Re: [Fis] Meaning of music?

Steven,

I guess that music has less to do with meaning as with affection or *mood.*

In our modern rationalist and subjectivist tradition affections (Greek: *pathe*) are seen as something *less* than rationality and *subjective* as opposed to the so called objective and *mood-free* science. This is, I believe, a Cartesian idealization. Human knowledge (and probably also *any kind* of knowledge of other living beings...) is basically, as Heidegger (following Aristotle and Augustine) stressed, *mood conditioned.* If we do not take for granted the dichotomy between an *outside world* and an *encapsuled subjectivity* then this thesis means that moods are not purely subjective but a condition of world experience. We can the say, for instance, that to experience the world as something *supporting* (or *destroying* or...) our lives makes us aware (AS *happiness*, *fear*, ...) of what *reality* is. Also the value free experience of the world through objective science is a specific mood, a *cold* one, so to speak. Not being the authors neither of the world nor of our lives (i.e. being, in Kantian words, "intellectus ektypus" or "derived intellects" as contrast to "intellectus archetypus"), our *cold* intellect comes too late in order to rationalize what we could call the *vibration* of being (this is a poetic formula, of course).

I would say that we grasp a sound AS music when we perceive it as an echo of such "vibration" or as an answer to it, in case we compose sounds giving them the quality of such a *world mood.*

Probably this is a dimension in which we can communicate with other living beings without the direct (!) intervention of meaning and language.

I very much agree with Andrei's posting concerning the "impossibility to say" which is another way of considering music as an 'echo' to the *vibrations* of being. I would only remark that we usually relate music to infinity and to God within a metaphysical perspective. We can also consider it is a response to *finitude* which is no less *disturbing* giving that *natality* and *mortality* are empirical phenomena which at the same time (!) resist to *meaning*.

kind regards

Rafael
Received on Sat Feb 7 12:32:26 2004