adorno 335true, without presupposing the answer to what truth is? Does the cor-
respondence theory of truth correspond to the fact that truth is corre-
spondence to reality? As we saw, some understanding of truth has to be
presupposed, otherwise our rejection both of utterances and of musical
interpretations without finally knowing what the truth is becomes inex-
plicable. The crux of the matter is Adorno’s assertion that the idea is ‘not
even purely knowable’: true interpretation of music is not just a matter
ofknowinghow to do it. Truth in art is not a wholly cognitive issue: ‘For
what mimetic behaviour addresses is the telos of cognition which cog-
nition at the same time blocks with its own categories. Art completes
cognition with what is excluded from it and thereby in turn detracts
from the character of cognition, namely its unambiguous nature’ ( 7 :
87 ). This claim involves another version of non-identity: the ‘telos of
cognition’ would in these terms be the – impossible – unification of
the general categories of thought with the particularity of any specific
object of thought. Adorno’s idea is that cognition alone cannot be self-
justifying. One can think of this in terms of Nietzsche’s question as to
the value of truth, or in terms of Cavell’s reminder that our relations to
things can entail demands which cognition cannot fulfil. Cavell talks of
Heidegger and Wittgenstein ‘throwing into question...philosophy’s
obeisance to epistemology’, in which certainty is ‘taken as its preferred
relation to objects (as opposed, for example, to recognition, or inti-
macy, or mastery)’ (Cavell 2005 : 245 ). Art’s importance lies, therefore,
in its extending the idea of ‘truth’ beyond what can be known, in the
sense of classified by a concept, towards other relationships to people
and things. Music enacts the dilemma involved in the telos of cogni-
tion by requiring general forms, epitomised for Adorno by notation –
which are analogous to concepts because they identify what they stand
for – with the demand that true interpretation incorporate the partic-
ular mimetic moment without which those forms are not adequately
realised. The parallel with what actually happens in moral life should
be noted here: legitimate moral rules can be applied in a manner which
constitutes a form of cruelty.
Adorno illustrates ‘the mimetic ability’ by ‘the musician who under-
stands his score, follows its most minute movements, and yet in a
certain sense does not know what he is playing’, and maintains that
‘it is the same for the actor, and for this reason the mimetic abil-
ity manifests itself most drastically in the praxis of artistic represen-
tation, as imitation of the curve of movement of what is represented’
( 7 : 189 ). Music has to combine the analytical and mimetic demands,