adorno 337construed in objective terms and what cannot whose results make music
significant in relation to philosophy.
All this is obviously very contentious if looked at in purely epistemo-
logical or semantic terms. Why stretch the notion of truth in such a
manner, and isn’t the approach still dependent on its own being true,
which must be stated verbally, so that one is forced back to the semantic?
In the essay ‘Aspects’ from theThree Studies on HegelAdorno gives a ratio-
nale for his position, in which the use of ‘mimetic’ suggests how music
plays a role in his conception:
Were there, to put it in Kantian terms, no similarity between subject
and object, were both to stand... immediately opposed to each other,
then there would not only be no truth, but no reason, no thought at
all. Thought which had completely eradicated its mimetic impulse, the
kind of enlightenment which does not carry out the self-reflection which
constitutes the content of the Hegelian system and which names the rela-
tionship of thing and thought, would end in madness... The Hegelian
speculative concept saves mimesis by thought’s reflection on itself: truth
is not adequation but affinity.
( 5 : 285 )The adequacy of the ‘speculative concept’ to its object can never be
finally achieved – except in the ‘absolute idea’, which Adorno regards
as a mere metaphysical conjuring away of the non-identical – and should
be thought of rather in terms of the continued engagement of thought
with the object. In this engagement the object is related more and more
coherently to its world via reflection on the practical and aesthetic, as
well as cognitive, ways in which we encounter and interact with it.
Music’s relevance to this idea has to do with the notions of ‘similar-
ity between subject and object’, and of truth as ‘affinity’. If ‘similarity’
is taken in an epistemological sense it would lead in the direction of
adequation, but that is explicitly not what is intended. Like contem-
porary pragmatists, Adorno has no time for global scepticism, and so
is not trying to connect subjective scheme and objective content. He
is instead thinking in terms of a version of metaphysics 2. The key to
the idea of affinity lies in its relationship to motivation. The lack of
any mimetic impulse would end in madness, because there would be
no sense in which engaging with the world had any point. Even self-
preservation would be senseless, since individual existence would lack
any reason for being sustained at all. It is because the world can engage
us that a wholesale separation of subject and object makes no sense. The