11 September: Hanslick, Jeans, Adorno and the question of what an interpreter may claim

Eduard Hanslick was born in Prague on 11 September 1825. James Hopwood Jeans was born in Ormskirk, in Lancashire, on 11 September 1877. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in Frankfurt on 11 September 1903. Clusters of this kind are usually an accident of the calendar and deserve to be treated as such; yesterday's entry said as much about its own.

This one holds together better than most, on a narrow point. All three men spent their careers on a question about warrant: how much an interpreter is entitled to say about an object that will not say it itself. Hanslick told a generation of critics that the emotions they heard in a symphony belonged to them and not to the music. Jeans told several hundred thousand readers that the equations of modern physics pointed to a mathematician standing behind the universe, and was informed, at length and in print, by a professor of philosophy in London, that they pointed to no such thing. Adorno held the hardest of the three positions — that the meaning is genuinely in the material and can never be said in other words — and is still mocked for the prose it produced.

Then there is the date itself. On 11 September 2001 something happened in New York which was handed to philosophers within weeks, with the question already attached, and two of the most eminent of them disagreed about whether the question could be answered at all.

Hanslick drew a line and then leaned on it#

Vom Musikalisch-Schönen appeared in 1854, a short book that went through ten editions in its author's lifetime and has never really gone out of the argument. Its notorious formula is that the content of music consists of tönend bewegte Formen — forms moved in sounding. Everything else that listeners report, the grief and the yearning and the triumph, Hanslick regarded as imported.

The argument beneath the slogan is better than the slogan. A definite emotion requires an object: you cannot simply hope, you hope for something, and the something is supplied by a thought. Instrumental music supplies no such thought. What it can present is the dynamic profile of feeling — rising, hastening, subsiding — which is why the same passage will be heard by one listener as ecstasy and by another as agitation. And arousal, he added, settles nothing about value; plenty of things stir an audience without being beautiful.

His career sat oddly with his doctrine. He was chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse from 1864 until his death, an unpaid lecturer at the University of Vienna who was made full professor of the history and aesthetics of music in 1870, and the most feared reviewer in the German-speaking world. Brahms dedicated the Op. 39 waltzes to him. Wagner went after him in the 1869 revision of his essay on Jewishness in music, and the carping pedant Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger was at one stage to be called Veit Hanslich, which is not subtle.

There is the awkwardness. A man who insisted that music has no extra-musical content spent four decades writing reviews in which Wagner's music stood for an entire cultural tendency, and a deplorable one. The formalism functioned as a rule for other people at least as often as a discipline on himself, and his bicentenary last year produced a good deal of rereading along that seam.

Adorno's difficulty was a claim about the object, not a mannerism#

Adorno took his doctorate at Frankfurt in 1924 under Hans Cornelius, with a dissertation on Husserl, and completed his habilitation in 1931. Exile followed, then Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer, circulated in 1944 and published in 1947, then Minima Moralia in 1951. He came back to Frankfurt in October 1949 and became co-director of the Institute for Social Research. Negative Dialectics came out in 1966; Aesthetic Theory was unfinished when he died and appeared in 1970.

The governing idea is the non-identical: the concept never quite closes over the thing it is applied to, and a philosophy that pretends otherwise has already falsified its subject. This is why he wrote as he did. The sentences turn back on themselves because the position forbids the summary that would make them easy.

On music the disagreement with Hanslick is total and interesting. Where Hanslick said the feelings are the listener's property, Adorno said the social content is really there in the forms, sedimented, hardened into what sounds like pure structure — and that it can be heard but not paraphrased, because paraphrase is precisely the operation that flattens it. Both men were defending music against a kind of chatter. They disagreed about which kind.

He is best known for a sentence he later withdrew. Writing in 1949, in an essay published in 1951, he said that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. Seventeen years later, in Negative Dialectics, he took it back:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

The withdrawal is rarely quoted by people who quote the original. He was also, for a supposed mandarin, a working broadcaster: "Erziehung nach Auschwitz" was a radio lecture given on Hessischer Rundfunk on 18 April 1966 and printed the following year, and it opens by saying that the demand that Auschwitz not happen again comes before every other demand made on education.

Not everything holds up. The essays on jazz are indefensible, resting on a sample he barely knew and a confidence he had not earned, and no amount of contextualising rescues them. His last months were miserable: students disrupted his lectures through the summer semester of 1969, three of them approaching the lectern and baring their breasts, and he cancelled the course and went to Switzerland, where he died on 6 August. Hanslick had died on 6 August too, in 1904. Two men who shared a birthday and disagreed about almost everything in the philosophy of music also share a death date, sixty-five years apart.

