hegel, philosophy, and music 137underestimation of music at a time when music itself, as Kramer puts
it, ‘help[s] produce the discourses and representations of which it is
also the product’. It is this two-way process that is largely excluded by
a Hegelian conception. The first tension is, then, between philosophy
as that which seeks to explain aspects of modernity, and philosophy as
that which seeks to advert to new forms of world-disclosure which offer
new semantic potential. The related, second tension is between philos-
ophy for which, as Pinkard argues, the absolute idea is ‘the normative
self-correcting structure of a rational form ofmodern“social space”, and
forms the “pure normative structure” of the patterns of reciprocal recog-
nition that make up modern mind,Geist’ (Ameriks 2000 b: 177 ), and
philosophy which suspects that limitation to immanent social appraisal
is not adequate to experiences of meaning which cannot be mediated in
such normative structures. In this latter view, forms of world-disclosure,
like music, are best considered in the terms suggested by Adorno, when
he says that their ‘interpretation measures itself by the level of its fail-
ure’ (Adorno 2001 : 120 ), something which is known to any commit-
ted performer, but is also part of the experience of listening to great
music (see chapter 9 ). Understanding thus becomes a regulative idea
whose boundaries could not be drawn by philosophy in the manner
suggested by Pinkard, because it is only in the active process of engage-
ment with music that one can experience the open-ended challenge
which it poses. This engagement can lead to debate in ‘rational...
“social space”’, but there is always a sense that even reciprocal recogni-
tion of the results of the argument cannot be the last word. It is in the
philosophy of the early Romantics that the beginnings of such ideas are
found. The Romantics’ attention to music gives them, as we saw, a new
understanding of philosophy, not as a systematic answer to metaphysical
questions, but as a search for ways of coming to terms with the modern
experience of finitude. I want now to consider some more early Roman-
tic and later Romantic approaches to philosophy and music, in order to
bring out both the possibilities and dangers of this sort of questioning
of philosophy.