hegel, philosophy, and music 107rules come to be understood and applied at all (see Bowie 1997 : ch. 1 ).
Our practices of justification must therefore be based on ‘a notion of
primitive correctnesses of performanceimplicitinpracticethat precede
and are presupposed by theirexplicitformulation inrulesandprinciples’
(Brandom 1994 : 21 –note already how this remark can apply to music).
Logical rules only express and make explicit what we always already do
as social actors in the world (see Bernstein 2001 ). Brandom explicitly
links his project to Hegel, suggesting that it ‘eats its own tail... pre-
senting an explanation of what it is to say something that is powerful
enough to explain what it itself is saying’ (Brandom 1994 : xx).
The link to our concerns is evident both in the notion of correct-
nesses of performance and in the fact that the Hegelian claim contrasts
with the early Wittgenstein’s contention that one cannot explain ‘log-
ical form’ as being what a proposition ‘must have in common with
reality in order to represent it’, a contention which he linked to music.
In Wittgenstein’s case the idea of the impossibility of explicating logical
form has to do with the representationalist assumptions of theTractatus,
which he will largely abandon in favour of a more pragmatic view, some
of which Brandom himself adopts. The idea that language is unable
to give an exhaustive account of its own content was also suggested by
Heidegger’s remarks in chapter 2 , which pointed in the direction of
music in a similar manner to Wittgenstein, while not relying on repre-
sentationalist premises.
The aspects of what Brandom proposes which regard language pri-
marily as human practice are in line with much of what I have been
arguing. Moreover, key aspects of the kind of Hegelian thinking on
which he draws will offer considerable illumination of the understand-
ing of music. However, Brandom’s adoption of Hegel also leads in direc-
tions which give rise to questions concerning the scope of philosophical
explanation. The main issue in the present context begins to become
apparent in the fact that music can be used to illustrate what Brandom
sees as the key operation in Hegel’s thought.
Hegel himself sees music in theAestheticsas exemplifying this oper-
ation, when he says of the tonic triad that it expresses the ‘concept of
harmony in its simplest form, indeed [it expresses] the very nature of
the concept. For we have a totality of different notes before us which
shows this difference just as much as undisturbed unity’ (Hegel 1965 :
2 , 296 ). Brandom sums up the operation which Hegel terms ‘determi-
nate negation’ as follows: ‘One understands items (for instance propo-
sitions or properties) as determinate just insofar as one understands