60 music, philosophy, and modernity
Rorty never mentions music in discussing these issues, and a dimen-
sion may therefore be lacking in his account. The fact that the
historical move towards non-representational conceptions of language
is often closely linked to reflection on music can, I want to argue,
affect the understanding of the consequences of adopting a non-
representationalist view of language. Music is evidently not ‘an instru-
ment for expressing beliefs’ in the representational sense Rorty intends
by this description, but is seeing it in terms of ‘reactions to the stimuli
provided by the behaviour of other humans’ the best way of understand-
ing its significance? For Rorty there ought presumably to be scope for
including music as part of what we can think of as language in the
broadest sense. The kind of line we draw between music and non-
music is therefore not the same as the one representationalists draw
between language and non-language. However, the behaviourist vocab-
ulary of stimulus and reaction does not sit easily with Rorty’s talk
elsewhere of the central importance of the creative imagination in
opposing the idea of thinking as representation of a pre-given order.
The spectrum between a reaction to a stimulus and an imaginative
response to something which can change the very nature of what
one is responding to requires more differentiation than Rorty some-
times offers. It is in this respect that the link to music of the develop-
ment of alternatives to representational theories of language becomes
significant. Herder’s elaboration of an ‘expressive conception’ is
illuminating here.
Music, language, and reasonEstablishing the link between ideas about the origin of language, and
music depends on something that can articulate a pre-linguistic state as
itself, rather than as a necessarily indeterminate negation of what can
be said. Music seems an obvious candidate for the role of articulating
what is prior to language, but this can lead in some questionable direc-
tions. Rorty’s version of anti-representationalism offers one way around
the problem of attempting to speak of what cannot be said. Does Rorty,
though, give any real grip on how music can be approached in prag-
matic terms?
The early Wittgenstein pondered the idea of music as a means for
articulating something which could not be described, namely how
propositions ‘picture’ reality on the basis of underlying structures
of intelligibility which allow for translation between different forms