music, language, and origins 55his attempt both to give an account of the origin of language and to
describe what he sees as fundamental differences between the nature
of a language early in its history and when it has fully developed. His
concern with the latter, which is shared by Condillac and Rousseau, is
made more urgent because of his location in a country where the lan-
guage has yet to develop into a generally accepted form. Indeed, Herder
himself made substantial contributions to the formation of the German
language as we now know it. Music plays an explicit and implicit role in
both these issues.
Taylor sees Herder as inaugurating a tradition of ‘expressive’ theo-
ries that leads in the direction of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, in which
language is primarily ‘world-making’, or ‘world-disclosive’, rather than
representational.^4 The notes for and student transcriptions of Heideg-
ger’s course in 1939 on Herder’s 1772 Essay on the Origin of Language
(Essay) have recently been published (Heidegger 1999 ). It is charac-
teristic of the phenomena which I wish to highlight that in these texts
Heidegger does not once use the word music, even though music plays
an important part in Herder’s arguments. Furthermore, music plays a
decisive subterranean role in what Heidegger has to say, and this affects
his approach to Herder’s text in ways which are germane to his whole
later approach to language and metaphysics. To appreciate the issues
raised by Heidegger, which will be considered in the last part of this
chapter and in chapter 8 ,weneed first to locate Herder in relation to
other manifestations of the concern with music and language in the
eighteenth century.
In his account of French Enlightenment theories of music, Downing
A. Thomas sums up the role of music in Condillac’sEssay on the Origin of
Human Knowledge( 1746 ) and Rousseau’sEssay on the Origin of Languages
(published 1781 , possibly written 1755 ):
conceived of as a natural sign of the passions, music predates all con-
ventional language. As such, it constitutes a natural model for all rep-
resentation...and thus paves the way for the subsequent elaboration
of conventional sign systems and signifying practices... As a signifying
practice which is nonetheless still part of the natural world, a primordial
system of musical tones sets the stage for conventional language and the
culture that exists within language.
(Thomas 1995 : 9 – 10 )4 It might be fairer to give Hamann the credit for this, but the two did develop many of
their ideas in a dialogue with each other.