The Music of Reason

Rousseau, Nietzsche, Plato

Michael Davis

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296600
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years, the field of cognitive psychology has begun to explore the rootedness of rational thinking in subrational inspiration, insight, or instinct—a kind of prediscursive hunch that leaps ahead and guides rational thought before the reasoning human being is even aware of it. In The Music of Reason, Michael Davis shows that this "musical" quality of thinking is something that leading philosophers have long been aware of and explored with great depth and subtlety. Focusing on the work of three thinkers traditionally viewed as among the most poetic of philosophers—Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato—Davis reveals the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's "prerational" foundations.Davis first examines Rousseau's Essay on the Origins of Languages: Where Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music to demonstrate that revealing the truth, or achieving individual enlightenment, requires poetic techniques such as irony, indirection, and ambiguity. How philosophers say things is as worthy of our attention as what they say. Turning to Plato's Lesser Hippias, Davis then reconsiders the relation between truth-telling and lying, finding the Platonic dialogue to be an artful synthesis of music and reason.The "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" that Plato placed near the core of this thinking suggests a tension between the rational (scientific) and the nonrational (poetic), or between the true and the beautiful—the one clear and definite, the other allusive and musical. Contemplating language in Rousseau, the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and playfulness in Plato, The Music of Reason explores how what we might initially perceive as irrational and so antithetical to reason is, in fact, constitutive of it.

PART I

The Music of Language

Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages

INTRODUCTION

Language, Political Life, and Music

Rousseau did not publish the Essay on the Origin of Languages during his lifetime. In a projected preface to a volume that would have included along with the Essay two other pieces (On Theatrical Imitation and The Levite of Ephraim), Rousseau wrote that it was “at first only a fragment of the Discourse on Inequality that I cut out of it as too long and out of place.”¹ The full title of the Discourse on Inequality is, of course, The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. It poses a puzzle. If men are naturally apolitical, how did they come to live in political society? And if to be the political animal means to be the animal with logos, understood as both speech and reason, how does the animal without logos come to have logos? Rousseau indicates the enormous difficulty of this question in the Discourse on Inequality itself: “For if men had need of speech in order to learn to think, they had indeed still more need of knowing how to think in order to find the art of speech” (¶ 68).² And shortly thereafter: “As for me, frightened by the difficulties that multiply themselves, and convinced of the nearly demonstrated impossibility that languages could be born and establish themselves by purely human means, I leave to whoever would undertake it the discussion of this difficult problem: which was the more necessary, a society already bound together for the institution of languages or already invented languages for the establishment of society?” (¶ 74). The question of the origin of language is thus in a sense the same as the question of the origin of political society. Now, at the beginning of the Essay on the Origin [singular] of Languages [plural], Rousseau claims that “speech, being the first social institution, must owe its form only to natural causes” (1.1). The first social institution must originate in something that is not socially instituted—that is, something natural, not conventional.³ By nature “speech distinguishes man among the animals” (1.1), but speech shows up only as a particular language rooted in a place and distinguishing nations among themselves. Why then are there languages rather than language? How does one account for the single origin of difference, and how does one natural origin yield diverse conventional results? What does it mean that human nature is by nature conventional? Is there an essence of Babel? This is our first question.

The curious path Rousseau follows in addressing this question is hinted at in his subtitle: Where Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation. Why does the question of language need to be glossed as a question of music? Music becomes an explicit issue in the last third of the Essay (chapters 12–20), but why? Our second question then is why the origin of political life necessarily leads us to music.

Finally, it is a regular feature of Rousseau’s writing to present what seem to be logical relations as temporal movements. The Second Discourse contains multiple examples of animals that fall just short of being human in the state of nature (consider, for example, the pongo, orangutan, quojas morros, beggo, and mandrill of note j) and multiple examples of human beings who live in a state that falls just short of natural (consider the Hottentot of note j and the Carib of paragraph 63), but there is not a single example of a human being in this presumably natural state. Because the pongo lacks speech, we are in no position to say whether it has the capacity to acquire speech that is characteristic of natural man. The pongo is natural, but it is not a man. Rousseau seems at first to mean to describe the Carib as having a “soul that, agitated by nothing, delivers itself to the sole sentiment of its own present existence without any idea of the future,” but he cannot mean what he seems to mean, for he goes on to say that the Carib “sells his cotton bed in the morning and, weeping, comes in the evening to buy it back, failing to have foreseen that he would have need of it for the next night.” In order to show that the Carib lacks foresight, Rousseau endows him with language and a notion of monetary gain. Both require foresight, and therefore neither can be present in natural man; the Carib is a man, but he is not natural.⁴ For this and other reasons, over time one is gradually led to conclude that the state of nature is a logical foundation of our understanding of human beings rather than their temporal origin.⁵ On the Social Contract is supposed to provide us with an account of the original agreement that stands at the beginning of political life, and yet every attempt to get at such an agreement seems to presuppose an already prior agreement—assembler and unir are always rassembler and reunir, idiomatically synonyms that betray the deep problem involved in giving any account of what comes first.⁶ And, while The Reveries of the Solitary Walker seems at first to provide examples of reverie as that state in which we timelessly experience the sweet sentiment of our own existence, here too each such example is either a leading up to or a falling away from the perfect contentment of such a state.⁷ We are initially led to believe that Emile will be an account of the imaginary education of a child over time. Rousseau adopts a baby at birth and brings him to manhood in such a way that he will avoid the amour propre that ordinarily causes us to live outside ourselves. Emile will be educated “according to nature” so that his present is not sacrificed for his future. To the greatest extent possible, his desires and powers will be in harmony. On the surface, the first serious threat to this equilibrium is the onset of sexuality in adolescence. Emile, therefore, appears to be an account of the fundamental transformation of human nature over time. On further examination, however, we discover the seeds of alienation already present in infancy.⁸ Accordingly, our third question is why Rousseau repeatedly begins by presenting as though they unfolded in time relations that in the end must be understood as logical.

