1986 - Higgins - Nietzsche On Music

Nietzsche on Music
Author(s): Kathleen Higgins

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1986), pp. 663-672
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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NIETZSCHE ON MUSIC
BY KATHLEEN HIGGINS
Because of its power to evoke emotional responses in its listeners, music has
often been compared with language; music has been called "the language of
emotion"' and "the art of expressing sentiments and passions through the me-
dium of sound."2 These suggestive comparisons of music with language lead to
a number of more specific questions regarding the nature of music's alleged
communication of its meaning to the human soul. If music is like a language,
what kind of meaning does it convey?
In the following discussion, I shall draw attention to an aspect of Friedrich
Nietzsche's analysis of music that is relevant to the question of how music can
be said to have meaning. Nietzsche's view of music as expressed in The Birth
of Tragedy, when taken together with some of his other remarks on language
and music, involves the rather startling suggestion that we can communicate at
all only because ours is a world in which music is possible. The human capacity
to experience music, according to Nietzsche, is something like a transcendental
precondition for the possibility of language.
In order to demonstrate that Nietzsche's understanding of music does entail
these rather surprising claims, I shall begin by summarizing Nietzsche's model
of the original of language and by explaining why Dionysus stands as a symbol
for the mode of self-understanding that, according to Nietzsche, language pre-
supposes. I shall then show why Nietzsche understandsmusic as the paradigmatic
vehicle for the expression of this Dionysian mode of self-understanding.
I. Nietzsche considers the original of human language in Section 354 of The
Gay Science. There he argues that language developed along with consciousness
to facilitate the survival of the proto-humanherd animals from whom we descend.
At a certain point in evolution, and in response to dangers which threatened
the herd from without, the conscious communication of information from one
individual animal to another proved useful for the satisfaction of survival-related
needs. Nietzsche argues also that only in connection with the development of
language did human consciousness evolve. In order for the individual animal
to communicate what pained or threatened him to another, he needed to "know"
what pained or threatened him; and consciousness developed as the faculty that
could have "knowledge" of this sort. Words express what human beings "know"
consciously. But most aspects of human experience are not "known" in this
way: "We 'know' (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the
interests of the human herd, the species ...."3
'C. F. Michaelis, Ueber den Geist der Tonkunst, second essay (1800), 29, as quoted
by Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustave Cohen, ed. Morris Weitz
(New York, 1957), 17.
2 Fermo Bellini, Manuale di Musica (Milano, 1853), quoted by Hanslick, The Beautiful
in Music, 18.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix
of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), 300.
663
Copyright 1986 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.
664 KATHLEEN HIGGINS
My summary of Section 354 is even more cursory than the section itself,
and Nietzsche's account there involves considerably more assertion than argu-
ment.4 The conclusions that he draws from his sketchy discussion, however, are
important for an understanding of Nietzsche's view of the relationship between
music and language. In the first place he concludes that the human consciousness
that is often taken to be "the genius of the human species"5is a direct outgrowth
of a previous level of mentality which was entirely communal. Before the de-
velopment of language, on this account, proto-human beings were aware of
themselves only in connection with the larger herd to which they belonged. And
only because of this intimate association of each animal with every other in the
herd did language arise-it served a species need. From this Nietzsche's second
conclusion follows: that language itself is inherently social. So much is language
a social phenomenon, in fact, that the individual who attempts to express his
experience through language must subordinate the aspects of his experience that
are unique and personal to the generalized, conventional categories that specific
words label and connote.
On the basis of this overview Nietzsche concludes, thirdly, that words do
violence to the immediacy and individuality of human experience. Words can
refer only to those aspects of experience that have been made conscious, and
"all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification,
reduction to superficialities and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of con-
sciousness becomes a danger. . ."6 Nietzsche makes this same argument in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra warns that to name and describe
one's personal virtues with common words does violence to the virtue.
You would do better to say, "Inexpressible and nameless is that which gives
my soul agony and sweetness and is even the hunger of my entrails."
May your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names; and if you must
speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her.7
These conclusions will prove relevant to Nietzsche's understanding of the
relationship between language and music because they serve to establish the
basis upon which language was built. It is important that language developed
because it was useful to the herd to communicate information relevant to survival-
related needs from one animal to another. In claiming that the communication
of such information was useful, Nietzsche presupposes that the herd animals
shared the same survival-relatedneeds. One would, of course, take it for granted
that the members of any animal herd share the same essential biological char-
acteristics, but Nietzsche's point here is that it was because these proto-human
4 Nietzsche makes a similar case in his Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future, trans. Walter A. Kaufmann (New York, 1966), #268: 216-17, Werke in
Drei Baenden, ed. Karl Schlechta (3rd edition; Munich, 1965), 2: 740-41. So the brevity
of Section 354 of The Gay Science should not be viewed as an indication that Nietzsche
considered the views there in an only cursory fashion on one occasion.
5 The title of Section 354
is, in fact, "On the 'genius of the species' " ("Vom 'Genius
der Gattung' "). See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #354: 297; Schlechta, 2: 219.
6 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #354: 300; Schlechta, 2: 222.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and
ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 148; Schlechta, 2: 302.
NIETZSCHE ON MUSIC 665
beings shared essential biological characteristics that they were prompted to

