MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

adorno 369

The key to the issue of music and philosophy here is indicated in

the following passage: ‘Mahler’s music anxiously preserves in itself the

soothing, healing quality which tradition ascribed to music since time

immemorial as the power to banish demons, and which yet pales into a

chimera in the face of the extent of the disenchantment of the world’

( 13 : 178 ). The point of Adorno’s view of disenchantment can be shown

as follows. For those directions in modern philosophy which are associ-

ated primarily with the natural sciences disenchantment simply reveals

the false nature of the beliefs that precede it. One of the major problems

of modernity is, though, as my reference to metaphysics 2 is intended

to suggest, that the significance of these false beliefs cannot be con-

jured out of the world merely by demonstrating their undoubted fal-

sity. Hence the association of the need to mourn with such a demon-

stration. Fascism and the rise of the contemporary religious right and

Islamism in the Western world have, for example, at least in part to do

with the failure to fill gaps left by disenchantment.^38 The pivotal role

of Mahler in interpreting Adorno’s positions on music and philosophy

lies in Mahler’s ability to evoke hope even as he undermines it and

mourns its loss, thus in the truthfulness of his presentation of the fate

of attempts to make a better world in modernity.

It is no coincidence that Mahler occasions some of Adorno’s best

writing on music. In it Adorno exemplifies what I mean by ‘musi-

cal philosophy’: the text is illuminated by the music and at the same

time illuminates the music. Rather than subordinating music to a pre-

established philosophical aim, the writing tries to do justice to it, includ-

ing with regard to its significance for philosophy. Adorno does not claim

to give a definitive representation of the music’s meaning, but responds

to it in a manner that allows it to unfold its potential. Take, for example,

Adorno’s response toDas Lied von der Erde, where he considers how the

‘earth’ is understood in the piece:

The first song says that it stands firm for a long time – not eternally – and

the one who says farewell even calls it the dear earth, as it is disappearing.

For the work [i.e.Das Lied]it[the earth] is not the universe, but what

fifty years later someone flying at a great height may have caught up with,

a star. For the gaze of the music which is leaving the earth it curves into

a surveyable sphere, in the way it has in the meanwhile already been

photographed from space: not the centre of creation, but something

tiny and ephemeral... But the earth which has moved far away from

38 Ernst Bloch always insisted on the need to see the effects of disenchantment in this way.