In a way that is initially not altogether clear, the second and third of our questions—which turn on music and time—are brought together in Rousseau’s account of the relation between melody and harmony in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Melody is more fundamental than harmony; in particular, it distinguishes itself from harmony by unfolding in time. Is it possible, then, that this primacy of melody is connected first to the nature of language, and thereafter, by way of language, to the nature of thinking? And by first understanding the essentially melodious character of human thinking might we thereafter also understand why Rousseau finds it necessary to unfold the logical as though it were temporal? If so, our three questions would resolve themselves into one.

CHAPTER 1

The Essence of Babel

Rousseau first attributes the plurality of languages to location.¹ Before encountering a language other than his own one might well take the world he experiences as the world simply. Afterward, however, he would have learned not only that the speaker of this strange tongue is not from this place; he would also know that he himself is from somewhere.² We may learn the language of our country out of usage and need, but this does not yet teach us why this language belongs to this country. We are forced to wonder how a universal and natural cause can be thought together with a local and conventional effect. And, of course, this mating of universality and particularity is itself at the very heart of language.

In the second paragraph of chapter 1 of the Essay, Rousseau articulates the strange precondition of all speech. “As soon as a man was recognized by another for a sensing being, thinking and similar to him, the desire or the need of communicating to him his sentiments and his thoughts to him made him seek the means for it.” A wants to communicate with B as soon as he has been recognized by B as a subject; this seems straightforward enough.³ But when we look at the matter from the point of view of B, it gets crooked. To recognize A, B would already have to have been recognized by A. So, while we expect Rousseau to say that recognizing another as similar moves us to attempt to communicate, in fact, the origin of language involves being recognized by another or—since being anonymously recognized would not affect us at all—sensing that we have been recognized. What is at issue in the sentence is revealed by Rousseau’s intentionally ambiguous use of the word “him,” which seems to apply now to the one recognized and now the one recognizing. It calls our attention to what ties the two together. Both are indirect objects—beings to whom things happen. They are only indirectly objects, for their similarity really consists in being subjects. Rousseau’s opening remark thus suggests that we are somehow capable of sensing that we are being sensed—we are capable of experiencing a subject as a subject and not simply as an object. It is this sense of having been recognized that generates in us a desire or a need to communicate our thoughts and sentiments. That is, we seek to communicate what we are as sensing/thinking beings—indirectly to communicate our selves.

If to make our selves known to another as a subject is the precondition for all communication, how exactly is this to be done? That I am a sensing being means that I internalize things. This internalizing is what must become known by the other if we are to communicate. But this can only be done by somehow externalizing the process of internalizing; it must be made available to the senses. To sense that one is being recognized means to sense another sensing one’s sensing. By beginning his account of this process at the moment one is recognized by another, Rousseau artfully finesses the question of how the initial recognition is possible. We come in in the middle. He therefore gives us an account of what must have transpired for communication to take place but never gives us an account of how it is possible for it to have transpired. Apparently, the dilemma of the Discourse on Inequality is not so easily resolved.

The Essay on the Origin of Languages proceeds by way of a series of dualisms. The initial divide is between the language of gesture and that of voice—the first more objective, the second more passionate. Rousseau subsequently distinguishes between the language of need and the language of passion (chapter 2), between literal and figural language, and so between prose and poetry (chapter 3), between the use in language of discrete and continuous sound (chapter 4), between writing and speech (chapters 5–7), between the languages of the north and those of the south (chapters 8–11), between the nonmusical and the musical (chapters 12–17), and, within music, between harmony (chapter 14) and melody (chapter 13). He concludes the Essay with an account of the degeneration of music from the time of the Greeks that segues to an account of a similar political degeneration (chapters 18–20).

