hegel, philosophy, and music 127Wagner’s attempts to create one, there will be no modern equivalent
of Greek tragedy’s grounding of a community. Hegel can also be inter-
preted, as we shall see, as being prescient with regard to serious music’s
development away from being accessible to the general public.
However, a differentiation needs to be made here, between the his-
torical ascendancy of the sciences and of modern forms of legal and
political organisation, and Hegel’s claims for philosophy in relation to
this ascendancy. Distinguishing the two will eventually return us to the
issue of metaphysics 1 and metaphysics 2 , and to some of the questions we
considered above. The main point has to do with how Hegel’s claims
about the limitations of art relate to his claims for philosophy, given
that, in the light of the success of the sciences, philosophy itself can be
seen to be at least as threatened by modernity as art. Hegel’s aim is for
philosophy to reveal the structures which make possible the increasing
conceptual determination of the world. This determination involves a
hierarchy of attitudes to the world, in which each stage is overcome by a
more mediated articulation that incorporates the unmediated elements
which preceded it. Brandom reads this basic pattern in the manner we
have seen, but it has consequences in Hegel which Brandom does not
consider.
Hegel’s interpretation of feeling and temporality in music depends
on the ability of philosophy to transcend forms of immediacy, like the
temporalised sounds which constitute music. The main issue here will
be nothing less than the relationship of philosophy to nihilism. In a
world where religious forms of totality, which supposedly overcome
contingency, transience, and decay, can no longer be defended, the
status of the transient empirical world becomes a central metaphysical
issue, and music forms one important response to this situation. Hegel’s
strategy is to push awareness of the transience of the life-world to its
extreme, in order to show how it is to be overcome in philosophy. The
truth is not what passes away, but what philosophy establishes, which
does not pass away, even though it is manifested in what does. This view
of truth can be read in a variety of ways. In the deflationary reading
that is shared by Hegelians like Brandom and Pippin it is a version
of the overcoming of the ‘myth of the given’, of the idea that there
are immediate experiences that can ground true belief. Truth resides
rather in the ways in which intersubjectively negotiated claims lead to
the concrete universals which legislate the modern world. On the level
of the now widespread rejection of sense-data based empiricism, there
is much to be said for this view. However, what is read in these terms