develop language. And he claims further that we still develop words only for
those aspects of experience that we can assume are common to other human
beings by virtue of the fact that we are animals of the same sort, sharing the
same biological equipment in the same terrestrial environment.
Nietzsche's association of the development of language with biological needs
is evident also in a fragment of 1871 entitled "On Music and Words." There
he argues that language has two aspects: the speaker's tone and the speaker's
gesture-symbolism. The speaker's tone symbolizes "degrees of pleasure and dis-
pleasure," which in turn are "expressions of one primal cause unfathomable to
us," the universal ground of being, which Nietzsche here identifies with the
Schopenhauerianwill.8Everything besides pleasure and displeasureis symbolized
through what Nietzsche calls "gesture-symbolism." He concludes that because
pleasure and pain are expressions of the universal ground of the world, "the
tonal subsoil" is universal, "comprehensiblebeyond the difference of language."
Gesture-symbolismis more arbitrary,as is reflected in the diversity of languages:
The whole realm of the consonantal and vocal we believe we may reckon only
under gesture-symbolism:consonants and vowels without that fundamental tone
which is necessary above all else, are nothing but positions of the organ of speech,
in short, gestures-; as soon as we imagine the word proceeding out of the
mouth of man, then first of all the root of the word, and the basis of that
gesture-symbolism, the tonal subsoil, originate.9
By "tonal subsoil" and "tone" Nietzsche evidently refers to the common
pattern of pitch inflection that be believes to be recognizable in diverse language.
Whether or not such a "tonal subsoil" actually does ground all languages is
questionable; one wonders whether Nietzsche ever heard someone speaking
Hungarian, a language whose pitch inflection differs significantly from German.
And the exploitation of pitch in tonal languages such as Chinese suggests that
Nietzsche's dichotomy of a universal, tonal aspect of language and gesture-
symbolism that is unique to a particularlanguage is at best an over-simplification.
Nonetheless, even if one does not take Nietzsche's dichotomy as sufficiently
sophisticated to account for all the functions of pitch in language, one still might
concur with Nietzsche that certain pitch inflections connote states of pleasure
or pain, comfort or discomfort, and that such connotations can be recognized
even by a person who does not understand the specific language of the speaker.
Pitch inflection can serve this function in language, according to Nietzsche,
because it expresses biologically based states, pleasure and pain, which are
common modes of experience for all human beings. When Nietzsche speaks of
the "tonal subsoil" of language, he refers to this function of pitch in language;
and he contrasts this function, which he takes to be the most fundamental aspect
of language, with the more conventionalized and variable aspect that Nietzsche
labels "gesture-symbolism,"referring primarily to words.
8 Nietzsche's use of
Schopenhauer's system in his consideration of musical commu-
nication will be discussed in Part II, below.
9 Nietzsche, "On Music and Words," in The Complete Worksof Friedrich Nietzsche,
ed. Oscar Levy, Vol. 2, Early Greek Philosophyand Other Essays, trans. Maximilian A.
Muegge (London, 1911), 31-32.
Again in this passage, then, Nietzsche contends that the human use of
language presupposesour implicit recognition that we share a common biological
ground of experience with other human beings. As means of communication,
words can have meaning only because they designate aspects of experience that
are common to other individuals besides the speaker.?1And without the fun-
damental, usually preconscious, recognition that one shares with the individuals
to whom one speaks the common biological basis for experience (including the
common experience of having an individuated body), one cannot have faith that
one's words communicate to others.
Dionysus, while certainly an over-determined symbol for Nietzsche, em-
blemizes among other things the common biological character of the existence
of all human beings. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche links Dionysus to a
mode of self-awarenessthat is characterizedby a forgetting of all that is individual
and by a sense of oneness with the rest of humanity and the rest of nature. For
this reason, Nietzsche associates the Dionysian mode of self-understandingwith
the experience of self-abandonment involved in human sexuality. And the self-
abandonment that Nietzsche has in mind is so complete that he symbolizes the
sexuality associated with Dionysus through the image of the orgy.
The orgy disregardsthe individuality of the participants to such a significant
degree that its sexual licentiousness is traditionally linked to accompanying acts
of physical violence.11Nietzsche takes pains to denounce the cruelty of barbarian
Dionysian orgies in favor of the later Dionysian festivals.12 But even the cruelty
of the early orgies is consistent with Nietzsche's point that the abandonment of
our everyday concern for our own individual well-being is necessary if we are
to recognize another, more fundamental aspect of being human: the aspect of
belonging, as a part, to the life force that drives the world. The recognition of
one's union with the rest of biological and natural being is a matter of significance:
Nietzsche suggests that he can overcome despair in the face of suffering and
human mortality only be recognizing that one belongs to this larger whole that
will survive one's death.13
Nietzsche's symbol of the Dionysian orgy thus calls attention to our preverbal
sense that we share the ground of our experience with each other. Our language,
however, though it depends on this sense, does not communicate the Dionysian
awareness that we share our world directly. Language, in fact, would cease to
function if we ceased to sustain this awareness; and no further use of language
would suffice in that instance to restore the Dionysian awareness that is a
precondition for its power.
Music, however, could restore Dionysian awareness. Music not only reflects
the fact that all our bodies respond to auditory sensation in essentially the same
way; music also has the capacity to transmit a mode of awareness to its listeners.
'o See Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philosophyand Truth:
Selectionsfrom Nietzsche'sNotebooks of the Early 1870's, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), 81; Schlechta, 3: 311.
" Consider, for instance, the portrayal of Dionysus's influence in Euripedes's The
Bacchae.
12 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (containing, in addition, The Case of Wagner),
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 39; Schlechta, 1: 26.

