1 From eds J. Samson and B.

Zon, Nineteenth-century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, Ashgate 2002

Musical Meaning?
Andrew Bowie
At the end of his essay 'Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World' John McDowell asks 'how can a mere feeling constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself to us?' (McDowell 1998 p. 130), and suggests that any philosophical approach which would prevent this question being asked may for that reason be regarded as at least questionable. McDowell puts into question a view which has tended, directly or indirectly, to inform many of the dominant ways of discussing the philosophy of music in the English-speaking world. In this view philosophy's concern is to establish the Archimedean point from which the essential truth about reality can be established: once this point is established one would have 'a framework within which any philosophical reflection on the remainder of our view of reality must take place' (ibid. p. 129). This framework is, of course, the framework of the natural sciences which aim, in Bernard Williams' phrase, for an 'absolute conception' of reality, a conception in which feeling is pretty unlikely to play a decisive role. The sciences are seen in terms of their articulating the truth about the world in propositions and it is philosophy's job to clarify and articulate the nature of the languages in which these propositions are couched. In their extreme forms such approaches to language have incoherently attempted to exclude most forms of actual language-use as 'meaningless' because what they convey is not amenable to the kind of verification procedures required for scientific inquiry. As such, the result of quite a lot of philosophical reflection in this tradition has been to restrict more or less severely what can count as 'meaning', excluding much of what most people find using the word in a deliberately rather indeterminate sense 'meaningful'.

2 A characteristic off-shoot of this proposition-based approach begins considering the question of musical meaning by looking for ways in which music seems to relate to language, then adopts some existing philosophical theory of the nature of language, and, on this basis, either confirms or denies usually the latter that music is 'like a language'. This may seem the evident thing to do, but two things should give pause for thought here. The first is that the results of this procedure are often startlingly arid. This can already be suggested by the relative lack of interest in these results on the part of many musicians and listeners who are otherwise intellectually fascinated by music, and by the fact that both the cast-list of philosophers of music in this tradition, and their agenda of questions, have been remarkably small, though there are signs of this now changing, one of which is Roger Scruton's recent book (Scruton 1997). In the main, though, serious historical questions are, as we shall see, largely ignored in this tradition, being dealt with only to the extent to which they may offer resources for questions about music of a non-historical kind. The second, related point is that the initial assumption of this approach already precludes much of what is significant about the question of philosophy and music, because its grounding idea is that philosophy is going to tell us what music is and is not, and what music can and cannot do. What, though, and it is this which interests me most here, of the idea that music may be able to 'tell' philosophy a thing or two, for instance concerning how to approach what cannot be said but which yet demands articulation? The obvious objection to this is that what music tells us about philosophy will have in the end to be stated propositionally. However, this may be begging the question, because it will presumably only be those aspects of music which are amenable to propositional articulation that can be definitively dealt with in this manner. Given the fact that in the modern period music has often been regarded as significant precisely because of what it says or does that verbal language does not, the objection begins to look at least debatable. It looks even more debatable when the link between music and poetry is made in the manner which began with Romanticism. There is, for example,

3 widespread agreement that cashing out the meaning of a poem in propositional terms fails to articulate what is so significant about 'these words in these positions' (Wittgenstein). Gadamer makes the essential point as follows: 'The word of everyday and as well of scientific and philosophical discourse points to something and disappears itself as something temporary behind what it shows. The poetic word on the other hand itself appears in its showing and, as it were, stands still.' (Gadamer 1993 p. 19). Stephen Davies who is part of the Anglo-American analytical tradition referred to above, does not even have the terms poetry or literature in the index of his book Musical Meaning and Expression, and he thereby exemplifies a key deficit in the analytical approach suggested by Gadamer's remark. One can also question the assumption that the adoption of conceptions from the analytical philosophy of language is the appropriate initial move in the philosophy of music on the grounds that this aspect of the AngloAmerican tradition of philosophy has anyway increasingly attenuated its earlier claims to be able give a theory of meaning. It has done so to the point where the distinguished American semanticist Donald Davidson has famously asserted that 'there is no such thing as a language ... if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed' (in ed. Lepore 1986 p. 446) namely an identifiable entity the discovery of whose rules will give us the method for explaining the meanings of utterances. If we adopt Davidson's claim it clearly becomes rather hard to argue about whether music is 'like a language' because both terms of the comparison cease to be strictly definable. One way of suggesting the difficulty here is that in actual language use much of the working of language has to do precisely with elements which many analytical philosophers of language never even mention. Schleiermacher, who was himself in many ways an analytical philosopher of language avant la lettre, was fully apprised of these elements which his successors ignore, as the following remarks from 180910 suggest: 'language as a totality of tones is a musical system. The musical element also has an effect in every utterance, and as this effectiveness has a different

