adorno 327principle unrealisable’ – in relation to different cultural domains. The
belief that the history of philosophy can be construed as the search for
an explanation of truth has often been understood in terms which
seem to require a regulative idea. Because the search in question
has yet to lead to a final consensus, the regulative idea supposedly
becomes what makes philosophy cohere as a unified enterprise, even if
its telos seems so far to have been absent. This is, though, precisely what
leads Wellmer to argue that the conception of truth as a regulative idea
is a metaphysical fiction. At the same time, however, the motivation
provided by such a fiction leads to results which arguably constitute
the history of Western philosophy, at least until the emergence of some
aspects of Romantic philosophy and of pragmatism, which break with
representational conceptions. The Romantic link of art to philoso-
phy would in this case have to do with the possibility that the idea
of philosophy as a unified enterprise constituted out of inherent or
necessary failure is in fact parasitic on a notion of unification derived
from the demands encountered in art.^13 In the musical domain the
fact that the importance of regulative ideas lies in the question of
motivation leads to another case of the entanglement of music and
philosophy.
Consider the following remark by Adorno on ‘true interpretation’,
which he characterises as ‘an idea that is strictly prescribed, but one
which is in principle unrealisable, for the sake of the fundamental
antinomy of art-music’ (Adorno 2001 : 74 ). Truth as idealised con-
sensus and true musical interpretation are in these terms both ‘in
principle unrealisable’, but this status has a normative significance
in music that is not obviated by the problematic metaphysical conse-
quences involved in a philosophical description of truth in such terms.
Adorno’s ‘fundamental antinomy’ has to do with relationships, such as
that between score and interpretation, between ‘analysis’ and ‘mimesis’,
and a variety of other oppositions that we shall encounter in what fol-
lows. The antinomy is explained when he asserts, with regard to assess-
ing how far a score should determine its interpretation, that ‘musi-
cal notation is, of course, expression of a musicalidea, which it, so
to speak, standardises, reifies, alters, and which... is to be awoken,
restored. In a certain sense true interpretationrevokesthe notation’13 The other alternative is the Hegelian idea that constant refutation of particular truths
in the sciences is the ground of the ‘absolute idea’, which is the ultimate negation of the
negation. As Adorno suggested, this can be linked to the dynamic of Beethoven’s tonal
music (see chapter 4 above).