76 music, philosophy, and modernity
in that essay too music plays no significant role, despite the fact that it
is closer to language than other forms of art. In a thinker as thorough
as Heidegger could be, this is pretty baffling.
It is important to remember here that, at the time at which Herder
is writing his texts, the great period of German music which leads from
Haydn to Schoenberg is getting underway. Haydn begins to compose
‘wordless’ Symphonies and String Quartets which become one of the
major reasons why the perception of music changes so much by the end
of the century. R ̈udiger Safranski tells the story of Heidegger in 1944
hearing Schubert’s last piano sonata in B-flat and claiming: ‘We can-
not do that in philosophy’ (Safranski 1998 : 371 ). Assuming the story is
reliable – there are other indications that Heidegger actually thought
music very significant – he would seem to be locating music as part of
metaphysics 2. The reasons for his repression of music seem, then, to
have to do with his suspicion of the ‘subjective’ nature of emotions. My
argument in the coming chapters will therefore seek to integrate emo-
tions into the defensible aspects of Heidegger’s conception. A measure
of the historical changes to be considered in the coming chapters is
the fact that Herder would not think music like Schubert’s sonata has
such importance. For him the autonomous ‘art of notes’ derives from
a mediated version of expression whose power is actually most present
in its more immediate forms.
What emerges here are precisely the kinds of phenomena intended
by my idea of music’s resistance to philosophy. Herder’s empiricist
philosophical assumptions mean that he is unable to grasp the sig-
nificance of the autonomous music which partly emerges because of
the influence on Romanticism of other aspects of his own thought.
Heidegger, while seeming open to the ways in which music’s intelli-
gibility is part of what he is seeking, fails to come to terms with the
world-disclosive dimension of emotion in music. Now consider the fol-
lowing analogous example of the relationship between philosophical
reflection and music. Dahlhaus talks of the ‘paradox that around 1800
there was neither a classical music aesthetic to correspond to the clas-
sical music of Haydn and Mozart, nor a romantic music to correspond
to the romantic music-aesthetic of Wackenroder and Tieck. Reflec-
tion and compositional practice were widely divergent’ (Dahlhaus
1988 : 86 ). He shows that, as Tieck founds the aesthetics of ‘absolute
music’ by separating music from ‘the rhetorical and the characteristic’,
Beethoven, the composer who was to produce the real music which
gave decisive support to the idea of absolute music, thought of his works