4 basis from that of the significant, they can come into conflict with each other' (Schleiermacher 1998 p. 238). Elsewhere he asserts that 'Language also has, along with the logical value of the word, a musical value, this is the rhythmic and the euphonic. If something is added in a period because of the rhythm then this does not, of course, have the same logical value as something else which is necessary in the context of thoughts: logically it comes closer to redundancy' (ibid. p. 83). The vital point is that language must be seen in terms of both the 'musical' and the 'logical', so that what is redundant in a purely scientific piece of language may be the source of the significance of a literary utterance, a significance which has something to do with its 'musicality'. Gadamer suggests the point of the hermeneutic attention to these dimensions of language as follows: 'The word which one says or which is said to one is not the grammatical element of a linguistic analysis, which can be shown in concrete phenomena of language acquisition to be secondary in relation, say, to the linguistic melody of a sentence' (Gadamer 1986 p. 196). The essential question here can be summed up by the hermeneutic contention that if understanding is ontologically prior to explanation one cannot then use explanation to explain understanding. Unless we have some prior ways of understanding the world we would never even be able to learn rules for understanding an utterance because we would not understand what it is to learn a rule at all. I do not, incidentally, mean to suggest by this that we consciously learn rules, just that a regress is entailed by the attempt to ground understanding in the learning of rules: what rule does one use to learn a rule in the first place? These ways of understanding were what led Kant to the notion of 'schematism', the non rule-bound ability to form and grasp concepts at all, in order to avoid a regress of rules for rules that would render all understanding impossible. Schematism is, then, the ability to apprehend identity in difference, to apprehend something as something, which, as we will see, is vital for an account of musical meaning. There are, then, two crude but useful ways of thinking about the object of investigation in both the philosophy of music and the philosophy of language. One is to

5 assume that there is a 'fact of the matter' which is 'out there', in the way there may be in the case of the physical sciences how, though, could we establish in a non-circular manner that there is? so that one's account will 'represent' or 'correspond to' what is already present. Such a world, as Peter Strawson has rather cruelly put it, would have to consist of 'sentence-shaped items' that can correspond to what Richard Rorty terms 'Nature's Own Language'. The other is to assume that the relationship between the subjective and the objective cannot be described in such terms because there is no definitive way of stepping outside our involvement with the object in question in order to separate what we, in Kant's sense, 'spontaneously' contribute to the object, and what we receive from the object. On the basis of this assumption one gives up the idea that the ultimate means of access to truth is the correspondence of sentences to what is already the case and accepts that all kinds of articulation may give access to what matters in the world, because the world consists of more than 'sentence-shaped items'. As such, the world therefore also involves aspects which the first view would regard as merely subjective, such as feelings or, remembering Heidegger, moods. This is echoed in the fact that language itself involves 'the musical', not just as an optional extra, but as something which can affect both how something is understood and what effect it has on its recipient. Mapped onto questions often asked in the philosophy of music this difference is echoed in the difference between two kinds of theories. The first kind asks whether music is able to re-present the world in the same kind of ways as language supposedly does. The second suggests that the model of language as representation of what is already there itself renders much of our understanding of the world incomprehensible, because it is impossible, as Schleiermacher already showed in the 1810's, definitively to separate out what the world contributes and what we contribute to truth and meaning. Consequently the representation model cannot be used to explain music's possession or lack of meaning either. Peter Kivy offers a characteristic example of the kind of assumptions involved in the first position when he says of Beethoven's Eroica

