350 music, philosophy, and modernity
In a further example of how music and philosophy become interchange-
able in Adorno, the last sentence applies equally to Beethoven’s music
and to Hegel’s system.
A fundamental problem with Adorno’s investment in ‘philosophi-
cal music’ becomes apparent when he maintains that ‘the insatiable
and destructive principle of expansion of exchange society reflects
itself in Hegelian metaphysics’ ( 5 : 274 ). When this claim is looked
at in conjunction with the relationship between Hegel and Beethoven
it becomes evident that Adorno relies on a connection between ( 1 ) sys-
tematic metaphysics based on the principle of determination as nega-
tion, ( 2 ) the commodity as an exchange value constituted by its rela-
tions to other exchange values, rather than by anything intrinsic to
it, ( 3 ) social rationalisation as the enforced integration of individuals
into structures which negate their individuality, and ( 4 ) autonomous
musical works whose elements are integrated in an increasingly com-
plete manner. The idea of the integral musical work evidently applies to
Beethoven, but it does so even more to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone com-
position. Significantly, however, Adorno has an ambivalent relationship
to the latter. He later criticises his own interpretation of Schoenberg in
Philosophy of New Music: ‘The decisive thing, the interpretation of the
compositions of Schoenberg, was always inadequate. In consequence
it appeared that music was supposed to be completely dissolved into
cognition’ ( 18 : 165 ).
When Adorno explicitly addresses the analogies between philosophy
and music, the tendentiousness of his presentation of Schoenberg as
‘philosophical music’ becomes apparent: ‘Philosophy is neither a sci-
ence, nor the poetry of thought to which positivism wanted, with a stupid
oxymoron, to degrade it, but rather something which is as mediated
with, as it stands out from, what is different to it. Its suspended nature
is, though, nothing but the expression of what is inexpressible in itself.
In this it is truly related to music’ ( 6 : 115 ). The contrast to the idea
of the ‘suspended nature’ of both music and philosophy is Adorno’s
claim that music ‘fulfils its social function more precisely when it repre-
sents social problems, which it contains in itself right into the innermost
cells of its technique, according to its own formal laws’ ( 18 : 731 ). This
claim is directed against composers who try to create political effects via
music, in favour of composers who pursue the compositional problems
of their era in the most thoroughgoing way, thereby supposedly getting
closer to the truth about the extra-musical world than composers who
begin with the concerns of the extra-musical world and seek to address