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‘absolute’ in modernity. Hegel wants to make philosophy into the complete articulation of Aesthetic theory and the end of art 141 what he thinks is only incompletely expressed in art and religion, the preceding forms of ‘absolute spirit’.1 What he means by this term can be understood in relation to the notion of ‘objective spirit’, the preceding, less developed form of Geist in his overall system. ‘Objective spirit’ is the realm which encompasses the history of attempts to overcome contradictions between the individual, the family and the state, which are manifest, for
more of an economist than often recognised (Fridén 1996), his conclusions stemmed more from ethical beliefs than from considerations concerning profitability. He sought to establish an ethical economic system. Arthur Schoppenhauer once described Rousseau as ‘undoubtedly the greatest moralist of all times’ (Schoppenhauer cited in Dent 1991: i). Not entirely accurate if one judges him solely on the less than flattering autoportrait in Les Confessions, but a philosophically accurate assessment given the thrust of Rousseau’s endeavour to challenge modernity and its
teleologically, as the locus of the realisation of reason. Instead he regards history as the zoology of the species mankind. The reasons that this view leads Schopenhauer to lend such importance to art take one to the core of some of the philosophical questions raised by aesthetics in modernity. Schelling regarded art as a means of coming to terms with the cognitively inaccessible motivating forces upon which reason is founded, and this gave art an active role in the subject’s self-understanding. Schopenhauer, in contrast, regards art as the only means of temporarily escaping
7 Music, language and literature Language and music The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. The attempt to explain language in representational terms in the empiricist tradition that eventually leads to analytical philosophy, and the understanding of language as a form of social action and as constitutive of the world we inhabit in the hermeneutic tradition give rise to very different conceptions of music. One paradigmatic
between our ears and in our hearts and souls. (Wekker 2016 : 19) Popular music is just such a repository; moreover, across south-east Europe ideas of ‘popular music’ are very often given meaning by relating them (by claims of continuity or performative distance) to folk traditions. South-east European folk music, in turn, has long been a symbolic resource in constructing collective cultural identities by ascribing or denying ‘modernity’ and ‘Europeanness’ to certain territorial
revaluation of the non-semantic medium of music in this period points to the sense that the resources of philosophy may be inadequate to the subject’s self-understanding in modernity. Perhaps the most disturbing question for the transcendental philosopher in all this, which is vital for the development of Romanticism, is why the absolute I should objectify itself at all in an intelligible world which includes ourselves. Either the absolute, the unity of subject and object, remains enclosed in itself as an undividable unity, which means that there would be no manifest world
modernity and blackness to their imagined opposite. They have also been subjected to racialising judgements themselves. Often, they have been involved in processes of racialisation running ‘up’ and ‘down’ simultaneously, even as the region's peripherality in European colonial history and its peripheralisation in the contemporary European economy have been adduced as reasons to disidentify Yugoslavia and its national identities from race. There are thus at least three modes for relating race to the Yugoslav region: a mode of indifference, colour-blindness or – to use the
4 Schelling: art as the ‘organ of philosophy’ Nature and philosophy One of the great issues which divides thinkers in modernity is the status of ‘nature’. If nature can no longer be said to have a theological basis, what determines how we are to understand what nature is? Kant’s ambivalence with regard to ‘nature’ suggest why this issue creates so much controversy. On the one hand, nature ‘in the formal sense’ is simply that which functions in terms of necessary laws, and is therefore the object of natural science; on the other, in the form of organisms and as
identifications with symbolic histories and geographies of race. They include not only identifications with ‘Europe’ as a space of modernity, civilisation and (critical race studies would insist) whiteness, but also analogies drawn between ‘Balkanness’ and ‘blackness’ in imagined solidarity, as well as the race-blind anti-colonialism of Yugoslav Non-Alignment (which, under Tito, cast the leader of this European country as a model of national liberation for the Global South). The Yugoslav region is increasingly likely to be thought of as ‘post-conflict’ and ‘postsocialist’, the
necessarily bound to the contingencies of their particular historical development, in which abstract and sensuous moments cannot be definitively separated. This fact should, however, he maintains, not be regarded as a problem. Instead, the historical specificity of languages should be seen as an opportunity, because Art and interpretation 187 it augments the possibilities for world disclosure. (The contrast between conceptions which see modernity as leading to nihilism and confusion, and those which see it as an opening of horizons is once more in evidence here.) It is in