hegel, philosophy, and music 135left to the specific sciences to get on with the job of revealing the nature
of things.^10 This can become a version of what Max Weber describes
in terms of the ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world. For Weber, the
truths which dominate the modern world eliminate the meanings of
the life-world. The vital factor in this interpretation is what we saw in
Heidegger, namely the fact that philosophy itself also becomes more
and more irrelevant in the face of the natural sciences.
What, then, of the contemporary defences of Hegel, which regard
him as a positive resource for a philosophical approach to modernity?
A key result of the Hegelian conception in Brandom’s terms derives,
as we saw, from his rejection of Cartesian representationalist intention-
ality in favour of Kantian inferentialist intentionality. This allows him
to explain progressing scientific rationality in a manner which places
‘mediated’ normative practices of justification prior to the ‘unmedi-
ated’ factual realm, in order to escape the dilemma of producing the
normative from the factual. The primacy of the normative means that
the approach can also be applied, as Pippin suggests, to the ethical
sphere, with regard to things which become impossible to justify, like
slavery and the oppression of women. In both theoretical and practical
spheres it is possible to discern a wider pattern of rational development
which can be immanently legitimated on the basis of critical appraisal
of social practices of justification. The idea of a developing rationality
offers a version of metaphysics that counters the nihilistic reading of
Hegel’s account of the development of philosophy via the elimination
of immediacy. It is, however, not clear how this approach regards the
aesthetic, and here the relationship of contemporary interpretations of
Hegel to the reading that links him to nihilism is important.
The historical point is the conjunction of the change in the impor-
tance of music with the emergence of Hegel’s vision of modernity. The
entanglement of Hegel’s philosophical claim, that truth depends on
the elimination of what makes music mere transience, with the claims
of the music that is produced in Hegel’s period gives us indications
of how to assess the relationship between music and philosophy. In
concrete social terms music at certain times does things which philos-
ophy is unable to do. Looked at strictly in Hegel’s terms this would
just mean that music allows people ‘to be more enthused the less they
have determinacy of content’. However, he does also appreciate the10 In this sense Hegel can be related to theTractatus:wecan throw away the ladder of
philosophy once this point is reached.