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4 Hegel, philosophy and music
Music and the limits of inferentialismHegel is often interpreted as embodying the idea that philosophy’s
task is to bring together the conflicting elements of modernity into a
new conceptual system. He can thus be seen as representing the kind
of claim for the status of modern philosophy that I am using music
to interrogate. His core idea is that initially indeterminate aspects of
the world progressively become determinate via the creation of links
between differing forms of interaction between subject and world, self
and other. This process begins with the most primitive forms of ‘desire’
that impel the subject towards the other, and ascends to philosophi-
cal reflection on the nature of truth and knowledge. The aim is for
philosophy to achieve the highest level of determinacy, which comes
about by more and more thorough conceptual differentiation. Hegel
sees this in terms of the development of ‘Geist’, by which he means
thinking as socially mediated interaction with the world, away from the
particularity of the sensuous world towards the non-sensuous univer-
sals which constitute the truth of that world. The aim of this chapter
is to begin to develop a contrast, that can be highlighted by the issue
of music, between Hegel’s vision of philosophy and a Romantic vision
of the kind looked at in thelast chapter, which will be further con-
sidered in the following chapters.^1 This contrast will make apparent a
paradigmatic tension that recurs in thinking about music’s relationship
to philosophy in modernity, notably, as we shall see in more detail in
chapter 6 and chapter 9 ,inthe work of Adorno.
There are, however, considerable difficulties ( 1 )ininterpreting what
is meant by Hegel’s account of the development ofGeistfrom sensuous
1 I have also dealt with Hegel’s relationship to music in Bowie 2003 a, chapters 5 and 7.
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