384 music, philosophy, and modernity
Aesthetics, language, and musicIf Rorty is serious about the aestheticisation of philosophy he might,
then, pay rather more attention to the resources offered by the aesthetic
tradition. The reason he doesn’t is that he wants, following Gadamer, to
get away from the ‘standard Kantian cognitive-moral-aesthetic distinc-
tion’, which reduces all issues not amenable to universal agreement to
being ‘merely a matter of taste’ (Rorty and Vattimo 2005 : 31 ). Avoiding
this reduction seems to me a desirable aim (cf. Bowie 1997 , 2003 b).
However, things are not as simple as Rorty tries to make them. In the
Critique of JudgementKant himself calls the cognitive-moral-aesthetic
division into question, suggesting that shared feeling, of the kind
required in claims about beauty, as opposed to claims about the merely
private ‘agreeable’, is also required for agreement in cognition (see
Bowie 2003 b: ch. 1 ). Dieter Henrich makes Kant’s idea plausible in his
Schleiermacher-influenced assertion, cited in chapter 5 , that ‘language
can only be understood as a medium, but not as the instrument of agree-
ment. Subjects cannot agree on the use of language, because the agree-
ment would itself already presuppose its use. From this it follows that
taking up communication presupposes a real common ground between
subjects who mutually relate to each other’ (Henrich 1999 : 71 ). This
common ground cannot be conceived of in conceptual terms, because
that would precisely require language, which the common ground is
supposed to make possible in the first place.
Such common ground can be apparent in the practice of music. Rela-
tionships between beings endowed with what Schleiermacher termed
‘immediate self-consciousness’ can be constituted in gestures, as well as
in other modes of articulation and expression, such as music or danc-
ing. These may be more important than what is articulated verbally, as
their role in all human cultures makes clear.^8 Moreover, what is at stake
in Kant’s attention to aesthetics is not necessarily part of the attempt,
as Rorty sees it, to separate ‘hard and soft’ areas of culture. Even in
its Kantian form aesthetics is also to do with whatconnects‘hard’ and
‘soft’ areas, by pursuing (even as it admits that it can never be achieved
in reality) the goal of making subjective judgements capable of com-
manding universal assent. Rorty’s remarks about concepts and the use
of words can, therefore, be interpreted in a direction which he does
not countenance because of his conviction that looking beyond the
linguistic will entail an appeal to epistemological foundations, and so
lead us back into ontotheology.
8 The very fact that the likes of the Taliban seek to ban these things underlines the point.