Communicating is initially a matter of getting someone’s attention. This involves initiating some change available to sensation. Rousseau suggests two possibilities—spatial movement sensed either by touch or by sight, and temporal movement, that is, sound. But, although touch works well even in the dark, it has a very limited spatial range. Accordingly, Rousseau concentrates on comparing communication by way of sight—what he calls the language of gesture—and communication by way of sound through the voice. The two are equally natural but have different advantages. Sounds seize our attention more readily than sights, but, our attention once assured, sight shows us more in less time.⁴ Gestural language is thus more articulate and, since its images resemble the things they image, less conventional than the language of voice. Rousseau adds that it is also easier.

Because of this ease and superior precision, we are naturally tempted to think of the language of gesture as the origin of language—as “first.” Rousseau provides us with a series of examples designed to tempt us in this direction; yet, upon reflection, none of them is particularly appropriate or convincing. From Pliny the Elder Rousseau borrows the girl who out of love for an absent beloved was supposed to be the inventor of drawing (1.4).⁵ The drawing, a figure available to sight, is a representation of the beloved—a remembrance. But its power really results from its failure. In its inability adequately to make the beloved present, to re present him, it is an image of her love rather than an image of her beloved. Rousseau follows this with several examples from “ancient history” of “arguments to the eyes” that supposedly “never fail to produce an effect more assured than all the discourses one might have been able to put in their place” (1.7). Yet when, in response to a message from his son, Tarquin walks into his garden and lops off the heads of the tallest poppies, the whole point of the story is that the herald entrusted with his answer does not understand its meaning. A powerful image to be sure, it gets one’s attention, but by itself it does not tell us that to assure one’s unrivaled rule it is necessary to annihilate the potential competition.⁶ This is true as well of each of Rousseau’s subsequent examples (Thrasybulus, Alexander, Diogenes, Darius, and Hyperides from Greek history and the Levite of Ephraim and Saul from the Bible). Darius knows that when the Scythians send him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows they mean to warn him, but even in Herodotus’s account there is disagreement about what the meaning of this warning is.⁷ And when Saul cuts up a pair of oxen and sends the pieces throughout Israel, to make his point, he must add—that is, add in speech—that whoever doesn’t follow him and Samuel will have the same done to their oxen.⁸

Are these arguments “to the eyes”? Are they not rather stories about the power of vision in which the story provides the context that makes their interpretation possible? For in each case Rousseau cites of the lucidity of gestural language, a prior understanding proves to be necessary. Powerful sights attract our attention, but to serve as language, they must be taken as something other than what they are. As answers, Rousseau’s “arguments to the eyes” presuppose certain questions, certain felt needs. Rousseau thus undermines his view of the priority of the language of gesture as easier, clearer, and less conventional than the language of sound in its articulation of objects, and does so at the very moment he seems to affirm it: “Thus, one speaks much better to the eyes than to the ears: there is no one who does not sense the truth of the judgment of Horace in this regard.⁹ One even sees that the most eloquent discourses are those where the most images are inserted, and sounds never have more energy than when they produce the effect of colors” (1.9). Rousseau’s own language here is revealing. It suggests not so much the power of vision but of speech making use of imaginary vision. It therefore makes the case not for the superiority of the language of sight but for the superiority of poetry, already a hybrid, over prose.

When he turns to the language of voice (1.10–14), Rousseau introduces time. In place of a static vision (a coup d’oeil) we are confronted with a sequence (coups redoublés) that sets what is communicated in an unfolding context. But this is to place at center stage the subject for whom meaning is unfolding. Sens as sensing displaces sens as meaning. The language of voice is characterized by accent. This, in turn, brings with it the possibility of communicating intensity, but of course also of meaning. Think of the difference between “No!,” “No, no, it’s OK.,” and “No??” Nothing can be said without tone (flatness too is a tone), and tone points not to the state of the object articulated but to the state of the subject who is articulating. The language of voice thus brings you inside the speaker. Rousseau indicates this movement rather beautifully by speaking of “accents from which one cannot screen one’s organ . . . and which in spite of ourselves convey to it the emotions that wring them from us and cause us to sense what we hear/understand” (1.10—the italics are mine). Rousseau means to indicate the change that voice brings to language; in doing so his own language moves from the impersonal pronoun on to the first person plural nous. Gesture might seem to be the language of the on, of pure articulation. Rousseau’s first chapter suggests that such a language does not really exist.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prelude: Music and Reason
• Part I. The Music of Language: Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages
• Part II. The Music of Poetry: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
• Part III. Poetry and Language: Plato’s Lesser Hippias
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments