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the regulative idea of truth, cannot be attained: ‘Identity of essence
and appearance is as little achievable for art as for cognition of the real’
(ibid.: 167 ). However, he has to rely on the idea of this goal of the abso-
lute when he maintains that music’s transience is what constitutes it as
mere appearance. He then argues, though, that ‘Geist’ (‘mind’/‘spirit’,
in the sense of that which makes things intelligible) is ‘non-being’, i.e.
lacks material existence, and that the ‘non-being in [works of art], for
the sake of which they exist, attains a however broken existence by dint
of aesthetic realisation’ (ibid.: 167 ).Geist’s need for material manifes-
tation in the configuration of the elements of the work of art makes the
work more than what it is as a material object, so that its appearance
is ‘methexis[Plato’s word for the participation of material things in the
forms] in truth’ (ibid.: 166 ).
The dialectical twists in this strand of Adorno’s thought are evidently
very hard to unravel. The main point is that the ‘broken existence’
realised byGeist’s appearance in art means that ‘Schein’ cannot, if the
metaphysical goal of ‘reality’ is inherently unattainable, simply be the
replacement for something ‘real’. The consequence of Adorno’s stance
is echoed in Wellmer’s objection to truth considered as a regulative idea:
in both cases the inaccessibility of the metaphysical goal forces one back
to what actually happens in language and in music. The implication
here would be that there may be nothing beyond the transcendence of
the given by the ‘broken existence’ of meaning in art. This transcen-
dence is, though, not the kind associated with traditional conceptions
of metaphysics. The centrality of music in Adorno’s relationship to phi-
losophy, and his ambivalence with regard to the philosophical idea of
music as ‘Schein’ result from this tension between art and the transcen-
dence of the given.
There is a friction in Adorno’s thinking between the ‘Schein’ which
participates in truth that is exemplified in Mahler’s music as a response
to modernity, and the idea that, were a humane state of the world to
become possible, a fulfilment could result which went beyond ‘Schein’.
The latter idea also informs Adorno’s conception of new music. Given
his view of the catastrophic nature of the dominant factors in moder-
nity, new music is obliged to deny ‘the meaning of organised society’,
and announce itself as mere ‘Schein’bybeing empty of meaning, rather
than be at all complicit in the given. This conception is, as we have
seen, unsustainable. It results from taking an extreme philosophical
interpretation of a particular historical constellation as the only key
to the truth of music. In my terms the friction involved in the idea of