hegel, philosophy, and music 121this proximity in his suggestion that ‘Music aims at an intentionless
language’ (Adorno 1997 : 16 , 252 ), precisely in the sense that it does
not seek to articulate meanings that can be construed as claims. The
crucial word, though, is ‘aims’. Adorno also makes it clear that music
can never be fully separated from intentional language: ‘Music without
all meaning/intending (‘meinen’), the merely phenomenal context of
the sounds, would acoustically resemble the kaleidoscope. As absolute
meaning, on the other hand, it would cease to be music and would
mistakenly become language’ (ibid.). Hegel, as we shall see, thinks that
the move to the word from the note is a fundamental philosophical
advance, and it is this move that seems to me to need more differenti-
ation than Hegel allows.
The empirical manifestations of a verbal language can, as we saw, be
regarded as signs whose intelligibility is constituted by the underlying,
only theoretically accessible, reality of thelanguewhich makes possi-
ble the articulation of contentful thoughts. Music can be thought of in
analogous terms because it exists in the form of empirical data and yet
is only really understood when these are appropriately contextualised.
What, though, is the underlying reality of which notes constitute the
signs? This cannot generally be what is theoretically accessible, if that is
expressed by facts as true claims which are endorsed within a commu-
nity. The crude answer must be that music has to do precisely with what
cannot be expressed in the form of facts, hence, for example, the idea
of music making a rhythmically or an affectively structured world intel-
ligible. The extreme version of such a position is that of Schopenhauer
(see chapter 7 ), who regards music as the most direct, intuitive form
of access to an underlying reality which is essentially resistant to discur-
sive articulation. The consequences of this particular view are, though,
precisely what I wish to avoid, because it imputes the same significance
to all music. Instead of offering a positive metaphysical determination
of music, I would prefer to show how it does not fit easily into many
of the dominant philosophical approaches to modernity. This involves,
for example, finding ways of revealing how rhythm and feeling can be
world-disclosive. Despite his rejection of representationalism, his con-
centration on language as social action, and his awareness of Gadamer,
Brandom does not take adequate account of the dimensions of lan-
guage and communication not catered for by the Frege-influenced tra-
dition that still plays a major role in his thought. His adherence to this
tradition leads precisely to a world of facts and claims, rather than of
contingencies to which we respond with a variety of kinds of articulation