56 music, philosophy, and modernity
Music functions in these theories, then, as the bridge between the
non-semantic and the semantic, which are seen in terms of the nat-
ural and the cultural. As Thomas maintains, following Derrida’s argu-
ments about Rousseau inOf Grammatology, the problem of describing
the origin of language lies in describing the transition between the non-
linguistic and the linguistic. How does one use what one is seeking the
origin of to describe its own origin, without it failing to communicate
what preceded itself? Understanding a state in which language is absent
cannot be achieved within language, but stepping outside language
seems to involve transgressing the bounds of sense. What is required in
relation to the origin of language would seem to be something which
is not yet language, but is still comprehensible, and music is seen as
playing this role. Condillac and Rousseau regard verbal language as
representational and as constituted by conventions. This separates it
from a preceding, non-conventionalised ‘natural’ condition in which
‘language’ was directly connected to passions generated by the pains of
natural existence.
The transition to language in Condillac begins when the cry of some-
one in pain, or some other feeling-state, is recognised as such by some-
one else. This is the condition of possibility for language to begin to
become a convention. The vital element is the possibility of an iden-
tity being established between one token of the cry and another (this
identity is the condition of possibility of there being tokens at all). The
issue of identity is the crux of many questions to do with music and
language. Because the cry is not yet language, but is apprehended as
significant by another, it has an ‘in-between’ status, which Condillac
regards as ‘musical’. The awareness of the other’s feeling he regards,
like Rousseau, as instinctive. His argument does nothing, though, to
explain the issue that concerns thinkers from Fichte to Husserl, Sartre
and beyond, of how it is that intersubjectivity develops at all. Why does
one being begin at a certain point to interpret another being’s perceiv-
able behaviour as a sign of an internal affective or other psychological
state that cannot be perceived as such? For Condillac, as language devel-
ops, the instinctive immediacy of the sensation of something particular
is diminished in favour of grasping the thing via repeatable signs which
have no direct affective relationship to what they designate, and which
eventually become merely arbitrarily related to it.
Music thus plays a role in Condillac’s attempt to explain the problem
for empiricism of how the data of the senses can come to form repeat-
able concepts that are designated by repeatable signifiers. The data do