MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

2 Music, language, and the origins of modernity

Language and modernity

The contrast between two notional kinds of ‘metaphysics’ adumbrated
in theprevious chaptercan be understood as another way of charac-
terising the tension between a ‘positivist’, science-oriented, conception
of modern philosophy, and a ‘Romantic’ conception which is oriented
towards what the arts reveal that the sciences cannot. This tension is
too often seen in rigid terms, and I want to develop a more nuanced
version of it via the issue of music. In thelast chapterI employed the
notion of metaphysics 2 to suggest ways of rehabilitating the claim that
philosophy should be concerned with the idea of what constitutes a
meaningful world, without falling back into no longer defensible, ‘dog-
matic’ theological or metaphysical conceptions of meaning. Part of this
rehabilitation relies, though, precisely on the possibility that it is when
the limits of philosophy become apparent that other means of reveal-
ing meaning in the world, like music, may become most significant.
The resistance of what is manifest in terms of metaphysics 2 to the terms
of metaphysics 1 suggests both new possibilities and instructive difficul-
ties. The initial difficulty is that any positive explanatory assertion about
these kinds of meaning has to take one in the direction of metaphysics 1 ,
even though metaphysics 1 does not offer resources for meaning of the
kind that form the focus of metaphysics 2. This also implies, however,
that the discursive demands of many kinds of philosophy cannot be
fulfilled by the resources of metaphysics 2.
The result is a tension between the ‘sayable’ and the ‘unsayable’.
This tension should, however, not be thought of as between two sides
which are wholly separate from each other. Any attempt to characterise
either as a whole would just be another form of metaphysics 1 , which

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