9 - The music of German Idealism

Summary

Anyone reading much of what is written about music in the analytical tradition of philosophy might be hard put to understand why anyone bothers to listen to and play music at all. Repeated discussion of whether music expresses emotions, what a musical work is, etc., involves doing what some of the rest of analytical philosophy does in relation to other aspects of the world, namely, seeking to establish which concepts can be applied correctly to whatever the object of investigation is. This kind of approach to philosophy is part of what can be challenged by ideas that developed in the period of German Idealism and that are today again becoming central to philosophy, notably via the effects of recent new versions of pragmatism. Instead of the first question being ‘What is the truth about the properties of the object x?’, the questions that are implicit in certain aspects of the re-orientation of philosophy in German Idealism are ‘How has x come to be significant at all?’ and ‘What sense does x make, and how?’. With regard to music, such questions allow us to stop thinking of it as an object of philosophy to be determined by conceptual analysis or as an object of natural scientific investigation and, instead, think in terms of the sense that music makes of the world, and why this kind of sense-making is so fundamental to many people's lives today, in ways which much philosophy as presently practised demonstrably is not. My title, then, is meant in both the subjective and objective genitive: I want to argue for the ‘musical’ nature of some of the most interesting philosophy in the Idealist period, and to consider how the nature of music changes in ways that can both illuminate and be illuminated by Idealist philosophy. The approach adopted here will, as anyone familiar, for instance, with Hegel's assessment of music may already be thinking, not necessarily rely on what was explicitly said in Idealist philosophy about music, but rather on how we can use aspects of this philosophy to understand the often underestimated impact of music in forming the world we inhabit.