Stebbing's charge against Jeans was that he had changed subjects without saying so#

Jeans was a serious mathematical physicist before he was anything else: Trinity College, Cambridge, a fellow of the Royal Society at twenty-eight, professor of applied mathematics at Princeton from 1905 to 1909, and co-author of the radiation law that carries his name with Rayleigh's, whose failure at short wavelengths was one of the roads into quantum theory.

The second career began on 4 November 1930, when he gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge. The Mysterious Universe was published by Cambridge University Press the next day. The first printing of 10,000 went almost at once and some 70,000 copies had sold in Britain by the end of the year, helped by six weekly BBC talks under the title "The Stars in Their Courses". Its famous sentence has been quoted ever since: the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. The Great Architect, Jeans wrote, now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

L. Susan Stebbing published Philosophy and the Physicists in 1937. She had been appointed to a chair at Bedford College in 1933, the first woman in Britain to hold a full professorship in philosophy, and she was not impressed. Her main target was Arthur Eddington rather than Jeans — a qualification worth making, since Jeans is often described as her chief victim and was in fact the junior partner in the indictment. The objection applies to both. A physicist who says that a plank has no solidity of substance has not made a discovery about planks; he has borrowed an ordinary word, emptied it, and relied on the reader not noticing. Jeans's version of the trick ran from "our mathematics describes it" to "it is mathematical" to "a mathematician made it", and the work is done in the two joins. Stebbing thought the resulting conclusions cloudy speculation dressed as consequence.

She was not alone. Herbert Dingle, who admired Jeans's gift for explanation, wrote that he was darkening counsel, "not by words without knowledge, but, much more dangerously, by knowledge without equivalent balance of judgement". Wittgenstein told his students he loathed the book and called it a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.

Credit is owed on the other side. The British popular science book more or less begins here, and his later Physics and Philosophy, from Cambridge in 1942, is far more careful about what the equations will and will not license. He died at Dorking on 16 September 1946, five days after his sixty-ninth birthday.

In Manhattan, the disagreement was over whether the event could be named#

Giovanna Borradori, of Vassar College, interviewed Jacques Derrida in New York on 22 October 2001 and Jürgen Habermas in the same city that December. Philosophy in a Time of Terror came from the University of Chicago Press in 2003, each dialogue followed by an essay of Borradori's own.

Habermas thought the attacks might be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense, because they occurred in front of a universal eyewitness — the thing itself, not a report of it, watched live by a global public. On the attackers he was unsentimental and specific: fundamentalism is a modern formation rather than a survival, produced by the violence modernisation does to inherited certainties, and it goes wrong by treating a religious claim as if it settled a political one. Terror, on his account, sits at the end of a spiral of distorted communication, mistrust compounding until speech between the parties stops meaning anything. He rejected the word "war" for the American response, and not on sentimental grounds; calling it war grants the status of combatant to people who should be tried as criminals, and suspends law at the point where law is what is being fought over. His prescription was the unexciting one, and he knew it: international law, courts with teeth, the slow construction of cosmopolitan authority.

Derrida began by refusing the question. "When you say 'September 11' you are already citing, are you not?" The bare date, he pointed out, is doing the work of a concept nobody has yet supplied, and the compulsive repetition of it is a way of managing that lack rather than repairing it: "We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way." His term for what followed was autoimmunity — a system turning on its own defences. The apparatus that had armed and trained these men during the Cold War was the same apparatus now attacked by them; the measures taken in defence of liberties would suspend those liberties. And the trauma, he argued, lies in the future rather than the past. What terrifies is not what happened but what the event has shown to be possible.

The real difference is not temperamental. Habermas held that the vocabulary of law and public reason is adequate to the case and was simply used badly. Derrida held that the vocabulary is compromised, that "terrorism" cannot be defined without first deciding which states are legitimate, and that a remedy drawn from a system carries the system's pathology with it. Both nevertheless landed on international law, Derrida with the rider that its institutions would have to be remade rather than invoked.

They had been enemies for twenty years. Habermas's chapters in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) treated Derrida as an aestheticist who had abandoned argument; Derrida replied that he had not been read. Appearing between the same covers in 2003 was the visible end of the quarrel. On 31 May 2003 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried "February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together", on the demonstrations against the Iraq war, over both names — with a note explaining that Habermas had written it and that Derrida, prevented by personal circumstances from composing his own text, had signed. The philosopher who said we do not know what we are naming put his name to a text he had not written, about a date used as a name.

Four answers, then, to one question about warrant. Hanslick's was a prohibition, Adorno's a demand, Stebbing's a rule of evidence, Derrida's a confession that the concept had not arrived yet. Nothing else connects a Viennese critic, a Cambridge astronomer, a Frankfurt dialectician and a Manhattan interview, and pressing the coincidence harder than that would be the sort of move all four of them would have caught.