Placing Aesthetics by Wood Robert E.;

Author:Wood, Robert E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 1999-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Response

One of the chief claims of Schopenhauer is the distinctiveness of music vis-à-vis the other art forms. He picks up on Kant’s observation that music is the language of affections, which gives rise to the aesthetic idea of an indeterminate whole of an immense wealth of thought. But he reverses Kant’s assessment of its value, which was based on the dimming of the priority of verbal-intellectual manifestness evident in poetry. For Schopenhauer, music gives direct expression to the encompassing Will while other art forms point to it indirectly by expressing the Platonic Ideas, which, in turn, are expressions of the Will. The metaphysical claim parallels the Neoplatonic notion of the relation between the One and the Nous, locus of the cosmic Logos. The One is beyond the Logos, transcending every distinction, including the distinction between subject and object that frames the region of the Logos. There is a distinctive relation to the One: a non-dualistic experience of identity beyond concepts and words. In orthodox Christian theology the Logos, though one with the Father in a unity closer than any other mode of unity, is other than the Father, being His mirroring in otherness. In a direct parallel, for Schopenhauer the Will lies beyond the Platonic Ideas which are its expression. At the level of art, music provides the mood, which generates the word and thus mirrors the world process. Interestingly, this reverses the understanding, common in the Christian tradition, of the priority of the word, both in terms of the creation story in Genesis, where God’s speech is the origin of things, and in the prologue to John’s gospel, where it is announced that in the beginning was the Word. This also goes back to Plato, for whom—at least in the Laws—music without words is nonsensical, suggesting a merely supportive role for music. It is found also in neoclassical aesthetic. Surprisingly, on this point Schopenhauer’s view seems more in keeping with the trinitarian doctrine of the Origin beyond the Word. Obviously different, however, is Schopenhauer’s reversal of traditional value, finding in the ultimate Ground—because of suffering, struggle, and death in its expressions—a repelling rather than an attracting source. Contemplation through music, rather than uniting us to the grounding Will, frees us from it.

As we have previously noted, the position on the priority of music over the word is opposed by Gregorian chant, in which, following the prologue to St. John’s gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), music is essentially subordinated to the word. Schopenhauer would probably say that even such a view betrays itself when it musically elaborates the Alleluia at great length after the sufferings of Lent, an emotional breakthrough revealing something of the real underlying character of things. Hegel likewise sees music as an intermediary form of art, leaving exterior form behind and straining toward the interiority of poetry. Poetry itself approaches philosophic prose as the highest manifestation of the ultimate depth of interiority which music only expresses inadequately. Schopenhauer reverses that: the word is derivative and essentially inadequate expression of that which music alone most fully expresses.

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