MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

358 music, philosophy, and modernity

could not say of any of them what it judges, none of them is a so-called

proposition (‘Aussage’)’ ( 7 : 187 ).^25

Adorno’s notion of judgement as identification makes it a form of

repression of non-identity, because it fails to allow for the irreducible

particularity of things. The problem with this position has been pointed

out by Herbert Schn ̈adelbach ( 1987 ) and Anke Thyen ( 1989 ). Identify-

ing somethingwithsomething else can involve a failure to take account

of its specificity; identifying somethingassomething could, in contrast,

be intended to reveal its unique nature (see Bowie 1997 : ch. 9 ). The

latter kind of identification might well depend on ‘these words in these

positions’, when, for example, something is characterised or evoked

in a poem. In a poem the manner in which the words are synthesised

would not primarily have to do with subsumption, etc., and this brings

its sort of judgement closer to music. Any suspicion of the identify-

ing aspect of language must take account of these distinctions. Given

what verbal language and music share, how, then, can the specific cul-

tural contribution of music be understood, without limiting the account

of this understanding to the idea of music’s avoidance of intentional

language?

One way of interpreting the notion of judgementless synthesis is

to consider other forms of symbolic synthesis which do not subsume

particulars under a universal. Music and language can be related via

metaphor, which appears as a form of identification or judgement but

does not have to function as such. The logical forms of ‘positing, iden-

tity, similarity, contradiction, whole, part’, which appear, for example,

in the statement of a musical theme, the recapitulation of the theme,

the use of a contrasting theme, the coherence of a piece, and the ele-

ments which make up the piece, also play a role in metaphor (in the

wider sense, that can include metonymy and synecdoche). The positing

of something’s identity with something else is not intended as a judge-

ment of identity, but rather, as Davidson suggests, as a way of making

us notice things. This is often based on some kind of similarity relat-

ing to the feeling evoked by the things connected – remember Nuss-

baum’s claims about feelings as kinds of judgement. Metaphors can

also have their effect because of the apparent contradiction between

the two things connected; related forms, like synecdoche, function in

terms of whole/part relationships. Davidson’s idea suggests that the

25 The difference is once more that music is closer to language than visual art, for the
reasons we saw in Wittgenstein.