13See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 554; Schlechta, 2: 1025.
Specifically, it has the power to communicate the Dionysian sense that funda-
mentally existence-all that is entailed by "being alive"-is something that the
listener can share with others. Nietzsche's rationale for this understanding of
music will become evident through the consideration below of his discussion in
The Birth of Tragedy of music as the paradigmatic Dionysian art.
II. Although Nietzsche acknowledges that a sort of music was linked by the
Greeks to the god Apollo, whom he associates with the static orderliness of the
visual arts, he distinguishes this music from that which he associates with
Dionysus. Apollonian music, claims Nietzsche, is music only in the sense that
it provides a wave-beat of rhythm, presumably in accompaniment to sung po-
etry.14The tones of Apollonian music coincide with the crest of these waves of
rhythm, with the result that the melody is not perceived as taking the form of
a line with some independence from rhythm. Instead, a melodic line is only
suggested by the tones that occur at regular distances and simultaneously with
the rhythmic waves.15
Dionysian music, as Nietzsche understands it, is music in a much fuller
sense. Nietzsche's model of Dionysian music is the dithyramb, which began as
a choral strophic song in honor of Dionysus, but became a more complicated
form involving "aulos accompaniment, soloist, and dancing groups" and "con-
sisting of various 'movements' " in a manner that has been "compared to the
cantata."16In this later stage of development, the dithyramb acquired an effective
character that is describedby Sachs as "enthusiastic"17and by Apel as "dramatic
and emotional ..., full of unbridled passion."18The dithyramb appears "to have
been dramatic from the very first," however, and the dithyrambic form was the
prototype of tragedy.19
In referringto the dithyramb as the paradigm of Dionysian music, Nietzsche
focuses on its affective associations. The unique essence of Dionysian music, as
he understands it, is the emotional power that musical elements convey. And
it is this power that makes Dionysian music an appropriate embodiment of
Dionysian music.
The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of
music in general) is carefully excluded from Apollonian music as un-Apollon-
14 See Willi
Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass. 1972),
351. Apel notes that in ancient Greece, "lyric and choric poetry shows the rhythmic
pattern of the music, which followed the verse exactly." Lyre accompaniment to epic
poetry was common and the kithara, which Nietzsche alludes to as the instrument
particularly associated with Apollo, was a kind of lyre. See Apel, 454: "In Greece the
kithara became the symbol of Apollo, in whose hands it represented the Greek ideal of
kalokagathia (harmonious moderation), as contrasted with the 'emotional' aulos, asso-
ciated with Dionysus."
15
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 40; Schlechta, 1: 28.
16
Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, 238.
17
Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World:East and West (New York,
1943), 268.
18
Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, 238.
'9Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, 268. The dithyramb had other
formal descendants as well, specifically "the intricate solo songs of professional virtuosi."
Nietzsche does not attempt to differentiate the dithyrambic form from tragedy, however.
ian-namely, the emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of the melody,
and the utterly imcomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb
man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something
never before experienced struggles for utterance-the annihilation of the veil of
maya, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself.20
Nevertheless, Nietzsche understands the interplay of tones in melody and

