Language and modernity

The contrast between two notional kinds of ‘metaphysics’ adumbrated in the previous chapter can be understood as another way of characterising the tension between a ‘positivist’, science-oriented, conception of modern philosophy, and a ‘Romantic’ conception which is oriented towards what the arts reveal that the sciences cannot. This tension is too often seen in rigid terms, and I want to develop a more nuanced version of it via the issue of music. In the last chapter I employed the notion of metaphysics to suggest ways of rehabilitating the claim that philosophy should be concerned with the idea of what constitutes a meaningful world, without falling back into no longer defensible, ‘dogmatic’ theological or metaphysical conceptions of meaning. Part of this rehabilitation relies, though, precisely on the possibility that it is when the limits of philosophy become apparent that other means of revealing meaning in the world, like music, may become most significant. The resistance of what is manifest in terms of metaphysics to the terms of metaphysics suggests both new possibilities and instructive difficulties. The initial difficulty is that any positive explanatory assertion about these kinds of meaning has to take one in the direction of metaphysics, even though metaphysics does not offer resources for meaning of the kind that form the focus of metaphysics. This also implies, however, that the discursive demands of many kinds of philosophy cannot be fulfilled by the resources of metaphysics.

The result is a tension between the ‘sayable’ and the ‘unsayable’. This tension should, however, not be thought of as between two sides which are wholly separate from each other.