Music, The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzche's ... - Nietzsche Circle

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Here Adorno underlines the newest of new music (for Adorno then and we could say,
still for us today), “That Beethoven never goes out or date is connected, perhaps, to the
fact that reality has not yet caught up with his music:”
For Adorno what sounds in Beethoven is a “‘real humanism’”, 159 as Adorno sets this
in “humanism” in scare quotes, and I think we can read this as Nietzsche’s human, all too
human and yet and still musical dissonance. This dissonance takes us to everything
magical about us — that is music — and everything wretched and base about us and
about what we do. It is no accident that Adorno also writes about the transfiguration of
music in the age of mechanical, technological, today we add digital reproduction. And it
also just as deliberate that Adorno’s uncanny quote, “Animals play for the idealist system
virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism,” 160 it is “humanity” that appears in the
same locus where Adorno adverts to Beethoven’s “lack of feeling for animals,” drawing
in the same locus a parallel with Kant and indeed to the dirty bargain that is the bargain
of the enlightenment’s claim to ethical dignity by the expedient of handing it off to
humans alone and at the exclusion of all and of whatever others, changing from time to
time in human history but always excluding animals and always excluding nature (a
paradise for us, that worldly world to which we are sent when we are expelled from
whatever original garden would not have us), as theorists, especially critical, especially
social but also media theorists annihilate the very idea. This too Derrida would have
learnt from Adorno:
A capacity for moral self-determination is ascribed to human beings as an
absolute advantage – as a moral profit – while being covertly used to legitimize
dominance – dominance over nature …Ethical dignity in Kant is a demarcation
of differences. It is directed against animals. Implicitly it excludes man from
nature, so that its humanity threatens incessantly to revert to the inhuman. It
leaves no room for pity. Nothing is more abhorrent to the Kantian than a
reminder of man’s resemblance to animals. 161
For Nietzsche, pointing to the encounter with the inviolable, with the limit, with the
abyss, it is not only ethics but science itself, in the insights of both Kant and
Schopenhauer, that suffers shipwreck and disaster (BT §15). Such tragic knowledge, such
insight into the tragic condition, Nietzsche argues requires, just and in order to be borne
at all, art itself “as protection and remedy.” (Ibid., cf. BT §25)