MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

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order of art just from thewillto such an order, without this order being

substantially present to us any more in the thing itself and in the world

in which we live’ (Adorno 2002 : 236 ).^34 In this respect ‘the insolubil-

ity of the nevertheless objectively posed problem’, which means that

Mahler cannot succeed in sustaining the sonata so that ‘the life of the

sonata becomes one with that of the details’, leads to a more convinc-

ing response to modernity than philosophical attempts to restore an

ontological order. Failure in art in this sense is different from failure in

philosophy, because art is able to embody unresolved contradictions in

a way which ‘says’ more than do contradictions in discursive texts.

Adorno’s term for what lies behind much of his interpretation of

Mahler is the ‘ontological need’ for an order of things that would make

sense of the disorienting experience of modernity. He thinks that the

state of the modern world demands that we renounce the need in

this form because it can only produce more illusions, particularly the

illusion that ‘what cannot be fulfilled is able to be fulfilled’ ( 6 : 99 ).

The alternative therefore involves ways of sustaining hope – a word that

occurs with very great frequency in his work – without hope becoming

mere delusion in the face of the distortions which stand in the way of

a just social order.^35 Hope is precisely dependent on the possibility of

transcending the given, and the question is therefore how it can be

expressed. In his essay on Goethe’sIphigenieAdorno claims that ‘In the

art of the period [hope] is located in the great music, in Beethoven’s

Leonora aria and in moments of many adagio movements, like that of

the first Rasumovsky Quartet, eloquent beyond all words’ ( 11 : 513 ).^36

But can this hope in the music transcend its immediate circumstances

in the heroic period of the bourgeois era, the period of Hegel’s system,

with all the associations that this has for Adorno? The eloquence of

these pieces has not diminished, even though they no longer express

the concrete socio-political hopes which gave rise to them. There is,

however, also an element of hope in the fact that such music is still

34 His interpretation of Heidegger in particular is questionable. However, the criticism of
ontology in the sense intended here would be shared by contemporary pragmatism’s
questioning of much that still forms the basis of analytical philosophy. The idea that an
agreed ontological order has not been found in modernity is hard to dispute, given the
contemporary tensions between scientistic forms of naturalism based on some kind of
fact/value dichotomy, and philosophies which follow the post-Kantian traditions (see
Putnam 2004 ).
35 Compare Rorty’s insistence on the idea of ‘Philosophy and Social Hope’ against the
dominant concerns of much Anglo-American philosophy.
36 This is the movement referred to in chapter 4.