adorno 375ofDoE. However, his best engagements with the entanglement of music
and philosophy reveal how each can become a form of criticism, or an
illumination, of the other.
I began the chapter by claiming that Adorno can be regarded as a
‘post-metaphysical’ thinker. In the course of the chapter it should have
become clear that this status is itself ambivalent. Modern philosophy’s
response to the idea that traditional conceptions of metaphysics are no
longer tenable tends to split into directions which either seek to reduce
truth to verifiable scientific claims, or seek new ways of responding to
the needs formerly met by metaphysics and theology. Both directions
lead towards a heightened concern with language, the former mainly
in order to explain its ability to represent the world, the latter in order
to explore its expressive, world-disclosive nature. From Adorno’s per-
spective the former can be seen as failing to take account of the non-
identical, of those aspects of things which are not reducible to what can
be stated in assertions. What he criticises need not, though, just be con-
strued in the terms of his more contentious philosophical diagnoses.
When he talks of philosophy’s ‘suspended nature’ he is attempting to
steer clear of a philosophical method which will rigidly demarcate what
can be objectively established about language from what is therefore
merely contingent or subjective. Music can here become a metaphor
for the need for philosophy to be on guard against forms of articula-
tion that obstruct access to what can give human lives meaning. The
task is therefore to explore forms which, while not being reducible to
the terms of the dominant kinds of rationality, might also be able to
broaden the scope of rationality. Adorno shares with Wittgenstein the
sense that attempting to solve philosophical problems by giving theo-
retical answers might often be an inadequate way of approaching what
those problems tell us about our understanding of our lives. Instead
of music being a philosophical mystery, it becomes a new resource for
a critical self-understanding of modernity. Adorno may often not con-
vince in his specific judgements, but the directions suggested by his best
work are far from exhausted.