310 music, philosophy, and modernity
DoEfamously tells the story of how ‘humankind, instead of entering
into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’
( 3 : 11 ),^1 a barbarism which results from the workings of reason itself.
Given the period of the book’s production, it is hardly surprising that
it is deeply pessimistic, to the point where the pessimism is not just
about the present but is projected far back into the past. The develop-
ment of humankind is based from the very beginning on the repressive
effects of its need to overcome the threat of external nature, thus on
‘instrumental reason’, which the authors associate with the ‘subjection
of everything natural to the arrogant subject’ (ibid.: 16 ). The problem
is that this reduces phenomena as diverse as primitive tool use and the
application of highly developed scientific concepts to the same common
denominator. This essentially relies on a version of Nietzsche’s ‘will to
power’, in which reductive identification wins out over the apprehen-
sion of the particular and irreducibly individual, in the name of self-
preservation. Versions of the extreme argument about subjection occur
in Adorno’s contentions about music, and this will be where he is at his
weakest, offering another example of how music can reveal limitations
in philosophical thinking.^2
However, Adorno’s interrogations of rationalisation in relation to
music are not always reductive, and his philosophical contentions some-
times gain from his detailed attention to music. In the notes for a
never completed work, recently published asTowards a Theory of Musical
1 References to Adorno that are from theGesammelte Schriftenwill just give the volume
number, followed by the page number. TheGesammelte Schriftenare now available on a
very reasonably pricedcd-romat http://www.digitale-bibliothek.de, thecdis number 97.
2 Adorno’s less critical admirers often cite the implausible dictum fromDialectic of Enlight-
enment, that ‘Only exaggeration is true’ ( 3 : 140 ), as an explanation of his exaggerations.
His more convincing account of exaggeration is contained in the following, fromMinima
Moralia:
While thought relates to facts and moves in the criticism of them, it moves no less in
the sustaining of the difference between thought and fact. It says what is precisely
because what is is never completely the way it is said. An element of exaggeration is
essential to thought, an element of shooting beyond things, of untying itself from
the weight of facticity, by dint of which it carries out the determination of being at
the same time strictly and freely, rather than merely reproducing it.
( 4 : 143 – 4 )
If everything transcends what we say of it, because of its enduring potential for being
redescribed, all positive claims to say ‘what is’ will involve this kind of exaggeration (see
also 8 : 319 ). The further implication, that thought should do more than reproduce the
real suggests an important link of music, as what discloses, rather than represents, reality,
to cognition understood in non-representational terms.