50 music, philosophy, and modernity
form of social action, a manifestation ofGeist?^1 How would one make a
decision as to which of these descriptions of language is prior, and how
does that decision relate to the form of language in which the decision
is articulated? At what point does something become language, and at
what point does something either cease to be or fail to be language? Any
initial answer to the question of what language is will already determine
the answers to subsequent questions.
It is increasingly clear that the failure of the analytical tradition to
attain any substantial agreement on a theory of meaning has not least
to do with a failure to agree on what it is that the theory is really about.
This situation is part of what the approach I am adopting here wants
to interrogate, by seeing what happens if one does not draw a strict
line between language and music. Many of the issues that I want to
examine have to do with the relationship between two basic questions:
‘What makes a noise or mark into a word?’, and ‘What makes noises
or marks into music?’ Davidson says that ‘A creature may interact with
the world without entertaining any propositions. It may discriminate
between colours, tastes, sounds, and shapes. It may learn, that is change
its behaviour, in ways that preserve its life or increase its food intake’
(Davidson 2001 : 104 – 5 ). What makes the creature count as being able
to have thoughts is, though, its ability to discriminate between ‘what
is believed and what is the case’ (ibid.: 105 ). Plausible as this may be
for many kinds of interaction between subjects, other subjects, and the
world, the concentration on belief excludes those realms of experience
which cannot be characterised in terms of belief. Mere discrimination
between sounds does not constitute hearing or playing something as
music, where having a musical ‘thought’ can consist in playing, singing,
or writing something which might never reach the propositional level.
It could be argued that this notion of ‘thought’ lacks aboutness, and
so is merely metaphorical. On the other hand, musical thought does
not lack coherence, intelligibility, or the potential to influence other
subjects. I do not, however, wish to make an extended philosophical
case on this basis. Nietzsche and Foucault argue that the history of
science should be as interested in why things were held to be true as
in whether they were true, and something similar applies in relation to
ideas about music and language, especially if one thinks that making
1 For those who find all this too speculative, it is worth remembering J. L. Austin’s assertion
that ‘Even if some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and
much of it is still not so’ (quoted in Cavell 2005 : 152 ).