Interesting Quote from Dahlhaus

[Alan Howe]

Well, Peter, the German philosophical tradition from Kant onwards is hardly known for clarity or precision of thought. Have you ever tried reading Hegel or Schopenhauer? So I'm not surprised that Dahlhaus is impenetrable...

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Huh! Well, I spent years of my life teaching Kant and Schopenhauer (but tried my best to steer clear of Hegel) and (says he with face proudly glowing red) was rated by my students as making these philosophers clear and intelligible. I don't have any problems with the tradition. In my mind all the convoluted nonsense belongs to 20th century French thought. But the best thing I've ever done is to turn my back on the whole thing, take early retirement, read interesting books rather than the semi-plagiarised efforts of students, discover more and more unsung composers (advocates of them on this site are largely to blame!), live well and happily on two pensions, and then utilise the very generous rewards of a 1 or 2 days a week fascinating job in the legal sphere to buy yet more CDs, travel a bit and attend lots of concerts. A chap doesn't need the German philosophical tradition for a good life! But enough of autobiography.

[Alan Howe]

The issue is not whether you can make Hegel or Schopenhauer comprehensible to students - after all that is what we teachers are paid to do, although in my view we probably have to do too much spoon-feeding these days. (By the way, when I was a student at Cambridge many moons ago, I had no-one to make such philosophers intelligible to me - it was totally up to me to get to grips with whichever one I was assigned and then to give a paper to the other German philosophy students.) The question is why they have to be made comprehensible in the first place - and the answer is that they are actually extremely difficult to read. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes is a readily accessible philosophical work, but I don't doubt that it can be made intelligible by those of us trained to teach it.

In the same way, I don't doubt that Dahlhaus can be made intelligible (although philosophy written in German often borders on the impossible as far as translation is concerned). What I suspect, though, is that Dahlhaus' philosophical musicology is basically nonsense; as Mark T. has pointed out, the infamous Dahlhaus symphonic black hole which had been swallowed whole by many writers on music has actually been comprehensively disproved over the past decade or so.