Phonograpic (continued)

A few odds and ends before philoso-rambling:

- Since this blog in large part revolves around a gimmick having to do with albums (albeit a gimmick interesting only to myself), I have to give big props to the clever idea the folks at Merry Swankster had. In the vein of the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament, they're having a March Madness showdown of the top albums of the '90s. Go check it out and vote on the matchups that have occured thus far - I'm banking on Daft Punk's Homework and Magnetic Fields to succeed well beyond their rankings and go far...who's the Duke of this bunch? Neutral Milk Hotel feels like Syracuse to me for some reason, and Radiohead is clearly the Tar Heels. Nirvana = Florida? (if Joakim Noah shoots himself and prevents a repeat of the NCAA championship, don't say I didn't warn you).

- Speaking of college basketball, I'm watching the Pac10 semis game between Wazzu and USC. I would LOVE a Wash State v. Oregon finals, but USC has managed to hold the lead for 3/4ths of the game. At least Cal did away with UCLA - meaning the Ducks are almost certainly winning this thing. UPDATE: Damn it, USC won. Well, that will make tomorrow's game more exciting, since I get to root for a team I like against a team I hate.


And now to continue the train of thought from the other day. There I laid out a brief sketch of Schopenhauer's thoughts on music, to touch upon the notion that there might be a connection between truth and music...could music have significance not only for aesthetics, but for epistemology?

Speaking very broadly, the common conception of truth is founded upon the model of vision. A thought or state of affairs is seen as one intricate image (or, if it temporally complex, akin to a video clip), and its veracity lies in the extent to which this mental picture comports with a real picture of the physical world. It has always been recognized that appearances can be decieving, but to address this problem it was assumed that the fault lay with the incomplete capacities of the human perspective, but the "divine mind" would have a perfectly clear picture of all Being. The notion that thinking is basically a kind of mental seeing (insight) has persisted in a number forms. The metaphysical was always built upon a bedrock of the physical being most pre-eminently visual (hence the close connections between eidos, forms, ideas, images, etc.)

Phenomenology differed from this insofar as it sought to subvert the dominance of metaphysical systems; most of the disputes that rage within the phenomenological tradition as to how successful each figure was at this. One way of reading the unfolding of thought amongst these figures is to see them as working to subvert the metaphysical assumptions made by their predecessor. In Derrida's view, Husserl and even to some extent Heidegger were affected by a metaphysics of presence. For Derrida, giving primacy to what is present to the senses in lieu of absent is a mistake; every phenomenon is instead a spectrum of presence and absence. (To defend Husserl, this may have been a reductionist view of him, given his emphasis on how every impression relies on forward protention and retention of the past). But confusion over how to interpret this reigns, largely because vision as a model for truth does not give leeway for there being a spectrum; either you can see something or you can't. Blurriness doesn't suffice (it doesn't incorporate the temporal element of differance, for instance).

Could this confusion be cleared up if we saw truth as more analogically related to hearing? Unlike sight, hearing operates not as an on or off switch, but only due to a complex concordance of spacings, distances, echos, resonances, etc. A thought is more like a musical chord than anything else - synthetic thought takes disparate moments in experienced life, joins them together, and rings forth their combined essence. As Heidegger rightly pointed out, untruth is not the privation of truth, but instead the same notes out of order...a note played in the wrong mode! Every truth contains untruth, just as every chord contains a number of octaves and off-tones (I don't know the technical terms for these things, I've forgotten most of my music theory background) that are subsumed into the dominant harmony.

This relationship has crept into language in a few specific ways. A "sound" theory is not just a "good" one - if you call a theory sound, then you are saying that it achieves a form of coherence not only internally, but also with the world at large...it is not just logically valid, but also an organizing principle that "rings true" with experience at large. And it is no accident that Husserl, when writing about the phenomenology of time, switched from visual examples to melodies, since no moment can appear as a moment unless it the mind also intends in any given moment the temporal contextual surroundings of the moment, the past and future knit together, the horizonal limits against which each tone reverberates so as to be heard at all.

The difficulties that one runs into trying to compare competing discourses of truth vis-a-vis experience are obviously much more complex than this, but perhaps finding more common ground is less a matter of trying to determine who is more metaphysical than whom, but instead seeing that many of the differences turn around the difficulty of trying to boil down thought to one of our senses, when our mind is comprised of a number of richer processes that interact in myriad ways.