336 music, philosophy, and modernity
and that leads to the constitutive contradiction which informs the
major developments in Western music. At the same time, this con-
tradiction reveals the limitations of a notion of truth which remains
exclusively at the cognitive level, and it is this that makes what may
initially appear rather an abstruse topic important for contemporary
philosophy.
Adorno rejects what he calls the ‘theory of truth as residue’ (‘Resi-
dualtheorie’), according to which ‘the objective is what remains after
the crossing out of the so-called subjective factors’ ( 5 : 256 ). He does
not exclude the possibility that this theory ‘may be valid where the
object is not itself a human one that is mediated throughGeist’( 9. 2 :
138 ) (e.g. in the physical sciences). Significantly, his description of the
‘theory of truth as residue’ is echoed in Bernard Williams’ idea of the
‘absolute conception’, which assumes that the exclusion of subjective
perspectives will generate pure objectivity, and that physics is there-
fore the source of such objectivity. In line with the direction intended
by Adorno, Arthur Fine has argued that Williams’ conception is false
in relation to many objects of inquiry, because it conflates ‘processes
that are impersonal and nonperspectival’ with those that are ‘impartial
and unbiased’ (Egginton and Sandbothe 2004 : 121 ), when ‘imper-
sonal does not imply unbiased, nor conversely’ (ibid.). The – Kantian –
question Williams does not answer is how a conception can be abso-
lute that seeks to exclude the ‘subjective’ ways in which the life-world
out of which science emerges is constituted. Fine argues that the kind
of judgement required for impartiality and lack of bias is essential to
understanding ‘what it is like to be another’ (ibid.). In Adorno’s terms
this understanding cannot be fully achieved in conceptual terms, con-
cepts being too general to grasp all that belongs to the individuality of
the other, and so it requires the mimetic. Such understanding connects
to the appropriate understanding of how to perform music, where the
need for ‘idiomatic’ expression and the need to get things technically
right are both essential.
Ultimately Williams’ conception requires, as Heidegger suggests by
his idea of modernity as what turns the world into a ‘picture’, a wholly
objectified account of the subjective, otherwise the term ‘absolute’ is
invalid. Adorno would regard such an account as another version of
what vitiates the metaphysics of German Idealism. For Adorno the iden-
tity of subject and object required for any absoluteconceptionabsolutises
thought’s ability to comprehend being. Such a conception would have
to overcome precisely the constitutive tension between what can be