314 music, philosophy, and modernity
is manifested in a historically specific musical phenomenon which has
to be experienced in its specificity if what Adorno means is to be con-
veyed. This contrast and interaction between what can be experienced
in music and what philosophy can say indicates a characteristic tension
in Adorno’s approaches to music and philosophy.
At times Adorno uses the notion of a ‘reconciliation’ between mind
and nature in such an emphatic manner that what he points to only
makes sense in quasi-theological or strong Idealist terms, both of which
rely – despite Adorno’s claims to the contrary – on there having been
some point at which mind and nature were not ‘unreconciled’. The
idea ofre-conciliation depends on something about which there cannot
be any justifiable arguments, namely the idea of the state prior to the
separation of mind and nature. In the passage about coloratura, on the
other hand, Adorno salvages the idea of reconciliation in a way which
does not promise more than any theory could ever convey. This glimpse
of a way of being both beyond mere technical domination and beyond
a failure to live up to human creative possibilities – possibilities which
necessarily involve technical command – suggests a model for the best
of Adorno’s ideas about music and philosophy.
Contrast this model, however, with the following, from the essay
‘Appreciated Music’, on ‘The ideal of music’, where the philosophi-
cal vocabulary leads to problems:
This ideal is one based on cognition, but not cognition about art, rather
cognition which art itself is, as a counterpart to scientific cognition: cog-
nition from within. Artworks are the only things in themselves; they stand
in for reconciliation with lost things in themselves, with nature. Compre-
hension [‘Mitvollzug’inthe sense both of listening which actively grasps
the nature of the music, and of adequate performance] of music is the
successful self-externalisation of the subject in something which thereby
becomes its own: anticipation of a state in which alienation would be
abolished.
( 15 : 187 )Here Adorno, sketching a version of metaphysics 2 , takes the step –
probably influenced by the Luk ́acs ofThe Theory of the NovelandHistory
and Class Consciousness–ofassimilating the idea of the loss of ‘things
in themselves’ to a theory of ‘alienation’. The suggestion is admittedly
that this state of alienation, which is produced by the incursion of the
commodity form into all areas of society, is not a perennial fact of human
existence, but the conception is still questionable.