Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Form, feeling, metaphysics, and music
- 2 Music, language, and the origins of modernity
- 3 Rhythm and Romanticism
- 4 Hegel, philosophy and music
- 5 Music and the subjects of Romanticism
- 6 Music, freedom, and the critique of metaphysics
- 7 Pro and contra Wagner
- 8 Music, language, and being: Wittgenstein and Heidegger
- 9 Adorno: musical philosophy or philosophical music?
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
4 - Hegel, philosophy and music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Form, feeling, metaphysics, and music
- 2 Music, language, and the origins of modernity
- 3 Rhythm and Romanticism
- 4 Hegel, philosophy and music
- 5 Music and the subjects of Romanticism
- 6 Music, freedom, and the critique of metaphysics
- 7 Pro and contra Wagner
- 8 Music, language, and being: Wittgenstein and Heidegger
- 9 Adorno: musical philosophy or philosophical music?
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Music and the limits of inferentialism
Hegel is often interpreted as embodying the idea that philosophy's task is to bring together the conflicting elements of modernity into a new conceptual system. He can thus be seen as representing the kind of claim for the status of modern philosophy that I am using music to interrogate. His core idea is that initially indeterminate aspects of the world progressively become determinate via the creation of links between differing forms of interaction between subject and world, self and other. This process begins with the most primitive forms of ‘desire’ that impel the subject towards the other, and ascends to philosophical reflection on the nature of truth and knowledge. The aim is for philosophy to achieve the highest level of determinacy, which comes about by more and more thorough conceptual differentiation. Hegel sees this in terms of the development of ‘Geist’, by which he means thinking as socially mediated interaction with the world, away from the particularity of the sensuous world towards the non-sensuous universals which constitute the truth of that world. The aim of this chapter is to begin to develop a contrast, that can be highlighted by the issue of music, between Hegel's vision of philosophy and a Romantic vision of the kind looked at in the last chapter, which will be further considered in the following chapters. This contrast will make apparent a paradigmatic tension that recurs in thinking about music's relationship to philosophy in modernity, notably, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 6 and chapter 9, in the work of Adorno.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Music, Philosophy, and Modernity , pp. 105 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007