harmony as a symbolic expression of the oneness of the universe. This inter-
pretation he derives from Schopenhauer, whose discussion of music is quoted
at length in The Birth of Tragedy.2lThe aspect of Nietzsche's debt to Schopen-
hauer that is almost relevant to my discussion is Nietzsche's adherence to the
Schopenhauerianposition that music directly objectifies the struggles of the will,
which-as the reality behind the phenomenal world-is in a constant state of
turbulence within itself. These struggles are objectified in the things and beings
of the phenomenal world, on Schopenhauer'sscheme; and these entities conform
to particular "grades of the will's objectification," the types by which the will
has, so to speak, "chosen" to objectify itself. These "grades of the will's objec-
tification" are, according to Schopenhauer, identical with Plato's Ideas.
The will, on Schopenhauer's scheme, is responsible for human suffering; for
the conflicts between human beings, and between man and nature, are only
objectifications of the will's frenzied turbulence within itself. The only way in
which suffering can be assuaged is for the suffering human being to see through
the illusion that the world is populated by radically separate individual beings
and things. When he sees through this illusion, the individual is no longer inclined
to strike back when other people or things in the world cause him pain, and
thus the cycle of phenomenal beings foisting pain on one another is at least not
mitigated in this individual's case.
Art serves the valuable function of helping this mitigation of human suffering.
Art stills the will of the aesthetically moved observer, and it allows him to see
beyond the particularity of whatever is presented to the universal Platonic Idea
that it instantiates. As long as the observer is captivated by art, he has seen
beyond the illusory character of the phenomenal world and has ceased to take
his own suffering seriously. Art thus provides moments of salvation for the
beholder; and although these moments are transient, they are, short of those
states of self-transcendence achieved by saints and mystics, essentially the best
that life has to offer on Schopenhauer's worldview.
Music, however, has the potential to affect the listener more powerfully than
any other art is able to affect its beholder. This is so because the intended effect
of any art is to release the observer from the grip of the illusory phenomenal
world by making him aware of the reality behind it. But while other arts attempt
to depict individual things and thus stimulate knowledge of the Platonic Ideas,
music bypasses any possible reference to the phenomenal world and appeals to
the will directly:22
20 Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy, 40; Schlechta, (n. 3, above), 1: 28.
21
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 101-03; Schlechta, 1: 89-91.
22 Arthur
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,2 vols., trans. E. F.
J. Payne (New York; Vol. I: 1969; Vol. 2: 1958), 1 :257; Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur
SchopenhauersSaemtliche Werke, ed. Paul Deuffen (Munich, 1924), I, 304.
Therefore music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure,
this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind,
but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to
a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories,
and so also without the motives for them.23
The emotional effect of music cannot, therefore, derive from music's represen-
tation of the individual aspects of existence. On the contrary, Schopenhauer
argues, music has such a powerful effect on human beings because it directly
represents the universal basis of human experience, the will.
Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer'sanalysis to the extent that he believes that
music expresses the nature of the world as a whole in its operations, rather than
expressing particular experiences understood from an individual perspective.
Nietzsche goes far beyond Schopenhauerin his assessment of music's salvational
powers:24"In music the passions enjoy themselves," Nietzsche's aphorisms pro-
claim in Beyond Good and Evil;25and elsewhere he remarks that, "Life without
music is simply a mistake, a hardship, an exile."26And these panegyrics to music
are anticipated in The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche argues that music
alone can invest myths with the power to convey the Dionysian wisdom that,
despite suffering, individual existence is joyous and powerful because it is
grounded in the basic unity of all that lives. That is why the myths represented
by Greek tragedies required music in order to achieve their full effect, for the
words expressing the mythic tales provided only a surface image of the universal,
Dionysian truths that the music expressed far more directly. Music is closer to
the source of Dionysian insight than words, for music "speaks" from "the heart
of the world."27
Because of its ability to engulf the individual in its harmonic flow, music
23
Schopenhauer, The Worldas Will and Representation,I, 261; Schopenhauer,Arthur
SchopenhauersSaemtliche Werke, ed. Deuffen, I, 308-09.
24 Nietzsche, when considering the power of music, is not making empirical claims
