conclusion 409of reconciliation, or whether it can offer a kind of reconciliation which
does not conjure away real problems. Barenboim offers a more positive
way of thinking about what leads Nietzsche and Adorno to a negative
conclusion, when he talks of music, which ‘is so clearly able to teach
you so many things’, being also able to ‘serve as a means of escape from
precisely those things’ (ibid.: 122 ). It is the power of this combination
from which the practice of philosophy can learn, if it is not to become
irrelevant to many issues which deeply affect people’s lives.
Take the following example, from the area we have been discussing,
of how structures in philosophy can exclude something essential. Many
major contemporary forms of conflict can, as suggested by the idea of
thedifferend ́ ,beseen in terms of the assertion of particularity and dif-
ference. If I see myself as identified by my not being what you, as Amer-
ican, Arab, European, Jew, etc., are, I constitute my identity by the same
operation as is the basis of inferentialism. In chapter 4 I questioned
Brandom’s strict distinction between texts which express claims, and
things which are described by claims, because it left too little scope for
communication that does not take the form of claims. In the present
case it is clear that claims alone, however well backed-up with justifi-
cations, will not produce a way beyond an impasse between opposed
groups of the kind characteristic of the situation in the Middle East.
If my identity is predicated on an inferentialist form of exclusion, thus
on a claim to which I think I am entitled, there would seem to be no
obvious way beyond it. Impasses that result precisely from trying to win
arguments are a factor in everyday life, especially, of course, in close
relationships. This suggests one way of understanding how philosophi-
cal approaches which rely predominantly on argument may suffer from
a vital deficit. Reliance on argument evidently makes sense for issues
that come in the causal domain, but in the world of communicative
reason it may not. Do we always resolve a dispute with somebody on
the basis of winning or losing the argument, rather than finding some
other way of responding to the dispute? It is hardly an exaggeration to
suggest that the very functioning of modern culture may be predicated
on the need for forms of interaction, such as music, which do not rely
on agreement on explicit ideas, and many kinds of philosophy would
do well to take more note of this.
The beginnings of a way beyond the establishing of identity by
exclusion may therefore have to do with what is apparent in Adorno’s
comment, cited in my discussion of Brandom, that ‘Works of art
point, as it were, judgementlessly to their content without it becoming