382 music, philosophy, and modernity
Intellectuals cannot live without pathos...Ifyoudonotlike the term
‘pathos’, the word ‘romance’ would do as well. Or one might use Thomas
Nagel’s term: ‘the ambition of transcendence’. The important point is
simply that both sides in contemporary philosophy are trying to gratify
one of the urges previously satisfied by religion. History suggests that
we cannot decide which form of pathos is preferable by deploying argu-
ments. Neither the realist nor her antirepresentationalist opponent will
ever have anything remotely like a knock-down argument, any more than
Enlightenment secularism had such an argument against theists.
(Rorty 1999 a)The realist’s transcendence would be the culmination of metaphysics 1 ,
although the transcendent world in itself independent of our
descriptions is inherently inaccessible to description. For anti-
representationalists metaphysics 2 can be regarded as the name for sec-
ularised forms of transcendence, which include such things as Rorty’s
liberal hope, Adorno’s ‘non-identical’, and, in the terms of the present
book, music.
Rorty’s claims about the limits of what can be achieved by argument
are highly contentious, especially if one adheres to the ‘realist’ side of
the debate. This is not least because of what they imply about the future
aims of philosophy. However, Rorty does not necessarily need a rigor-
ous argument for his claims: that would anyway be self-refuting, and,
whatever the aims of the realists, there simply are no generally accepted
arguments, even among realists, that achieve the degree of consensus
achieved by successful scientific theories. This does not mean that there
could not be such arguments, but history gives one a right to a provi-
sional inference that the evidence is not encouraging. The situation
is, then, that ‘Even if they admit that their opponents’ point admits
of no refutation’ both realists and anti-representationalist pragmatists
‘will remark, complacently and correctly, that it produces no convic-
tion’ (ibid.). Were this not the case there would have to be decisive
conclusions to philosophical debates that were based on knock-down
arguments, but again history tends to contradict this.
Rorty talks in this respect about his hope for ‘aestheticisation’ of
philosophy: ‘In the sort of culture which I hope our remote descen-
dants may inhabit, the philosophical literature about realism and anti-
realism will have been aestheticized in the way that we moderns have
aestheticized the medieval disputations about the ontological status of
universals’ (ibid.). A person’s relationship to philosophy may be defined
by the extent to which they concur with Rorty’s desire for a farewell to
so many of its up to now prevailing concerns. However, one does not