106 music, philosophy, and modernity
immediacy to full conceptual determinacy, ( 2 )inestablishing how this
account can be understood in relation to key features of modernity, and
( 3 )inunderstanding exactly how Hegel is relevant to philosophy now.
I want, therefore, first to use Robert Brandom’s account of Hegel’s ide-
alism to clarify certain issues in Hegel, suggesting that music gives rise
to some instructive difficulties for Brandom’s project. This will enable
us in the following chapters to contrast the implications of a Hegelian
position with key Romantic ideas in Novalis, Schelling, and Schleierma-
cher, and to make more sense of the Wagner–Nietzsche relationship.
The latter thinkers do not regard philosophy’s role as consisting pri-
marily in the establishing of ever-increasing conceptual determinacy
(though they do not oppose such an aim), and they establish a differ-
ent way of thinking about music and philosophy, which is echoed in
later thinkers, like Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno.
Brandom’s project is directed against a strand of modern philosophy
which is also opposed by Heidegger and Adorno.^2 His argument begins
with the change in the conception of intentionality in modern philoso-
phy, from Descartes’ epistemological concentration on certainty, which
is based on the idea of mind’s representation of material contents in
the world, to Kant’s concentration on necessity, which is based on nor-
mative assessments grounded in the idea of conformity to rules. The
crucial consequence of this change is to see truth as inseparable from
normative commitments in the practice of social interchange, rather
than thinking of it in terms of adequate representation. Brandom devel-
ops a theory of ‘material inference’, which begins with what people
concretely do in making claims and justifying the commitments these
claims entail, rather than, as theories of logical inference do, relying
on logical rules which are supposedly what ground claims and render
them valid. Many of the inferences we make all the time are not formally
valid – Brandom gives the example of ‘It is raining, therefore the streets
will be wet’ – and depend on a range of other practices and kinds of
knowledge for their intelligibility, such as whether the streets of this
town are actually open to the skies, whether they have a special coating
which prevents them getting wet, or whatever. The reason for this choice
of approach is already fundamental to the hermeneutic tradition from
Schleiermacher onwards: the assumption of a priority of logical rules
generates a regress of rules for rules which gives no account of how
2 The discussion here has been revised in the light of comments by Jay Bernstein and
others. My thanks to them. See Bernstein’s comments on Brandom in Bernstein 2001.