322 music, philosophy, and modernity
much as it was with strictly epistemological concerns. The problem
with the philosophical versions of the conception of truth as regulative
idea, which play a role in some of the work of Apel, Putnam, Haber-
mas, and others, is that they cannot show that the idea plays a real part
in the practice of inquiry or of everyday communication. Unless we
already knew in some way what it was that we were seeking, we would
have no way of knowing if we had reached that for which the regula-
tive idea stood, so the idea that under ideal conditions, rather than
the messy ones we actually deal with, truth would be guaranteed is of
no use. Rorty suggests regarding such ideas as a ‘focus imaginarius’
because they serve as a motivation for producing justifications, rather
than having any substantive content. The substantive idea of truth as
a regulative idea starts, then, as Albrecht Wellmer contends (Egginton
and Sandbothe 2004 : 99 , and Wellmer 2004 ), to sound indefensibly
metaphysical.
Adorno’s echo of the Romantics in his remark that musical ‘inter-
pretation measures itself by the level of its failure’ (Adorno 2001 : 120 )
can be informative here. The implication I want to explore, as another
way of understanding music as a form of metaphysics 2 ,isthat musical
practice offers a way of responding to the idea of the transcendence of
truth that does not entail a metaphysical version of the idea that truth
substantially pre-exists the search for it. What is at issue here can be sug-
gested by Hilary Putnam’s arguments about the entanglement of fact
and value. Putnam rejects the idea that value issues can be assessed from
a perspective outside involvement in them, of the kind to which reduc-
tive ‘naturalism’ makes claim. He talks of ‘moral perception’, by which
he means ‘the ability to see that someone is, for example, “suffering
unnecessarily”, as opposed to “learning to take it”’. There is ‘noscience
that can teach one to make these distinctions. They require a skill that,
in Iris Murdoch’s words, is “endlessly perfectible”, and that... is also
interwoven with our (also endlessly perfectible) mastery of moral vocab-
ulary itself’ (Putnam 2004 : 128 ). Putnam insists that epistemic values
and ethical values are not the same, but that they may play equally impor-
tant roles in our lives. The comments just cited can clearly be applied to
music, where the ability to distinguish between what is ‘deeply expres-
sive’ and merely ‘meretricious’ involves a further mastery, a mastery
which is not just of the vocabulary for verbal expression about music,
but of music itself.^9
9 The same can apply to the other arts.