190 music, philosophy, and modernity
fact that the whole will always produce anew from what is destroyed.
Obviously this is not supposed to be redemption in a theological sense.
The idea is instead that, because there is no other life, one has to affirm
this one in all its destructiveness and transience. Not to do so would
be the ultimate waste of what possibilities life offers, and would mean
living life by trying to repress what it really is. Nietzsche thinks that the
view of art as a form of necessary deception that ‘justifies existence’
advanced by Schopenhauer and his earlier self essentially does this. His
new approach introduces a different sense of temporality, in which the
transience of music ceases to be a deficit.
The complicating factor here is that the later Nietzsche’s charac-
terisation of Dionysus is, in some respects, analogous to Hegel’s con-
ception of the absolute, in which all particulars are ‘negative’ and
only the whole is positive, so that insight into the necessity of nega-
tion is the highest philosophical insight. Hegel’s immanentist philoso-
phy, which rejects any fundamental dualism between the empirical and
the intelligible has, as we already saw in Brandom, been interpreted
in an ‘anti-metaphysical’ manner which brings it closer to Nietzsche’s
refusal of a dualism of the temporal and the eternal. The ambivalence
in Hegel interpretations is inherent in the ambivalence of the signif-
icance of tragedy and music apparent in the differences between the
later Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The essential problem is how the
destruction of the parts via the way they relate to the whole is under-
stood with regard to metaphysics and music in modernity.
Hegel famously used the idea of the ‘Dionysian’ in thePhenomenology
of Mind, where he talks of ‘the True’, in a manner which could be applied
to a Beethoven symphony, as the ‘Bacchic frenzy in which no member is
not drunk; and, because each, as it separates itself, just as immediately
dissolves itself, the frenzy is equally transparent and simple tranquillity’
(Hegel 1970 : 47 ). Without the dissolution of each finite particular into
the totality there could be no advance in truth, but there would also be
no truth but for all the particulars that manifest the truth, even as they
dissolve: ‘appearance is the emergence and disappearance which itself
does not emerge and disappear’ (ibid.). For Hegel, though, unlike
for Nietzsche, this conception of the primacy of the whole over the
parts is the source of a rationally articulated, teleologically constituted
philosophical system, even as he also describes the True in terms which
are associated with music and Dionysian states. Nietzsche rejects such
teleological conceptions on the grounds that they will detract from the
contingent possibilities of present life, in the name of a promise for