about the actual effect of music on any particular listener or group of listeners. He
observes in The Birth of Tragedy that his description of the effect of Greek tragedy may
actually apply only to a relatively small percentage of those who actually attended such
dramas. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 132; Schlechta, 1: 122.) The implication is
that Nietzsche is concerning himself with the effects that tragedy is designed to produce,
even though any particular member of the audience may, for one reason or another, be
incapable of experiencing these effects at any particular time. Nietzsche's analysis of the
tragic effect refers to the condition of the ideally receptive and sensitive audience; and
it seems reasonable to suppose that his analysis of the effect of music refers similarly to
the state of mind aroused in ideally responsive and musically sensitive listeners.
25
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, # 106, 84; Schlechta, 2: 631.
26Nietzsche in a letter to Pewter
Gast, Jan. 15, 1888, quoted by Karl Jaspers,Nietzsche:
An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F.
Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmidt (Chicago, 1961), 33.
27 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 129; Schlechta, 1:119. See Sarah Kofman's
discussion of Nietzsche's insistence on the primacy of sound and tonality over word and
image in "Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphoses," in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary
Styles of Interpretation,ed. David B. Allison (New York, 1977), 201-06, esp. 202. Kof-
man's emphasis on the unifying Dionysian ground of metaphor and image, and the power
of music to reflect the Dionysian ground, coincides with my purposes here.
can communicate the Dionysian experience in accord with the model of the
orgy. In the midst of the Dionysian experience, all aspects of the human being
appear integrally bound to the oneness of being. One's individual existence is
not divorced from the rest of reality, and the recognition of this, even if pre-
conscious, provokes a mood of celebration.
The phenomenon of dance testifies, I think convincingly, to music's power
to provoke this celebratory mood that Nietzsche labels "Dionysian." And dance
also provides further evidence for the claim that human individuals, through
music, find expression for their awareness that they share a world by virtue of
their common, bodily way of relating to it. The dance is an active response to
the physiologically based stimulation that music provides. For this reason,
it serves as a vivid parablefor what Nietzsche means by the Dionysian experience:
"Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things
.... 28 Nietzsche describes the listener's response to the Dionysian dithyramb,
the Dionysian music associated with Greek tragedy, as a symbolic dance that
utilizes the whole body as a vehicle of expression:
The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a world of
symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere
symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing,
forcing every member into rhythmic movement.29
In dance the body does not become an instrument of individual self-expres-
sion; instead it conveys what the music outside it expresses.30The body, which
individuates most completely, is entirely subordinate to the Dionysian unity that
music represents. The dancing body moves as a unit possessing the quality of
grace.31In this sense, the individual is most completely an entity in the dance
in which the body functions most completely as a single whole, and the body
functioning at this high point of coordination is also able to establish through
the dance a harmonious relationshipwith the external environment. Emotionally,
the graceful dancer feels attuned to his environment, while vigorously expressing
his delight at this state of the world.
The external environment, furthermore, is perceived as being simultaneously
conditioned by the music. The music organizes time in a way that is experienced
in common by all who hear it. Although the individual's body occupies a space
separatefrom the space occupied by others, this separationis disregardedthrough
the dance, which celebrates the possibility of moving continually from one place
to another. Dancing coordinates the experience of traversing space from the
separate vantages of different individuals into a unified configuration of motion
through time. The Dionysian experience is like the dancer's response to music
because it draws the individual into a common experience with others, and
because it moves one into a joyous response that involves the entire person.
III. Music, on Nietzsche's analysis, directly expresses the ground of being
that underlies all existence. Language is capable of expressing meaning only
28
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 224; Schlechta, 2: 369.
29
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 40; Schlechta, 1: 28.
30 This
is, of course, assuming that the dancer is not so self-conscious that he is barely
"dancing." Again, I am referring to dance in its paradigmatic sense.
31 See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 230; Schlechta, 2: 374.
because words are conventionally established for the purpose of representing

