48 music, philosophy, and modernity
Looking at how music plays a role in these responses can suggest ways of
examining the limits both of philosophy and of scientific explanation.
The question which then arises concerns the status of music, philoso-
phy, and science, if none of them can be given the grounding role in
relation to the others.
In Heidegger’s story of metaphysics 1 the activity of the subject in
scientific investigation becomes the ground of all truth, and this can
lead to the scientistic claim that all questions must ultimately come
into the realm of the sayable by being given scientific explanations.
Heidegger’s alternative to this conception will concern us in more detail
later, and much of it depends on his understanding of language. Tracing
elements of the tradition of reflection on language to which Heidegger
belongs can therefore bring to light a recurrent connection to music
which has too rarely been taken into account by many philosophers.
Philosophers’ conceptions of music are often rather uncritically derived
from the dominant theoretical assumptions about music of their period.
This means that it is not necessarily when philosophers directly address
music that it plays the most important role in their conceptions. Instead
it is often when they examine the nature of language or investigate
epistemological questions that the role of music can be more decisive.
Language’s new role in philosophy in the second half of the
eighteenth century has been much discussed (see, e.g., Bowie 1997 ,
2003 a; Foucault 1970 ). What has less often been discussed is the sig-
nificance of how this role connects to the new understandings of music
in this period. The decisive factor is thatit ceases to be clear what lan-
guage is.Atthe same time the significance and nature of music itself
changes, so that it is no longer clear what music is either. This con-
junction relates to the wider sense in modernity that the world can no
longer be seen to be ‘ready-made’: previous ontological assumptions,
including ones about the nature of humankind itself, become open
to question. The continuing debate in certain areas of the analytical
philosophy of music about whether music is a language is therefore a
symptom of a wider historical issue. The debate can best be approached
by considering the interactions between differing forms of expression
and articulation which occur in differing cultural contexts, rather than
by seeking a definitive answer to the ‘philosophical’ question of what a
language is.
The scientific revolution increasingly takes over questions about how
and what things are by establishing laws of nature based on empir-
ical observation and mathematical calculation. One consequence of