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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
1 Popular music and the ‘cultural archive’ This book began its Introduction, and begins its chapter structure, not in the mainstream of international affairs (the politics of state socialist Non-Alignment, or postsocialist European border control) but with what might seem a more distant topic: popular music. It does so because the everyday structures of feeling perceptible through popular music are a readily observable sign that ideas of race are part of identity-making in the Yugoslav region; proving this point opens the way to revisiting
In 1796 a German politico-philosophical manifesto proclaims the 'highest act of reason' as an 'aesthetic act'. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy is the focus of this book. The book focuses on the main accounts of the human subject and on the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics. Immanuel Kant's main work on aesthetics, the 'third Critique', the Critique of Judgement, forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The early Romantics, who, after all, themselves established the term, can be characterized in a way which distinguishes them from later German Romanticism. The 'Oldest System Programme of German Idealism', is a manifesto for a new philosophy and exemplifies the spirit of early Idealism, not least with regard to mythology. The crucial question posed by the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism (STI) is how art relates to philosophy, a question which has recently reappeared in post-structuralism and in aspects of pragmatism. Despite his undoubted insights, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's insufficiency in relation to music is part of his more general problem with adequately theorising self-consciousness, and thus with his aesthetic theory. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues in the hermeneutics that interpretation of the meaning of Kunst is itself also an 'art'. The book concludes with a discussion on music, language, and Romantic thought.
6 Epilogue: in the beginning was song And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. (John 1.5) We have (rather deliberately) said very little about the subject of music, as this is not obviously a part of Rousseau’s social philosophy. Yet music was – though scholars have often forgotten this1 – Rousseau’s main passion, and this passion spilled over into his political writings in more ways than one. Rousseau, the musician and note-copier, was an accidental philosopher. Had he not seen the prize question from the Academy in Dijon on
ideas of reason and nature. In order to see why, we need to consider certain aspects of the anti-Idealism of Schopenhauer and Marx, before turning in more detail to Nietzsche’s own texts. Schopenhauer: music as metaphysics The importance of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) for the work of the early Nietzsche is well established. However, it is not clear that Nietzsche’s rejection of Schopenhauer in his later work means that he in fact rejected all of the elements of Schopenhauer’s thought which had been central to his early texts. Schopenhauer is an interestingly
analogy to music, for which he otherwise does not have a great deal of philosophical time, talking of the ‘tuning/attunement’ (Stimmung) of the cognitive powers, which is differently ‘proportioned’, depending on the object in question, and which ‘can only be determined by feeling (not by concepts)’ (B p. 66). Whether this ‘common sense’ is a ‘constitutive principle of the possibility of experience’ or only a ‘regulative principle’, for creating ‘a common sense for higher purposes’ (B p. 68), Kant leaves open. However, he does insist that we necessarily presuppose such a
universal structures of contradiction and resolution of contradiction that make up the Logic itself. Music and the Idea Hegel’s Logic is ‘abstract’ because it has to be independent of anything ‘concrete’ in the empirical world. Characteristically, in Hegel’s terms, this actually makes it concrete, because without abstraction the truth of the concrete cannot be revealed. The apparently most concrete, the sensuous immediacy of what is in front of you as you read this sentence, is indeed ‘abstract’. It omits all the complex mediations required for you to be reading it at all
, that I think it is the case, otherwise the possibility of self-correction becomes incomprehensible. Furthermore, feeling is for Schleiermacher the basis of forms of awareness and articulation which cannot be reduced to the terms in which we can verbally articulate them. The link to music is vital here. Although the notion of feeling is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Schleiermacher’s thought, it does point to a dimension which is sometimes neglected or glossed over in much philosophical discussion of language. We evidently must rely, for example, on verbal
see, to vital changes in both the production and reception of music. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy will form the focus of my investigation. Modern philosophy begins when the generally accepted basis upon which the world is interpreted ceases to be a deity whose pattern is assumed to have already been imprinted into the universe. The new philosophical task is therefore for human reason to establish its own legitimacy as the ground of truth. This transformation is prepared in the
, synthetic nature of … supposed folk music’. 15 Here he moves close to the critique of demagogic appeals to ‘community of the people’/V olksgemeinschaft discussed in the previous chapter. For the other Volk revivalist elements Adorno rejected include what he calls ‘musical collectivism’ i.e. the insistence on the communal and thus proto-nationalist authorship of folk compositions. Such views have also been brought into doubt in subsequent folkloric studies and, as discussed below, in Peter Burke's historical work in this