6 Symphony that 'it has no content to reveal, no message to decode', and that in the teaching of the work 'few instructors, trained in the modern analytical and musicological traditions as they are, will be tempted to attribute any meaning to it' (Kivy 1993 p. 29), it being, 'in a sense', 'pure contentless abstract form' (ibid. p. 30). The sort of meaning it has mistakenly been supposed to have Kivy talks about as being expressed in terms involving representation of 'God and goodness' (ibid.), or, in another essay, in terms of the emotions either of the composer or the listener. Clearly this kind of attribution of meaning cannot be an adequate response to the question of what the Eroica might mean, but one has to say that Kivy hardly alights on the most likely candidates for its meaning. Even if the Eroica makes no assertions about the end of feudalism and the concomitant liberation of human possibilities of combining order and free invention it would be an impoverished conception of how we might understand the world that denied that this music could function as a metaphor of these aspects of early modernity which cannot simply be replaced by the kind of historical clichs I have just employed. In this latter view the Eroica can indeed articulate dimensions of the experience of modernity via which McDowell's 'mere feeling' may well 'constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself to us', in this case by articulating the dynamism which results from the realisation of the possibilities inherent in new forms of combination of musical material that are unfettered by existing conventions governing the scale and complexity of musical composition. It seems a good idea, therefore, to leave open more space than Kivy does for what musical meaning might be, given the resources of metaphor which we employ nearly all the time not just in relation to music to get in touch with what cannot be simply cashed out into literal assertions. The same point was suggested earlier in relation to poetry. While allowing a significantly greater leeway and offering many important suggestions for the ways in which metaphor is necessarily involved in reflection on the meaning of music, Roger Scruton still makes the analytical claim that 'Language is essentially an information carrying medium, intelligible in principle for

7 every rational being, and governed by rules which organise a finite vocabulary into a potential infinity of sentences. It is not obvious that any of those things is true of music' (Scruton 1997 p. 172). It is, though, also not obvious that the primary function of language is the carrying of information, rather than, as the hermeneutic and pragmatist traditions would have it, the enabling of orientation in the world or the enabling of human co-existence; the latter, for example, does not rely solely on the informational, but rather on the performative aspects of language, aspects that can often depend on the tone, rhythm and degree of emphasis of utterances, all of which belong to the 'musical' rather than the 'logical' aspect of language. Rather a lot turns here, of course, on what one takes 'meaning' to be. Heidegger famously suggests in Being and Time that 'words accrue to meanings', because what we understand when we understand is the world we inhabit, not sentences about states of affairs, or whatever. If we therefore take 'meaning' to be what we understand when we understand, it becomes unclear how this understanding could emerge solely via rules, not least because that would explain neither language acquisition nor how new forms of understanding emerge in relation to new aspects of the world, which can be relatively unproblematically accounted for when we think in terms of the need for new forms of interaction with the world. The limits of what is implied by the representational, rule-based view are easy to make apparent. Any new metaphor clearly cannot be understood in terms of the existing rules of a language, even though it will usually obey syntactic rules, because it would then simply be an old metaphor or a piece of literal usage for the linguistic community in question. In the view I want to suggest we therefore need a much more open-textured sense of the relationship between language and the world, that does not ignore those kinds of understanding which question the idea that meaning can be reduced to what we know when we know the conditions under which sentences are true. Such an approach might then begin to answer McDowell's question of how a feeling can 'constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself to us'.

8 The meaninglessness of the Eroica in Kivy's terms results from the fact that it has no 'content'. Content here means semantic content, which is what we understand when we understand a proposition. If it were the case that we could give a convincing account of such understanding we could, as Kivy wishes to, keep straightforward divisions between semantic and non-semantic forms of articulation, and music would be meaningless although, as he says elsewhere, it may still have 'expressive properties'. Matters are, though, not that straightforward, even in relation to semantics. Scruton claims in a discussion of the difference of metaphor from literal meaning that 'In understanding a literal sentence, I acquire a grasp of its truth-conditions' (ibid. p. 85). However, the problem with this is that the truth conditions of a literal sentence must be stated in further sentences, leading to a regress of statements of truth conditions for the truth conditions of the truth conditions, and so on. Now it is either the case that, as hermeneutics and Davidson's 'principle of charity' suggest, we do understand the world and what is said about it in languages we have acquired most of the time, or it is the case that we therefore never really understand because of the regress of truth conditions. Given the implausibility of the latter assumption it must be the case that meaning in the sense just suggested is not constituted solely by grasping truth conditions, so that understanding is indeed not reducible to explanation. Furthermore, the strict distinction Scruton wishes to draw between metaphor and literal meaning is also put into question by the suspicion that the line between literal meaning and metaphor is not a stable one, because we cannot exhaustively specify what any utterance can mean what its truth conditions are if it is used in a new context. History tells us that metaphors literalise themselves and literal meanings become metaphorical: how do we decide which comes first and where the line is to be drawn, if we accept that meanings change as the world does? What, for example, is the literal meaning of the term 'music'? Davidson, who admittedly insists that the only 'meaning' a word can have is its literal meaning because he thinks meaning in this restrictive sense is given in terms of

