain
thinkers in modernity.
At the same time, however, an apparent paradox emerges here. In
terms of the dominant assumption of modern scientific method, the
success of an analytical philosophy of music would be measured by the
extent to which it explains the phenomena which are its object. To
this extent such a theory can be understood in terms of metaphysics 1 ,
although this leaves it open to the problems I have outlined. The
inversion I have proposed is undertaken in order to explore how an
alternative vision of metaphysics and meaning can seek resources in
what cannot be explained and in what can only be revealed by specific
engagement with a phenomenon or a practice which resists wholesale
discursive explanation. The problem for anytheoristseeking to explore
‘the unsayable’ is obvious, and was already indicated by Wittgenstein’s
self-refuting stance in theTractatus.Asuccessful theory in these terms
must actually be doomed to failure by its own success, because the more
it explains, the less what it explains is revealed in a non-theoretical
manner. Metaphysics 2 would therefore begin to become metaphysics 1.
However, there can be more than one way in which talking about some-
thing can be successful. A literary response to a piece of music may do
more justice to it than a theoretical account which seeks to describe
its essential nature in technical terms. The notion ofdoing justiceto
things is central to what I have to say because it offers a way of link-
ing discursive understanding of music with the kind of non-discursive
understanding present in the performance and reception of music, and
in related aspects of human life for which music is significant. Quite
simply: one does not always do justice to something by explaining it in
general terms; there may be other kinds of response to it which bring
out its value and significance more effectively.
Towards the end of theTractatusWittgenstein says ‘Nothowthe world
is is the mystical, butthatit is’ (ibid.: 85 ), and suggests limiting philos-
ophy to what can be said, i.e. to propositions of natural science. His
philosophical questions have to be ‘overcome’ as meaningless if one is
to ‘see the world correctly’. There is a fundamental ambivalence here.
On the one hand he adheres to the demands of empirical scientific
rigour as the only way to generate meaningful propositions about how
the world is, but he also thinks that these propositions do nothing to