Music, Truth, Profundity :: Philosophy Art Papers

Music, Truth, Profundity PART I 1. Theme One of my long-standing philosophical worries is what I describe as a cognitive plight in relation to melodic comedy communication. How can an nontextual matter form which lacks a discursive element and addresses itself primarily and indeed immediately to the auditory sense, be discerned as conveying truth or profundity? The power is amply attested so much so that alone among the arts music occasionally figures as a surrogate religion. The pieces of this kaleidoscope ideas culled from Schopenhauer, Langer, Jung and others did not fall together until recently after reading Peter Kivys Music Alone, an account of his quest for musical profundity which ends (as he confessed) in failure, but from whose dissection of the presuppositions I gained a platform for a synthesis of my own. In this essay the key concepts of an embryonal theory are presented as a quasi abstract of the 19K draught which comprises its first formulation. 2. Sense and Mi nd Kivys main point is that profundity must be tacit as treating a subject matter in a profound way, i.e. discursively. Accordingly the principal means of achieving profundity are verbal, in art the tools of novelists, dramatists and poets. But musicians lack those resources therefore, as Kivys analysis of Bachs Well-tempered Clavier shows, no further yield than superb craftsmanship results but how is this differentiable from the craft of a Faberg? These travails point to an underlying critical malaise, namely the comprehensive prejudice that reason and cognition are inherently discursive to understand is patently the ability to describe what one has understood. Therefore his failure to nail down musical profundity amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the ineffability of instrumental masterpieces resulting in musical truths being consigned to its sensory modality or else to a demand for marshalling verbal paraphrase for explicit decoding. My proposition is that both of these ar e blind alleys. Firstly, verbal analogues hold dear the illegitimate notion of a residual language component (of which more infra). Secondly, sensory cortices are merely the incidental conveyances of communicative values they are not possible sites for the germination of humanly significant meanings. Consider that speech is necessarily sound before it can be interpreted as utterance and frankincense belongs to the same sensory modality as music but from this it follows that discrimination between words-as-sounds and words-as-meanings cannot be the work of the auditory cortex, but only of a mind.