9 truth conditions claims that 'the endless character of what we call the paraphrase of a metaphor springs from the fact that it attempts to spell out what the metaphor makes us notice, and to this there is no clear end. I would say the same for any use of language' (Davidson 1984 p. 263). If one can notice more than states of affairs that can be represented in propositions it would seem to be the case that music can make one notice aspects of moods, feelings, temporality, landscape, or, even, in some cases, states of affairs for instance via the effects of film music on what one understands in a film that may not even be expressible in propositions. Indeed, music may first enable certain ways of being to become accessible at all, as suggested in Heidegger's pupil Heinrich Besseler's remark that 'musical rhythm would generally relate to the manner in which we "are there at all" and "move", to a certain "temporal" basic character of our existence' (Besseler 1978 p. 67). We presumably would not teach children music and dance if we did not think that their world gained in meaning via this kind of activity, and there is plenty of evidence to show that children's verbal, cognitive and orientational abilities are improved by familiarity with music. Kivy's claim about the Eroica, which he generalises into a view of the meaning of all 'absolute music', is, then, that a 'syntactic' form should not be interpreted in semantic or representational terms. In one rather obvious sense this will be correct, if we assume that semantics functions solely in terms of language as representation. By limiting the question of meaning in this way, though, vital questions about the nature and role of context in understanding are obscured. In the wake of Wittgenstein's famous remark that 'Understanding a sentence in language is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one thinks' (Wittgenstein 1971 p. 227), Rom Harr has suggested in relation to Susanne Langer's idea that words have 'fixed connotations' that 'the contextuality of the significance of the musical sign is not enough sharply to distinguish language from music' (ed. Krausz 1993 p. 209), because context, which precludes fixed connotation, is necessary for the functioning of both words and music. If context is inseparable from meaning a musical performance can even, albeit in a not very

10 interesting manner, be said to 'refer', or perform a 'speech act' when it signals a conventionally accepted significance or practice. The interesting point here is that historical shifts in the understanding of music, like the development of the idea of 'absolute music' at the end of the 18th century, can only be understood to be as significant as they evidently were to many people in the modern period if we have ways in which to characterise what the music meant which do not see such attributions of significance merely as mistaken projections onto what is inherently meaningless. This clearly has to do with the ways in which conventions and their transgressions are interpreted in historical contexts. To put it in the most brutal and somewhat unfair terms: it is just not good enough, for example, to say that if the Nazis had possessed the supposedly correct theory of musical meaning i.e. that it has none they would not have needed to ban 'entartete Musik' and other music by Jewish composers. If a philosophy of music has no more to say about such issues than that, it really does have little claim on anybody's attention. The important question is, of course, why the Nazis attributed this kind of meaning to music. It may very well be in part the result of preceding bad theories of musical meaning, but all this means, for the time being at least, is that we also need to understand why those theories developed, and why the Nazis adopted them. This would, however, appear to lead to another regress. One of the most important ideas of Beethoven's contemporaries, the German Romantics, was, though, as Schleiermacher put it, that 'Beginning in the middle is unavoidable' (Schleiermacher 1988 p. 105). In the present context this means that philosophical approaches to music cannot begin by establishing the correct theory and then proceed to look at the historical failures that preceded the true theory, because they can never claim an extra-historical vantage point for themselves that is free of the 'prejudices', in Gadamer's sense of background assumptions that cannot be exhaustively thematised, which we must always rely on to understand anything as music in the first place. Now a further suspicion lurking in both Kivy's and Scruton's approaches is that acceptance of a version, or in Scruton's more

