MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

adorno 371

This pleasure, which is a complex aesthetic pleasure, raises a vital ques-

tion for Adorno’s philosophical understanding of music.

On the one hand, the Adorno who sees the modern world as dom-

inated by totalising economic and cultural processes tends to talk in

terms of an equally totalising counter to this world, in the form of the

realisation of freedom, or of a ‘human’ world. On the other hand, the

Adorno who predominates in much of the Mahler book seems to sug-

gest that even a realisation of such an ideal will not be able to overcome

the sense of irredeemable transience which is a condition of modernity.

Indeed transience in a world which was indeed humane and constituted

in terms of freedom might be even more painful, as one would have

more to lose. In that case there would be a need for the hope that

better resources for coping with transience would develop as part of

liberation.

The ambivalence with regard to the work of art suggested by this

thought is particularly important in relation to Adorno’s qualification

of art as ‘Schein’, ‘appearance’/‘illusion’, which he links to the idea

of art as ‘play’.^39 He thinks of ‘Schein’inrelation to Hegel’s idea that

art is the ‘sensuous appearing of the idea’, which contrasts for Hegel

with philosophy’s supposed overcoming of the sensuous. In an essay,

‘Little Heresy’, on understanding music, in which he reflects on the

relationship between hearing the parts and hearing the whole, Adorno

points to the dilemma of ‘Schein’: ‘The light of the beauty of details, once

perceived, obliterates the illusion (‘Schein’) with whichBildungcovers

music and which is all too complicit with music’s dubious aspect: the

aspect which says that music is already the happy whole which humanity

has until today denied itself’ ( 17 : 302 ). In one obvious sense musicisjust

appearance, and it is necessarily linked to the idea of play (although

if one thinks of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language game’ the sense

that music lacks ‘reality’ because it is play is already diminished). The

happiness that music can convey with regard to the concrete historical

world is merely a promise, and may not be fulfilled. Adorno’s point,

though, is more emphatic, because he links music’s being appearance

with its ideological creation of the illusion of a ‘happy whole’, which he

sees as getting in the way of realising that whole.

Take an extreme example: the target of Adorno’s conception is the

sort of aestheticism which leads audiences in the Nazi period to enjoy

39 The meaning of ‘Schein’ depends very much on the context of its use. I shall here
sometimes use ‘appearance’ and sometimes ‘illusion’, but will also retain the German
term when both senses play a role in understanding the term.