Deep Refrains

Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable

Michael Gallope

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226483726
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. But if music, in all its sensuous flux, does not mean anything in particular, might it still have a special kind of philosophical significance?
 
In Deep Refrains, Michael Gallope draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music's ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music's ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music's ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music's stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.
 
 

PRELUDE

A Paradox of the Ineffable

Does music speak to us independently of concepts and signs? Does it speak to us at a level of deep reality beyond our world of ordinary language? It is a challenge even to form such a question without engendering a paradox. For if music were to “speak” to us beyond language, by what criteria and idiom is it speaking, and does this speaking—now at a metaphorical level—still entail some process of signification? And how exactly would the “speaking” of a nonreferential medium like music get translated into a referential medium like language without sacrificing the specificity of one’s musical experiences?

These questions have often haunted efforts to positively define the idea that music has no signification outside its own sonorous form. For to argue that music is entirely autonomous still seems to entail at least two realms of non-musical scaffolding: (1) a linguistic argument and (2) an extramusical context of values and relationships in which such a claim is wagered and maintained. It is perhaps symptomatic that negative arguments defending the formal autonomy of absolute music are far more common than positive ones. Hanslick, easily the most influential formalist of music in European aesthetics, is a case in point. He spent much of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) critiquing all that should not be associated with music: namely emotions and various representational illusions. Musicological studies of absolute music have often expounded upon this negativity as a fruitful source of hermeneutic, genealogical, or deconstructive inquiry. Daniel Chua, Susan McClary, and Berthold Hoeckner, among many others, have sought to unearth the ironies, betrayals, and polyphonies of meaning that haunt the nineteenth-century conceit of absolute music’s pure form.1

But, as has been stated in the introduction, absolute music is only one particular case of music’s ineffability. Consider this opening question in broader philosophical terms: Can the experience of something boundless, infinite, or absolute ever be truly immediate? Or must it be mediated by something else, namely reason, the intellect, and language? In a short essay on the ineffable, Roger Scruton has described the routinely paradoxical situation that ensues for philosophers like Schopenhauer and Jankélévitch, who like Plotinus, posit an ineffable realm and then proceed to write about it for pages and pages.2 Scruton himself acknowledges that certain things may be ineffable (ultimate causes, aesthetic experiences, and so on), and describes the ineffable as a realm that should be recognized rather than dismissed (as scientific positivism might claim). He also asserts, however, that loquacious accounts of the ineffable are temptations that may be best overcome by the virtue of silence, or otherwise disclosed through more indirect forms of meditation.

Adorno confronted this philosophical paradox several times over, and described it in processual terms, as if the absolute (unlimited, infinite, self-reproducing) quality of music was like soap or melting chocolate in our hands. Its discreetness fades, and eludes our precise grasp. Ephemerality haunts the experience of the absolute: “Music reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible.”3 By way of a reference to a blinding light, Adorno alludes to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The meaning is clear: for Adorno, as one seeks to apprehend knowledge of the absolute, one’s eyes are pained and blinded as a paradox takes hold. Nothing essential—of being qua being in the Platonic sense—may be copied without distortion and falsification. Notice too that “the absolute” is a philosophical term here, not a formalist one (as it would be for “absolute music”). Adorno’s question is: What happens when music reaches the absolute—the absolute? In other words, what if music is accorded a philosophical significance that is unbounded?

This is one way to characterize Schopenhauer’s aspirations for music. In his philosophy, music’s ineffability is not presumed to be absolute in a formalist sense, but is instead taken to “speak” in a way that is coextensive with the unbounded flux of one’s inner emotional drives, or will. And Schopenhauer’s will joins us to the universe. It is an absolute, inexhaustible, and self-determining force that operates as the foundation of all there is.

0.1 SCHOPENHAUER’S DEEP COPY

In order to make clearer the stakes of this claim, consider some of the basics of Schopenhauer’s approach to music, as well as central aspects of his philosophy more broadly. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer contends that music is exceptional among the arts because of its unique intensity and nonrepresentational character. As he puts it: “Music’s effect on us is on the whole of the same nature [as the other arts], but stronger, faster, effective and infallible [nur starker, schneller, notwendiger, unfehlbarer ist].”4 In another passage, he refers to music as “that profound pleasure” that is capable of expressing “the deepest recesses of our nature.”5 In the modern vocabulary of the humanities, we might describe these remarks as an early version of music’s medium specificity: among all the arts, music is stronger and faster in its effect upon us, and it has a way of tapping into an “inner” feeling, something Schopenhauer describes elsewhere as a “serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self.”6

The philosophical basis for Schopenhauer’s contention that music is exceptional among the arts is a dualism between two capacities of the subject: reason (Vernuft) and feeling (Gefühl). Reason, in Schopenhauer’s view, is mediated by the Kantian a priori of concepts, forms, individuations, and representations, and pertains to the world of space, time, and causality. Feeling, by contrast is a “wide and negative concept” linked to the affective dimension of moods, passions, and emotions. If for Kant, all knowledge was mediated by the form of the concept, Schopenhauer defended the existence and the value of nonconceptual and intuitive knowledge; for him, feeling and intuition had their own special precision, and were linked to a much greater natural force—something he called the will.7

In his early discussions of the will in The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer discusses the experience of one’s own body. In his view, when we experience our own bodies in voluntary action, our body becomes a “double reference.” A “double reference” means that one’s body is framed by the Kantian orders of representation at the same time as it is accessible to us as part of a cosmic will of force and energy. For one ordinarily apprehends such an experience of a body’s voluntary action as part of a world determined by space, time, and causality. Schopenhauer keenly reminds his readers that this experience is simultaneously undetermined by these factors; at some level, he insists, one has an absolutely immediate experience of one’s own embodied volition. From these undetermined aspects of a voluntary action, he deduces the existence of a broader cosmic will, a thing-in-itself, all that Kant took to be inaccessible to a subject’s cognitive powers. In Schopenhauer’s view, one’s volition is merely the apex of a vast fabric of blind striving, a world of natural forces devoid of rationality or intellect.