11 differentiated case, the wrong version of a theory of musical meaning will lead to the downgrading of musical analysis by reducing music to ideology. I think the opposite can be the case, but this will only be so if the parameters of analysis are extended by a new kind of understanding which tries to move beyond the identification of whatever elements the particular form of musical analysis sees as appropriate, to contextual questions about the signifying power such elements had in their initial context, had in subsequent historical contexts, and can have for us now. How, then, do I propose to articulate the meaning of the Eroica? Not surprisingly, I have no definitive answer to this, but some points of orientation do seem possible and I think some useful questions arise from what I have said so far. The first point is simple: part of the meaning of the Eroica is now, like it or not, what it has been said to mean in the time since its first appearance. The idea that one can listen in a manner free of these preconceptions is, as Gadamer suggests, a myth: 'We never find ourselves in the situation of being the pure contemplator of or listener to a work of art, for in a certain sense we are always participants in the transmission. The aim of grasping the inner structure and the connectedness of a work is, as such, not sufficient to remove all the prejudices which stem from the fact that we are ourselves within a tradition' (Gadamer 1996 p. 30). One part of such a tradition is, of course, Kivy's assertion about the Eroica, which is itself only meaningful as a rejection of attempts to give the work semantic content, in the same way as Hanslick could only insist on 'the purely musical' because some previous understandings of music had not. Had the claim to semantic content never been made one assumes the insistence that a work means nothing would be merely redundant. It is possible to say in this sense that one aspect of the work's meaning is usefully characterised precisely in terms of the disagreements themselves as to whether it means anything at all: otherwise the phenomenon of the rise of 'absolute music' would be rendered merely trivial. After all, not every artefact matters enough for it to continue to generate this kind of widespread conflicting attention, and the lack of any explicit verbal indications of meaning within the work is

12 evidently an important part of its historical significance, as the eruption of words into the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth would subsequently make apparent. The danger here is clearly a subjectivism, of which Kivy is rightly suspicious, which allows the work to mean whatever anyone thinks it does. However, this suspicion can easily be exaggerated, for fear of the 'pink elephant theory' of literary interpretation, the theory which claims that, given the essentially non-referential nature of the literary, there are no grounds for denying the claims of someone who thinks that Hamlet is actually about pink elephants. One crucial aspect of the understanding of music and other art in modernity does indeed lie in the fact that art is seen as being able to liberate the imagination from the need to think merely in terms of conceptual determination, allowing the capacity of 'schematism' to work freely in ways that are restricted in other areas of human life. This does not, though, obviate the demand that any claim resulting from that freedom should be at least potentially able to be legitimated to others. Kant talked of the 'aesthetic idea' as 'the representation of the imagination which gives much to think about, but without any ... concept being able to be adequate to it, which consequently no language can completely attain and make comprehensible' (Kant 1977 p. 193). Kant himself did not appreciate that music can constitute such a representation, but his successors did, and their arguments have yet to be adequately understood. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, extended the idea of what 'no language can completely attain' to truth itself: 'Absolute truth cannot be admitted; and this is the testimony for the freedom of thought and of spirit. If absolute truth were found then the business of spirit would be completed and it would have to cease to be, since it only exists in activity' (Schlegel 1991 p. 93). For the Romantics music actually becomes analogous to the world in general Schlegel talks of the 'endless play of the world' as 'the work of art which constantly forms itself' (Schlegel 1988 2 p. 206), and Schelling, in his 1802-3 Philosophy of Art, talks of music as 'nothing but the heard rhythm and the harmony of the visible universe' (Schelling 1854 I/5. p. 329). These claims are perhaps not as mad or hyperbolic as they might sound. The 'rhythm' of the

13 universe lies in the fact that for there to be any order in the universe we must be able to render different aspects of it identical, in the way that differing beats of a rhythm require us to link them together for them to be a rhythm at all, rather than random noises. We do much the same, as Kant suggested, in forming new concepts, and language itself clearly relies on rhythm in this sense. Once we start to think in these sorts of terms the question of musical meaning becomes much more interesting, though less amenable to a philosophical theory that would simply 'answer the question'. Now these latter remarks may seem desperately vague and lacking in academic rigour, but there is a deeper issue here that can be approached via a central aspect of Kivy's claims. When Kivy attributes identifiable 'expressive properties' to music, so that sadness, joy etc., are 'heard musical properties' (Kivy 1993 p. 358), one assumes that these are supposed really to 'be there' in the music and that the correct understanding of the music occurs when one grasps these properties. To hear music as 'sad' does not require us to feel sad when we hear it; instead we understand it as being sad by being aware of its having that expressive property. However, this approach seems likely to give one merely an inventory of what Kivy himself calls the 'garden variety' emotions that can be heard in the music, along with whatever musical analysis may tell us about its structure, etc. This, though, gives us very little purchase on the experience of engaging with the Eroica, which constantly brings one back to the work, only to hear it differently, be it in terms of its perceived internal structures or of the way it articulates moods and emotions, or whatever, let alone giving us any purchase on the history of the effect of the Eroica on subsequent musical practice and its social significance. The problem with philosophical claims like Kivy's lies in the question of 'properties'. At least since Locke philosophers have failed to agree on exactly what difference there is between primary qualities of things, which are independent of any subjective experience, and secondary qualities, which are not. I have no intention of getting further involved here with the discussion of whether we might, as Rorty suggests, drop the distinction, because all we are generally sure about is that some ways

