412 music, philosophy, and modernity
is, therefore, inescapable, but that brings its own problems, because the
historical explanation has to be of something which does not appear in
the objective world.
Let us take a paradigmatic example of opposed philosophical
accounts of self-consciousness, in order to suggest how the topic is
affected by music. The positions in question involve structures that
underlie many subsequent differences of position in the philosophy of
mind, so their significance goes beyond their initial historical manifes-
tations. The Hegelian answer to how one can comprehend something
which resists objectification but which can at the same time be consid-
ered to be a condition of possibility of objectivity is to regard subject
and world as inseparable. The apparent ‘emptiness’ of the transcen-
dental subject is ‘filled’ with the content of the world, so that the sub-
ject articulates the world with the means – including language, as what
Hegel terms the ‘existence ofGeist’–which the world itself provides.
Self-consciousness therefore cannot be understood in isolation from
the intersubjective and objective world which subjects inhabit. Man-
fred Frank and Dieter Henrich have, however, developed an objection
to this position that involves arguments from Fichte, the early Roman-
tics, and Sartre. The idea here is that mediated self-knowledge, which
comes about ‘reflexively’, by ‘self-recognition in the other’ of language
and society, cannot account for self-consciousness, because it has to
presuppose something that is prior to reflection. How can I recognise
myself and my thoughts asmine,ifIam not already familiar with myself
in a form which does not require the other? Seeing myself asmyself
in the mirror, which I can, of course, fail to do in any real-life case,
includes an awareness of myself that the mirror cannot provide. Ernst
Mach famously failed to recognise himself as the ‘shabby pedagogue’
whom he saw in a tram mirror, although he knew that he himself was
seeing a shabby pedagogue.
The Hegelian position makes possible considerable insights into the
historical and social constitution of the self, and it is very hard to dis-
agree that in many ways we become what we are by our relationships
to the other. The Frank–Henrich position, on the other hand, opens
up a dimension in which resistance to determination by the other is
possible, because my immediate sense of self can come into conflict
with the orders of the other, to which it cannot be reduced. In this
respect, the argument that self-consciousness is not reducible to its
social mediation also seems plausible. The nature of the connection
of such self-consciousness to the world seems, however, to play little