410 music, philosophy, and modernity
discursive. The spontaneous reaction of the recipients is mimesis
towards the immediacy of this gesture’ (Adorno 1997 : 7 , 363 ). Music
generally lacks explicit ideas of the kind conveyed by propositions, but,
as we saw Dahlhaus argue in chapter 5 , this does not mean that it is
vague or unspecific. Successful participation in music, whether as lis-
tener, performer, critic, teacher, etc., is as demanding as participation
in any discipline, because it requires specific intellectual and other
skills and emotional literacy. Such skills, which Adorno relates to the
mimetic, and which are illustrated by the two cellists, reveal the lim-
its of an inferentialism that relies predominantly on identification by
exclusion.
These ideas clearly do not immediately offer a great deal for prac-
tical politics, and I am not suggesting that the attempt to find ways
beyond intersubjective differences through argument be abandoned.
That would be absurd. What music does offer, though, is a way of grasp-
ing how what argument can achieve is embedded in aspects of human
life which concentration on argument can obscure. Barenboim gives
the example of how the temporality of music can inform our under-
standing of political failure when he talks of the ‘relationship between
the content and the time it takes’ in both cultural and political spheres.
He cites the failure of the Oslo peace accord between Israel and the
Palestinians as being the result of the tempo of the process not going
hand in hand with the content... there was something that was wrong
and, therefore, it could not have its own tempo. But this is absolutely,
for me, a parallel with playing music, where the content requires a given
speed, and if you play it at the wrong speed – in other words much too
slow or much too fast, and the whole thing falls apart.
(Barenboim and Said 2004 : 59 )What he is referring to cannot be described in purely theoretical terms
because the factors that are linked by temporality in the political situ-
ation and in music have to do with specific holistic connections which
are rooted in complex lived experiences and so cannot be learned just
by following theoretical descriptions.
It should be becoming clear by now that philosophical disagreements
may also lead to impasses that are analogous to those in the politico-
cultural realm. Philosophical argument about standard problems will,
of course, be perennial, if these continue to be relevant to the ways in
which we describe ourselves and the natural world. History makes that
clear. However, if the problem in question directly engages our lives,