14 of talking about things are more effective than others, or whether we should hold onto it, because it gives us purchase on the 'absolute conception' though it is probably apparent where my sympathies lie. The real trouble in the present context is that if one decides that something really is a certain kind of property on the basis of a philosophical theory of properties this will already dictate the answer to the question of the meaning of music, and it is this, as I suggested at the outset, that I think is the important mistake. I think so because the initial basis of the investigation already determines the possible results, so that we cannot learn anything substantial from music that we did not already assume was there via our prior philosophical conception. This, of course, has fairly devastating consequences for the very idea of a 'philosophy of music', and I think this would be a good thing. One of the main effects of the dominant analytical tradition of music philosophy has, as many people now realise, been to impoverish debate about music by its obsession with the restriction of permissible ways of discussing music. The simple rejoinder to my complaint is, of course, that the circularity I have identified will be present in any approach to music indeed, I suggested as much myself in the claim that one can only explain what one has already understood in some manner. The difference is that the hermeneutic position I wish to advance sees this circularity as a reason not to think philosophical approaches to the meaning of music could arrive at a theory which would definitively settle the issue. So what does this hermeneutic alternative look like in practice? One person who, albeit with very mixed success, attempted to work out a way of approaching the meaning of the Eroica was T.W. Adorno in his never completed book on Beethoven. In his initial methodological reflections Adorno takes up what I have touched on via the notion of schematism:

The 'play' of music is play with logical forms as such, of positing, identity, similarity, contradiction, whole, part, and the concretion of music is essentially the power with which these forms articulate themselves in the

15 material, in the notes. (...) The threshold between music and logic does not therefore lie with the logical elements, but rather with their specific logical synthesis, the judgement. Music does not know judgement, but rather a synthesis of a different kind, a synthesis which constitutes itself purely from the constellation [i.e. the particular configuration of musical material], not from the predication, subordination, subsumption of its elements. The synthesis also stands in relation to truth, but to a completely different truth from apophantic truth (...) The reflections would have to terminate in a definition like Music is the logic of judgementless synthesis (Adorno 1993 p. 32).

Adorno's work on Beethoven is infuriating because, having assured us that music does not judge, he then proceeds to argue that the Eroica and other 'affirmative' middle works of Beethoven (and the Ninth Symphony) are enactments of the same process of the reduction of the world to what we think about it as Hegel's idealist system of philosophy, which he regards as the paradigm case of philosophy's arrogation to itself of the right to judge 'that's how it is'. However, even in the midst of some of his most irritating claims about music and philosophy, Adorno also manages to suggest how the ongoing ability of each to reveal the inadequacies of the other constitutes the best framework for philosophical discussion of musical meaning. Whatever may be said against this conception it has the significant virtue of giving musicians more reasons to talk to philosophers than has been the case during most of the history of the English-language analytical philosophy of music. If this dialogue is to prosper English-language philosophers will have to widen the scope of their researches by engaging with the wealth of philosophical resources in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy for showing how feeling can 'constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself to us'. They could begin by looking at the

16 Romantic tradition that produced the following remark, from Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on philosophy of 18045:

Now if feeling is the root of all consciousness, then the direction of language [towards cognition] has the essential deficit that it does not grasp and comprehend feeling deeply enough, only touches its surface ... However large the riches language offers us for our purpose, however much it can be developed and perfected as a means of representation and communication, this essential imperfection must be overcome in another manner, and communication and representation must be added to; and this happens through music which is, though, here to be regarded less as a representational art than as philosophical language, and really lies higher than mere art. Every effort to find a general philosophical language had to remain unsuccessful because one did not touch on the fundamental mistake of philosophical experiments with language. Feeling and wishing often go far beyond thinking; music as inspiration, as the language of feeling, which excites consciousness in its well-spring, is the only universal language (Schlegel 1964 p. 57).

For more extended versions of my arguments see Bowie (1993), (1997), (1999),

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