adorno 325practice of music. Now compare this situation with Wellmer’s criticism
of the Habermas–Apel idea of truth as a regulative idea based on the
aim of ‘final ultimate consensus’.
Wellmer shows that the idea of truth-oriented inquiry depends on an
asymmetrical relationship between two ways of thinking of truth. I want
to relate these to the idea of right interpretation and the inherent fail-
ure completely to realise it in practice. In the first person, my conviction
of the truth of something is inseparable from my sense that it is justified,
so that there is ‘an internal connection between truth and justification’
(Egginton and Sandbothe 2004 : 102 ). My understanding of what truth
isdepends on my understanding that what I hold to be true is justified.
I may very well be wrong, but I cannot assume that I am always wrong
without losing themeaningof what it is to be right. In judging music,
both as listener and as performer, something similar applies: I must
have some ability to distinguish between right and wrong for any criti-
cal awareness to be possible at all. My view of someone else’s conviction
of the truth of something, on the other hand, presupposes that they
hold the conviction for reasons (otherwise I would again not under-
stand truth), but, unlike in my own case, it isalwayspossible for me to
think that those reasons fail to legitimate their conviction.
Wellmer contends that the absence of a pre-given or universally
agreed set of what really are good reasons means that invoking good rea-
sons entails ‘the adoption of an attitude with normative consequences’
(ibid.: 103 ), in which we are obliged to give and defend reasons with no
foundational guarantees, not even the notional guarantee contained in
the idea of a final consensus.^12 What links these ideas to music has to
do with how we conceive of the normative consequences. Our compre-
hension of the notion of truth comes, Wellmer argues, from its internal
connection to justification, but that is also what makes truth congeni-
tally controversial, so the tension between consensus and disagreement
is constitutive: ‘just as every controversy about truth has its telos in an
uncoerced consensus, so does every consensus carry in itself the seed of
new disagreements’ (ibid.). Note how an analogous claim can apply to
musical judgements in the form both of verbal judgementsaboutand of
practical judgementsinperformance. Wellmer’s characterisation can
also be linked to Adorno’s view that there is a constitutive contradiction
between a score and how it is performed: the score implies a telos of true
performance, but actual performances reveal ongoing disagreements
12 The position is, as Wellmer says, close to that of Brandom.