354 music, philosophy, and modernity
Behind this criticism lies the problematic history of art, aesthetics and
philosophy in modern Germany. Adorno talks elsewhere of the ‘guilt
of the German mind which mixes up its particular achievements in
art and philosophy with the realisation [of mind] in society and so is
under the control of those who obstruct real humanity’ (ibid. 14 : 369 ).
Tonality gives the sonata its force because it produces the appearance
of resolution by repeating what happened in the past, in the form of
the repetition of the exposition in the recapitulation. This repetition
is ‘ideological’: its affirmation of what has already happened fails to
acknowledge the ‘persistent unfreedom’ involved in historical reality.
Much as Marx criticises Hegel for the claim that the ‘real is the ratio-
nal’, Adorno criticises Beethoven for producing affirmative music in
an unjust society. As this criticism is the basis for much of Adorno’s
approach to music and modernity, we need to look at it a bit more
carefully.
The decisive issue is Adorno’s application of his interrogation of
issues concerning the notion of identity to music. If the world is unfree,
unjust, etc., and if we have the means to obviate this situation, any-
thing at all which contributes to things remaining the same is com-
plicit with injustice. Great music is complicit because ‘it asserts itself in
its objective appearance as the absolute, now, here, immediately, as a
guarantee of transcendence’ (ibid.). Stated as baldly as this, the claim
seems pretty vacuous. However, Adorno’s idea of non-identity makes
it clear that such generalisations are inherently inadequate, and can
only be justified by immersion in the specifics of what is in question.
If one asks, for example, why modern Western ‘classical’ music contin-
ually changes – to the point of losing much of its audience – in ways
that music in a traditional society does not, the idea that what hap-
pens in music is linked to other tendencies in modernity makes more
sense.
The following parallel between philosophy and music can suggest a
related way of understanding the legitimate aspect of Adorno’s ques-
tioning of identity and its relationship to music. In the later Wittgenstein
the idea that philosophy progresses by argument refuting argument, in
the manner of scientific explanations being replaced by better expla-
nations, largely gives way to the idea that philosophical problems wear
themselves out because they cease to matter, or can be made to dissolve
by realising that the ways in which they are talked about are deficient
in some way. Such a view makes it easier to accept that philosophy and
music are connected in the ways that Adorno suggests, as his idea that