Schopenhauer offers his readers vivid examples of what he means by the term “will.” If our voluntary, embodied movements provide direct evidence of the will, Schopenhauer claims that this experience of freedom is inseparable from a teeming universe of interior forces that courses through all levels of the cosmos. Birds and insects, for example, who are not guided by knowledge, nonetheless reflect the activity of the will: “The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds a nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins a web; the ant-lion has no notion of the ant for which it digs a cavity for the first time.”8 The many nonintentional systems of our body are likewise objectifications of the will: “Even in us the same will in many ways acts blindly; as in all those functions of our body which are not guided by knowledge, in all its vital and vegetative processes, digestion, circulation, secretion, growth, and reproduction.”9 Schopenhauer further adds that cosmic bodies, gravity, and light from the sun are facets of this all-encompassing will, which exists outside of space and time. From the simplest inert matter up through the conscious actions of man, there lies a metaphysical hierarchy that echoes a Neoplatonic chain of being: “There is a higher degree of this objectification [of the will] in the plant than in the stone, a higher degree in the animal than in the plant; indeed, the will’s passage into visibility, its objectification, has gradations as endless as those between the feeblest twilight and the brightest sunlight, the loudest tone and the softest echo.”10

Schopenhauer’s recourse to sonic metaphors of tones and echoes in this sentence is not merely a flourish of figurative language. In his discussion of music, he argues more fully that the exceptional intensity of music gives us what he will call “an unmediated copy” of the will. This is the foundation of music’s ability to “speak” its own specific language. Melody has a particularly expressive role in this regard:

Melody, however, says more; it relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason. Hence it has always been said that music is the language of feeling and of passion, just as words are the language of reason.11

Things get complicated from here, because this thought is teeming with paradoxes. What does it mean to say that music is a language of feeling, when language by definition is made of words, and thus entails representations? And what does it mean that its history “of the intellectually enlightened will” is a secret, rather than something that is manifestly obvious? Finally, if melody “portrays” or “paints [malt]” every tiny “movement of the will” in a way that is inassimilable to reason, how can we say and understand this thought in language without corrupting it? Minimally, to return to the central thesis: We know that for Schopenhauer, music speaks in a way that language cannot. It speaks a language of feeling and passion; it speaks about things that do not get said in ordinary language.12 In a particularly provocative (and prescient) turn of phrase, Schopenhauer even claims that music’s secretive character emanates from the nocturnal depths of the unconscious, delivered to us in the manner of “a magnetic somnambulist” without the aid of any concepts: “Here, as everywhere in art, the concept is unproductive. The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake.”13

If we take a step back, it would appear that we have at least two somewhat distinct conceptions of the will in play, both of which Schopenhauer understands to be central to the powers of music. One the one hand we have a Neoplatonic chain of being, a metaphysical hierarchy of energetic life that stretches from heavy matter up through plants, animals, and humans; and on the other, a Romantic stratum of inner feelings that is centered in human experience. For Schopenhauer, it is crucial to understand the intimacy with which the two are intertwined: the Platonic forms structure metaphysical access to the noumenal secrets of life. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer can claim that music’s language of feeling—a profound wisdom in musical sound alone—has a certain exactitude that Schopenhauer claims is more precise than language. For Schopenhauer, music’s exactitude even engenders a sense of universal assent: “[Music] creates such a powerful reaction in man’s inmost depths, it is so thoroughly and profoundly understood by him as uniquely universal language, even exceeding in clarity that of the phenomenal world itself.”14 Music, as a precise language of feeling, is a pure epiphany, an undeniable infusion of musical truth. It communicates with us like “the silent sunbeam, cutting through the path of the storm, and quite unmoved by it.”15

Schopenhauer derived his Platonic convictions about the clarity of music’s universality from residues of Pythagorean metaphysics, which maintained that music’s mathematical properties positioned it closer to the eternity of the cosmos. This influence was, to be sure, ready to hand. For centuries the medieval quadrivium associated music with mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. And even by the nineteenth century, Pythagorean thinking had never fully been cast away by the rising tide of the natural sciences; it could easily lurk in minor passages of otherwise cutting-edge philosophical accounts of music by Schelling and Hegel.16 (Famously, even Hanslick indulged in Pythagorean speculations in the early editions of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen).17 And beyond Pythagoreanism, it is noteworthy that Schopenhauer was a close reader of Plato. In fact, a certain current of Platonism inflects the way Schopenhauer thinks of music’s exceptional precision.

Consider just a few examples. In one of his most Platonic statements about music, Schopenhauer understands music to have a distinct status as axiomatically transcendent and eternal; to even exist without the world. As he puts it: “. . . music, which bypasses ideas, is also totally independent of the phenomenal world; it simply ignores the world, and it could in some sense continue to exist even if the world did not, something that cannot be said of the other arts.”18 He also draws direct p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Musical Examples
• Figures
• Introduction
• PRELUDE  A Paradox of the Ineffable
• INTERLUDE  Wittgenstein’s Silence
• Conclusion: A Paradox of the Vernacular
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index