Our languages have meaning. Beneath language, beneath all languages, universally so, music lives beneath meaning and before it, its pre-condition and its physical medium. Meaning presupposes music, and could not emerge without it. Music sounds the transcendental in language, the universals preceding meaning. It inhabits the sensible, it carries all possible senses. It vibrates in the secret recesses of our conversations, continually underpins our dialogues, our exchanges presuppose it, it knows in advance our harmonies and discords, it built our house before we were born as speaking beings – and not only in the vibrating enclosure of the uterus – and paves the way for our collective existence; the social contract, hidden from all languages, can be heard indistinctly in its orchestration.
Many philosophers refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their trust in the tactile, or olfactory. Abstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding. To abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather than merely to leave it behind: analysis.
To accede to things themselves, let your tongue be still.
Many philosophers refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their trust in the tactile, or olfactory. Abstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding. To abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather than merely to leave it behind: analysis.
To accede to things themselves, let your tongue be still.
Michel Serres, “The Five Senses”