Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger

Wesley Phillips

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349566617, 9781137487247
• eBook ISBN: 9781137487254
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

1

Melancholy Science as Dissonant System

Resignation and the infinite task

Ever since Adorno was reproached by his students in the late 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has been accused of resignation.¹ By determining contemporary society as totally reified, the charge goes, Adorno’s critical theory thereby denies its own agency for social change (to reify means to turn subjectivity into a thing). Adorno had already defined his project as ‘the melancholy science’, the only possible philosophy amidst conditions of ‘damaged life’ – and does not melancholy suggest resignation?² Adorno’s more recent detractors have included Italian radical thinkers. For Antonio Negri (writing with Michael Hardt), Adorno’s critical theory represents a form of ‘deconstruction’ at a time when what is required is ‘constructing, in the non-place, a new place.’³ And for Giorgio Agamben, ‘negative dialectics is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought, closer to the emotional tonality of Jean Améry than that of Benjamin.’⁴ What these statements share is the old charge of a decisive abstraction of theory from practice, understood here as construction and messianic event respectively.

It took a careful reader of Adorno to see that this problem in his thought was a consequence of the influence of neo-Kantian philosophy on many German theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In her Melancholy Science (1978), Gillian Rose offered what is still the most detailed – though by no means apologetic – introduction to Adorno’s thought. But by the time of Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), Rose would fault a turn away from the speculative whole in Adorno and others. Adorno’s underlying philosophical motivation remained neo-Kantian, Rose suggests there and in subsequent essays, in its affirmation of the unrealisability of the whole by way of its regressively infinite deferral.⁵ In spite of the under-examined nature of Rose’s categorisation of Adorno under ‘neo-Kantian Marxism’, supporting evidence for her verdict can indeed be found in the critical theorist’s most openly philosophical work, Negative Dialectics (1966).⁶ Adorno concedes from the outset that ‘praxis’ is ‘postponed indefinitely’.⁷ Praxis is not thereby ruled out. But that praxis is postponed indefinitely raises the problem of the infinite task, a maxim of much neo-Kantianism. Is the infinite task a possible task, or is it rather a form of waiting in vain? If the melancholy science involves an infinite task then it invites those problems associated with the Kantian antinomy of reason, later replicated in neo-Kantianism under different circumstances to those of Kant himself.

Rose reassured her reader that the ‘melancholy science is not resigned, quiescent or pessimistic.’⁸ But by the time of her Hegel study, she seemed to uphold a more traditional and denigrating association of melancholy with sickness, without examining the nature of this sickness. Freud distinguished ‘melancholia’, the masochistic displacement of the ego for the lost beloved, from ‘mourning [Trauer]’, which works through the loss of the beloved. When ‘completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.’⁹ Freud’s distinction serves to indicate that melancholy is not one-dimensional in philosophy as in psychoanalysis. The disavowal of the whole is the philosophical counterpart to the disavowal of the lost object, masochistically enjoyed and thus constantly reaffirmed. Rose was right to raise the problem of neo-Kantianism in Adorno and contemporary radical thought. But her turn against Adorno can equally be understood as a consequence of her previous under-examination of melancholy.¹⁰ As Rose would have known, the melancholy science translates die traurige Wissenschaft – hence, Trauer and not Melancholia.¹¹ Following Rose’s cue, but resisting her conclusions (Hegel alone), this chapter will situate Adorno within a tradition of melancholy scientists as a way of rescuing him from the flames of the regressively infinite task. In particular, Adorno’s ongoing appropriation of Benjamin’s early reflections on language prove fundamental to Adorno’s understanding of metaphysics and experience. This appropriation is often filtered through Adorno’s writings on music.

Neo-Kantianism emerged in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a symptom of and response to both the decline of idealism and the rise of the natural sciences. Neo-Kantianism attempted to read Kant scientifically by formally separating out the questions of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ – the Marburg and Baden schools tending to follow these two concerns respectively – and by reading Kant’s metaphysically derived transcendental deduction empirically. For Rose, this drastic division of philosophical labour into ‘validity’ and ‘value’ not only signalled the demise of any speculative interest in the whole – a philosophical prerequisite for historical materialism – but also gave rise to a generation of thinkers that tended to approach their object as something already given, only to become preoccupied by questions of method.¹² Since Rose’s critique is Hegelian (the early, Jena Hegel), many of her criticisms are equally applicable to Kant’s own transcendental idealism. Indeed, Rose could have said in Hegel Contra Sociology that the neo-Kantian dualism of value and validity is set up in Kant’s failure to mediate his theoretical and practical projects. The Critique of Pure Reason uncritically required the subsequent critiques to ground its concept of freedom, the unconditioned (this is why the German idealists always read Kant backwards). In the first Critique, reason is set out as the uniquely rational task arising from its antinomical structure. The critique of pure reason shows the task of reason to be critique, the pursuit of knowledge. This has justifiably been termed Kant’s ‘intellectual categorical imperative.’¹³ Upholding the principle of sufficient reason, Kant conceives of the task of reason in terms of the pursuit of knowledge ‘conditions [Bedingungen]’. If ‘the conditioned is given’, states Kant, ‘then the whole sum of conditions, and hence the absolutely unconditioned, is also given, through which alone the conditioned was possible.’¹⁴ Kant uses ‘given’ in two opposing senses here. The conditioned is given in experience, as appearance – whereas the sum of conditions, which is (the) unconditioned, is given as an ‘idea’, not in experience. As with the thing-in-itself, the unconditioned is the necessary ground of appearance (‘through which alone the conditioned was possible’), yet this metaphysical realm is not available to experience itself. Since the unconditioned can only be known in this way, each of the four antinomies refer to the question of whether the unconditioned is finite or infinite – that is to say, effectively, whether the unconditioned is or is not. The problem is that the antinomies are answers, not questions. Hence Adorno writes of the third antinomy that, ‘each thesis and antithesis is developed as non-contradictory in itself. To that extent, the antinomy is by no means comfortably dismissed, but rather its inevitability is demonstrated.’¹⁵ Elsewhere in Negative Dialectics, Adorno defends infinity without considering these problems.¹⁶ He equally tends to understand Kantian critique as the direct anticipation of Hegel’s determinate negation, as if the antinomy were already that which Kant himself termed it: ‘dialectic’ (see Chapter 5).¹⁷ Adorno thereby overlooks Hegel’s overall Aufhebung of Kant’s ‘abstract reason’ in the name of ‘actual reason’ – the cue for Rose’s Hegelian attack upon neo-Kantianism.

