music, language, and origins 57so, he thinks, by a process of erosion, in which sensuous immediacy is
lost as the determinacy of the concept is established by the exclusion
of particularity. This model plays a vital role in eighteenth-century con-
ceptions of language and beyond. In its original state the imagination
is seen as possessing a vividness which is diminished as the other dimen-
sions of thought develop. Conceptual language develops at the expense
of the affective and creative dimensions of the imagination: ‘persons
not as yet accustomed to instituted signs, have the liveliest imagina-
tion’ (Condillac 2002 : 123 ). What Condillac terms the ‘language of
action’ (ibid.), by which he means the gestures which accompany pain
etc., and in which he includes dance, becomes the language of words,
and so weakens the imaginative power which motivates the former. As
Thomas puts it: ‘Force is lost for truth; passions give way to analysis’
(Thomas 1995 : 81 ).
Given Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s opposition to empiricism, it might
seem odd, but this model of the relationship between the identity insti-
tuted by the sign and the resultant loss of sensuous particularity will
play a role in their work (and many who are influenced by them).
Both, moreover, regard this process as fundamental to their criticisms
of empiricism and of aspects of the Enlightenment. The question is
whether this kind of model can still be used in this manner if the
borderline between the sensuous and the conceptual cannot be char-
acterised in the manner it is here. The idea of an initial immediacy,
of ‘sensuous particularity’, which is lost via conceptual thinking, is a
version of what Wilfrid Sellars calls the ‘myth of the given’, the idea
of self-authenticating experiences which do not rely on their relation-
ships to anything else for their significance. The idea that this initial
immediacy is a myth leads to the further question as to whether music’s
role in modernity is therefore to compensate for something lost, or
whether this conception itself relies on a nostalgia for a mythical original
state.
Rousseau is famous for the way in which he links the origin of lan-
guage to music: ‘the first languages were sung (‘chantantes’) and pas-
sionate before being simple and methodical’ (Rousseau 1990 : 67 ).
Language is not generated by natural needs, but by human emotions.
Needs give rise to ‘gestures’, passions to ‘voices’, and it is the voice
that is essential for music. Without the existence of language there can
therefore be no music, although the real nature of the division between
the two is by no means easy to specify in these terms. Like Condillac,
Rousseau sees the historical move of language away from its sensuous