44 music, philosophy, and modernity
make life meaningful by responding to the fact that the world exists
at all as something intelligible. Music, in contrast, seems to have to
do with the latter, but this cannot be propositionally stated. One way
of interpreting Wittgenstein’s gnomic remarks is in the light of the
widespread sense today that philosophy has not succeeded in explain-
ing scientific knowledge by epistemological reflection. Whereas very
few scientists seriously disagree, for example, about key aspects of the
theory of quantum mechanics, because of its proven predictive capacity,
few philosophers agree about how to explain the success of the theory.
This could suggest that meta-reflections on the nature and history of
the epistemological enterprise may now offer perspectives which work-
ing predominantly within epistemology does not. The propositions of
natural science can be said to fulfil the demands of metaphysics 1 by
explaining how things are. The attempt to explain how it is that they
are able do so is what Wittgenstein regards as leading to ‘nonsense’.
Nonsense is, though, highly significant.
As the later Wittgenstein will contend, it is primarily aspracticeswhich
enable successful prediction and control that the natural sciences have
come to play the irreplaceable role they do in modernity. Sceptical
objections to the forms of validation applicable in the sciences simply
have no grip in this respect. Thephilosophicalaim of explaining that
the sciences are good at predicting because, for example, their propo-
sitions ‘correspond to reality’ leads, on the other hand, to scepticism-
threatening dilemmas concerning the explanation of the notion of cor-
respondence. So what does this tell us about music and philosophy?
Music is also first and foremost a human practice, with an enormously
diverse number of manifestations and significances, which is, in many
respects, self-legitimating, because it is part of what it is to be human.
If one suspects that the ‘philosophy of music’, in the sense I wish to
question, faces at least as many difficulties as the kind of ‘philosophy of
science’ that tends to lead to scepticism, what is the concrete alternative
for thinking about philosophy’s relationship to music?
In the light of the approach I have begun to sketch, the initial premise
is, we have seen, that it is no good just looking at the matter from the
side of philosophy, as though philosophy had already legitimated itself
by producing convincing theories which can then be applied to music.
Whatever one thinks of the philosophical enterprise – whether one
thinks it has come to an end as far as the forms it has taken since
the Greeks are concerned, or thinks that the pursuit of the regula-
tive idea of solving major philosophical problems is an ever-developing