136 music, philosophy, and modernity
importance of modern music’s becoming an independent expression
of human freedom. The fact is that the two positions never quite seem
to square. In the light of the questionable side of the subsequent recep-
tion of phenomena like Wagner, Hegel’s rationalist approach contains
an important warning which we shall consider again later in the book.
At the same time, the suspicions of philosophy that are contempora-
neous with Wagner (and which, in the case of Feuerbach, influenced
Wagner’s conceptions) point to ways in which philosophy as a social
practice fails to address deep concerns about the direction and nature
of modernity.
My question is whether such works as Beethoven’sEroica,orhis
late quartets, and Wagner’sRing,orTristanmay not offer understand-
ings of modernity, which, while relying on discursive language to be
approached in these terms at all, still articulate something which phi-
losophy cannot. This claim requires such music both to have a cogni-
tive dimension and yet to communicate something that is only possible
because of its specificity as music. In contrast to the Hegelian philosoph-
ical image of a progressing rationality, which many come to regard as
hard to square with the often catastrophic course of the world in which
that progress occurs, music’s development embodies contradictions in
modern experience which relate to the nature of freedom in moder-
nity. Modernity involves both the overcoming of traditional orders and
the fear of groundlessness that haunts the new ‘merely human’ orders.
Significant modern music confronts the most difficult issues in society
concerning, for example, ineluctable change, the disintegration of tra-
ditional forms of order and the precariousness of new forms of order,
the nature of time, the fragility of the self. It does so in ways which
may temporarily transcend these problems, even while using them as
its content, by articulating dimensions of the problems which can never
be reduced to what we say about them. At the same time, music will be
faced with the growing sense that its new orders are becoming more
and more arbitrary. For the moment, though, what interests me is the
fact that it is in one respect preciselybecauseof its indeterminacy that
music does something which philosophy cannot.
These claims relate to two crucial tensions in modern philosophy.
Hegel can be seen as seeking to reveal the philosophical essence of
modernity, in order rationally to reconcile people to the brutal changes
it involves. Such a philosophy of immanence runs the risk of failing to
appreciate the importance of responses to the contingencies of moder-
nity which do not fit a rationalist model. This failure is echoed in Hegel’s