adorno 331in relation to the idea of truth in art, be construed in analytical terms
as ‘rightness’, rather than as truth. Indeed, Adorno often refers in such
contexts to ‘Stimmigkeit’, which means ‘rightness’, and which has a con-
notation relating to ‘being in tune’. However, he also has no hesitation
in also referring to truth in these contexts. Wellmer’s claim that the
notion of truth ‘points of its own accord to a normative horizon which
always already goes beyond that of an argumentative dispute about the
truth of single utterances’ (Wingert and G ̈unther 2001 : 52 ) gives a way
of seeing why.
For Wellmer the understanding of truth cannot be restricted to a
deflationary semantic conception, because even ‘the concept of propo-
sitional truth cannot be understood if it is not understood in its inter-
nal relationship to a (normative) problematisation of ways of seeing,
background understandings, etc.’ (Wellmer 2004 : 172 ). The continual
need to negotiate and to resolve differences in such understandings
does not rely on a regulative idea in the metaphysically problematic
sense, but is part of any practice constituted in normative terms. In
comments on Donald Davidson’s holism, which involves the ‘principle
of charity’, the assumption that in interpreting someone’s utterances
one should assume that most of what they say is true, Wellmer suggests
a direct bridge between the philosophical issue of truth in interpreta-
tion and the question of musical interpretation in Adorno. The prin-
ciple of charity relates to the fact that interpretation for Davidson is
necessarily hypothetical, but that ‘does not mean that the meaning of
utterances or texts has some kind of being-in-itself beyond interpreta-
tion, so that it would only ever be grasped, as it were, hypothetically and
temporarily or incompletely; instead this manner of its being grasped –
interpretation – belongs to the manner of being of linguistic meaning.
Its “esse” is “interpretari”’ (ibid.: 200 ). Wellmer’s anti-Platonic concep-
tion of interpretation, which is expressly informed by the later Wittgen-
stein, the Heidegger ofBeing and Time, and Gadamer (Wellmer is also
a pupil of Adorno), echoes the Heidegger-influenced ideas of Besseler.
For Besseler the manner of being of music in modernity was constituted
by engagement in a practice, rather than being the representation of
something already objectively existing. This concentration on practice
is vital to my approach, but there is a further difficulty here.
Adorno is resolutely opposed to the idea of any kind of ‘being-
in-itself’ that stands outside time, against which thought measures
itself. Truth for Adorno always has what he calls a ‘temporal core’,
because it can only be understood in relation to historically determinate