Kant’s antinomy of reason is ‘given to us as a problem’ (both ‘Problem’ and, more commonly in the Critique, ‘aufgegeben’, as in Aufgabe, task).¹⁸ But since the antinomy is constitutively insoluble, Kant must in the end side with infinity, as the infinite task of reason itself. Crucially, Kant’s serial paradigm of conditions looks like what Hegel will term the ‘bad infinity’.¹⁹ According to Heidegger, another critic of neo-Kantianism,²⁰ the second edition of the first Critique ‘helped to prepare the turn away from an uncomprehended finitude toward a comforting infinitude’.²¹

Rose thus lost patience with Adorno’s melancholy science. What was the ground of Adorno’s critique of reason, if Adorno’s critique was to be without foundations? Which reason, if any, made critical theory possible? Aside from the crucial passage on ‘waiting in vain’, the ‘Meditations on Auschwitz’ section at the end of Negative Dialectics ultimately relies (it is argued in Chapter 5) on a Kantian philosophy of reflection, and on the conflation of antinomy with dialectic. The disintegration of the philosophical tradition ‘after Auschwitz’ calls for a new understanding of philosophical reason and of metaphysics. But Adorno’s response at this point is seemingly taken from that same tradition. Nonetheless, Adorno’s metaphysics is not exclusively Kantian. His writings on music in particular point towards an alternative, ostensibly post-Kantian tradition.

Language, system, music

Adorno’s writings on music almost always reflect upon something other than music. Language is a case in point. And it is through the problem of language that Adorno addresses one aspect of the problem of philosophy. This is because Adorno’s concept of language is filtered through the early writings of Benjamin, especially after the war (in the context of his co-editing of Benjamin’s writings with Gershom Scholem). Like Benjamin, Adorno contends that the problem of philosophy lies immediately in its mode of presentation. For, ‘presentation [Darstellung] is not a matter of indifference or external to philosophy, but immanent to its idea’.²² The question of presentation is immanent to the question of the possibility of philosophy to the extent that the philosophical system is the mode of presentation of the whole. The problem of the system and of the whole already impinges upon the problem of infinity, introduced above – either because the whole is said to be inexpressibly infinite or because the system incorporates that infinity within it.

The problem of presentation leads to questions about the signifying status of language, since language is the medium of meaning. The system that represented the whole would have rendered language as transparent to itself. Such a system would be a language beyond language, resulting in a dualism that would paradoxically signal the impossibility of the system and of language. But this impossibility only follows from an exclusively representational paradigm of language. Benjamin refers to this problem in the ‘Epistemo-critical Prologue’ to his Origin of the German Trauerspiel (published in 1928). According to Benjamin’s philosophy of language, the whole world may be read as a text, since the world is itself a context of meaning in the broadest sense. Benjamin here invokes Hermann Cohen’s work on logic, only to transgress its rationalism (Benjamin and Scholem had followed the Jewish neo-Kantian’s work closely during the early 1920s). This is undoubtedly the source of Adorno’s remark about Darstellung:

It is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of presentation [Darstellung]. In its finished form philosophy will, it is true, assume the quality of doctrine [Lehre], but it does not lie within the power of mere thought to confer such a form. Philosophical doctrine is based on historical codification. It cannot therefore be evoked more geometrico.²³

The attempt to re-present the logos ‘more geometrico’ is a ‘renunciation of that area of truth towards which language is directed’ because logos as language is constitutive of the presentation of philosophy itself. The Latin phrase refers to the rationalist systems that deployed a mathematical criterion of representation – as if philosophy were the measure of an already given whole, not a ‘historical’ and hence mutable one. In Benjamin, we find a distinction between the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza on the one hand – who introduced their systems with the epigram on geometric method – and Leibniz on the other, upon whom Benjamin will partly rely for his idea of the monad. This contradictory approach to rationalism, to early modern philosophy, explains the contradictory ‘harmony of the spheres’ of the ‘Prologue’ itself, as we shall see (The relationship between Spinoza and Leibniz is in any case complicated by the reception of Spinoza in modern philosophy. Moreover, Benjamin’s rationalism critique remains pertinent to the more recent turns to Spinoza in radical thought). Benjamin’s critique of Kantianism always risks lapsing into a precritical dogmatism. The ‘Epistemo-critical Prologue’ contains many dogmatic moments, but Benjamin ultimately maintains the question of presentation. Benjamin does not reject the system as such, but rather responds with a mode of presentation that is systematic yet fragmentary – hence, ‘systematicity’. Benjamin attempts to circumvent the formal logic of representation with a mode of presentation called constellation. Adorno will reformulate Benjamin’s constellation amidst a renewed questioning of the possibility of philosophy as metaphysics.

Adorno is attracted to the negativity of the antimony as a critique of systematic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Melancholy Science as Dissonant System
• 2  Twisting Free With/Of Wagner
• 3  The Dialectical Image of Music
• 4  Invincible in the Wasteland? Music, Space and Utopia
• 5  The Expression of Waiting in Vain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index