5 Music and the subjects of Romanticism
The task of philosophyIn early German Romantic philosophy communication and under-
standing are often regarded more as ways of acting and being in the
world than as forms of representation of a pre-given reality. Music
becomes particularly significant because it involves norm-based inter-
pretation, on the part both of players and of listeners, and yet resists
wholesale incorporation into representational and theoretical dis-
course. The question is what this means for philosophy. The interroga-
tion of the nature of philosophy occasioned by the changes in thinking
about language in Romanticism need not imply that, because modern
philosophy fails to achieve some of the tasks it sets itself, it is therefore at
an end, in the way the later Heidegger claims by his equation of philos-
ophy and metaphysics 1. Such an implication would contradict the prag-
matist side of Romanticism, which assesses discourses and practices in
terms of their contribution to human flourishing, and so abstains from
final judgements on the status of particular cultural practices. There
is, however, no doubt that a significant strand of modern philosophy,
from the Romantics, to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno,
Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, can be interpreted as questioning the
assumptions of science-oriented philosophy in terms of the issues that
we have been exploring via music.
Ernst Tugendhat has criticised this strand of philosophy as follows: ‘it
is characteristic for the entire tradition of philosophical Romanticism
from Schelling and Hegel to Heidegger and Gadamer that, in ever new
ways, an ontologically inflated conception of art became a substitute for
the question of the justification of norms, and it was in every instance an
obfuscation of the concept of truth’ (Tugendhat 1992 : 430 ). From what
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