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.