things; but music expresses the Dionysian basis of human reality without the
mediation of vocabularies established by convention. This implies that elements
of music do not, in principle, mean specific things in the way that words do,32
and that as a consequence music lacks the particular referentialpower of words,
but Nietzsche does not regard this as an indication of a lack of power on the
part of music.
On the contrary, music "means" in the sense that it conveys to its listeners
the experience of being a part of the entire matrix of terrestrial living, an
experience which occasions delight. This is not "meaning" in the sense in which
we normally say that language "means"; but Nietzsche contends that the sense
of membership in a larger world, as it is directly transmitted to the listener in
music, is actually a fundamental element involved in all linguistic meaning,
though an element that we simply assume preconsciously. The power of words
to reflect differences amongst the elements of the world presupposes an unstated
awareness on the part of language-users that the world is already a unity. In
experiencing music as we do, we reveal the awareness that Nietzsche takes to
be prerequisite to our use of language. What our experience of music involves,
then, is something like the fulfillment of a transcendental precondition for the
possibility of human language.
Nietzsche does not mean to suggest that everyone needs to have had the
experience of music before being capable of linguistic interaction with others.
He is not making a claim about individual human development;but he is claiming
that in music we directly celebrate the common ground of biological impulse
and experience, which appears there as a medium for our shared delight, and
that it is only because we implicitly presuppose this ground that we can attempt
to communicate through language at all.
Nietzsche's assessment that music has the power to relate the individual to
the social world in a more complete way than words can achieve seems to me
a convincing interpretation of music, even if his account of why words are, in
principle, superficial is itself an oversimplication. My effort here has been pri-
marily to illuminate Nietzsche's account of the nature of this power of music.
Obviously, this aspect of Nietzsche's view of music is not an exhaustive account
of the phenomenon of music in general. Here I have been concerned with
Nietzsche's understandingof "music" as opposed to any other medium of expres-
sion, without regard for differences amongst various kinds and styles of music.
But even if the music of Glenn Miller and that of the Rolling Stones can both
be said to demonstrate "the power of music" in some sense, a seemingly obvious
question would ask why and how the two are different.
32
The exceptionto this occursin instanceswherethe composerestablisheshis own
conventionalized referentialvocabularyin music,as is the case in Bach'swordpainting.
But such vocabulariesmust be "taught"to the listeningpublic,in some fashion,before
they can be recognized;and the fact that Bach's music can be enjoyedwithout such
knowledgerevealsthat the music even in these cases is not primarilyused as a means
of referringto specificthings.
Nietzsche himself considers the differences amongst different kinds of music,

primarily in his later works that attack Wagner; and it would be valuable to
consider whether or not Nietzsche's efforts to designate criteria for judging
music are, in the final analysis, compatible with his account of "music," in
general, as the Dionysian art. But this is a question for another discussion.
University of Texas at Austin.
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1986 - Higgins - Nietzsche On Music

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1986 - Higgins - Nietzsche On Music

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Nietzsche on Music

Author(s): Kathleen Higgins

Copyright 1986 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.

beings shared essential biological characteristics that they were prompted to

trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 39; Schlechta, 1: 26.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche understands the interplay of tones in melody and

because words are conventionally established for the purpose of representing

Nietzsche himself considers the differences amongst different kinds of music,

University of Texas at Austin.

The North American Division of the SchopenhauerSociety announces

Special thanks to the following for their expert advice:

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