Phonographic

Since my two greatest motivating influences behind these words shall be music and philosophy, I thought it would behoove me to say something regarding the intersection of the two.

Typically the only times one would consider the role of music in philosophy would be through aesthetics. Two prominent examples are in Kant and Schopenhauer. The former does not delve into music with too much detail, but simply put it is a representational artform if it derives from notation, but not representational otherwise. Music is vastly more central to Schopenhauer's philosophy, but Kant's general positions on aesthetics are still crucial for accessing the baseline assumptions of Schopenhauer (along with most other subsequent aesthetic theorists). In a super-tiny nutshell, Schopenhauer's philosophy in World as Will and Representation stems from a (kind of crappy) reading of Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and the objectified representational world that humans can sense. Only moral feeling gives us any access to the "real" world (since our senses are mere representations of this world), and this "real" world is a single, unitary, Will that is ever changing and ever devouring. This Will has nothing but need, and Schopenhauer sees this as the root cause behind all change...a never satisfied, bleak, and hopeless desire for re-formation.

Schopenhauer's main interest, then, lies in how to escape from the clutches of this Will. While his ultimate solution lies in some weird combined mystical/Christian/Buddhist meditation stuff that isn't important here, the main "distraction" for Schopenhauer lies in aesthetics. Because art is a manner of appreciation without particular desire (stemming from Kant's theory of how art awakens a "purposive-less purpose", since beauty is not a need or want that seeks fulfillment), it temporarily frees one from being subjected to the Will as desire. He then ranks the arts in order of how objectifying they are - meaning, how much they put someone in the purely contemplative state. Music ranks highest of all the arts on this scale, for a few reasons: 1. There is no "material" to sound, which means there is no matter that can be desired as a particular and thus break one out of the desire-less contemplation. An example of what is meant here could be seen with the statue of David - the kind of pleasure one takes in comprehending the work as a whole is quite different from the pleasure one might get from rubbing their hands on the cool marble. (This distinction will be collapsed in interesting ways by Heideggerian aesthetes). 2. Because there is no object to which a musicial performance is tied to, it is freed to picture and objectify the Will in any particular mode in which it shows itself (When I speak of "mode" here, think kind of Spinoza...in fact, Schopenhauer is in many ways a Spinozist who thinks that substance is kind of vaguely evil, and uses Kantian distinctions and theology to try and find a way out of it, strange as that description sounds). Thus, a rousing line from the trumpets can represent the start of a historical battle without being tied down to a particular "this" or "that", which objectifies the Will to the highest extent, and thus allows for the highest form of aesthetic contemplation.

When you step back from the terminology for a second, it is clear that Schopenhauer thinks that music offers a solution to his very particular kind of mind-body problem...music is free to represent mental objects in a way that sculpture, art, dancing, and even poetry cannot. While poetry lacks any sort of physical material, Schopenhauer sees the words that comprise poetry to be sedimentary in a sense, in that they refer directly to specific things...music has no referent in the phenomenal world at all. But he still insists that music "makes sense" even if nothing else particular existed at all...the upswell of Becoming sounds out in the roll of a timpani, for instance. Music is a non-representational mental connection that bears a different relationship to language than any other art form.

Oops, I meant to just namedrop Schopenhauer before moving on to the relationship between music and truth...but that kind of unfolded on its own. But that's ok, it is relevant - I'll just continue this train of thought tomorrow (and anything related to both philosophy and music I'm going to call "phonographic", which is a word play that is in one way obvious but also means a "clear musical insight", or perhaps "musically clear insight"...what is musical vision?)