Andreas Dorschel

In the process of making bedsteads, Plato claimed, makers look towards the ‘idea’ of the bed. But what is that idea? Two candidates come to mind: shape and purpose. The fact that we identify objects of very different shape, not even involving a bedstead, as beds seems to render purpose conceptually superior. But, then, what is a bed’s purpose? An obvious response appears tobe: lying down and sleeping. Yet, first, beds are not needed for that. Secondly, precisely when a bed is slept on, it is not perceived as a design object. Thirdly, beds constitute a kind of existential furniture, associated with giving birth, making love, suffering illness and dying. All such issues humans really care about, however, are strikingly indifferent towards the design of beds. As elsewhere, the maxim that form follows function fails. Design thinking might rather make headway when beds are conceived of as peculiar spaces within spaces.

Intentionality is a key feature of emotions; we understand them as directed towards objects. Intentional objects need not be real objects. Furthermore, objects of emotions can be distinguished from their causes. At the same time, objects and causes may be related, and, for some emotions, have to be related if the emotions are to count as warranted. Psychoanalysis and comparable cures tend to ignore these relationships. That does not necessarily preclude therapeutic success. Yet being based on said ignorance renders such accounts less than reasonable.

Within the European history of ideas, at least three conceptions of metamorphosis can be distinguished. First, as celebrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there is the vision of an open-ended flux of shapes in all directions, potentially with the ambiguous result of wavering identity. Secondly, at the centre of the synoptic gospels Jesus’s transfiguration is presented as a luminous elevation, rendering his true nature unambiguous. Thirdly, alchemy conceives of metamorphosis as contingent upon a meeting of polarities. The distinction is fit to disclose crucial aspects of works of art, particularly of musical compositions.

In his Eighth Symphony Gustav Mahler envisions modern artistic production to steer clear of an alternative emerging at the time: that between popular music on the one hand and esoteric avantgarde music on the other; Mahler’s music is meant to reach the masses, but without descending to audiences’ lowest common denominator. One query through which Mahler’s paradoxical aesthetic vision of an ‘individualism for the masses’ can be explored has been hinted at by the composer himself: Does his integral symphonic work of art (‘Gesamtkunstwerk’) include or rather exclude chamber music?

Order has been ascribed both to nature and to society. There is a long tradition of claiming that the social order and the natural order are closely linked. Radical enlightenment challenged that tradition. According to Spinoza (Ethica, pars 1, appendix) to call something orderly simply means that we can easily imagine and remember it; ascribing order thus betrays merely something about us, not about things. This challenging idea never became Enlightenment mainstream. In fact, ties between an objective natural order and our own human order were widely popularized in the 18th century. Yet one strand of thinking, set out to undermine traditional views of order, turned up trumps. The British Enlightenment succeeded in undoing the time-honoured equation of order and hierarchy.

Order has been ascribed both to nature and to society. There is a long tradition of claiming that the social order and the natural order are closely linked. Radical enlightenment challenged that tradition. According to Spinoza to call something orderly simply means that we can easily imagine and remember it; ascribing order thus betrays merely something about us, not about things. This challenging idea never became Enlightenment mainstream. In fact, ties between an objective natural order and our own human order were widely popularized in the 18th century. Yet one strand of thinking, set out to undermine traditional views of order, turned up trumps. The British Enlightenment succeeded in undoing the time-honoured equation of order and hierarchy.

In 1885, the Austrian music critic and scholar Friedrich von Hausegger published his book “Die Musik als Ausdruck” (“Music as Expression”) which may be understood as an answer to Eduard Hanslick’s “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen” (“On the Musically Beautiful”, 1854). Unlike Hanslick, Hausegger takes the body as central to any adequate account of music. Hence Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in particular his book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872), becomes a central reference for Hausegger. His treatise is a detailed and systematic reconstruction of the probable development of musical expression. The new edition is the first to present the complete text of the second edition of 1887 (amended by Hausegger) in modern Latin typeface.

Aestheticians in the tradition of Critical Theory have claimed that the or a purpose of musical interpretation is somehow to save or salvage or rescue ("retten") the musical work. What sense, if any, can be made of this claim? The notion of salvage or rescue presupposes the concept of danger. Threats to works of art emerge from two sources: from outside and from inside. Whilst the former problem is only touched upon, the latter is discussed in some detail, using the example of Brahms' Alto Rhapsody op. 53. Kathleen Ferrier's and Clemens Krauss' interpretation of 1947 deals with rather than ignores the composer's crumbly attempt at fusing art and religion. Salvage as their attitude vis-a-vis the work is distinguished from cover-up on the one hand and exposure on the other hand.

It is known that sociobiology, the theory of the biological origins of the social behavior of living beings, is related to ethics. However, sociobiology does not include moral doctrines but simply describes facts. The present essay discusses two basic theses, “altruism” and “reciprocal altruism”, in order to prove that a natural science free of judgments and evaluations is contrary to a theory of ethics, such as the theory of Kant and Apel, as well as to intuitive theories of ethics. Ethics is the explanatory theory of morality, and morality should be established at the theoretical level, so that doubt can be expressed and not restrained.

Ancient mythology related music to pain in a twofold way. Pain is the punishment inflicted for producing inferior music: the fate of Marsyas; music is sublimation of pain: the achievement of Orpheus and of Philomela. Both aspects have played defining roles in Western musical culture. Pain’s natural expression is the scream. To be present in music at all, pain needs to be transformed. So even where music expresses pain, at the same time it appeases that very pain. Unlike the scream, musical dissonance is articulate. While pain’s presence in music has to be mediated and in a way remote, it can be more differentiated than any immediate natural expression of it. Pain itself offers no structure to those who are overcome by it; rather it tends to disintegrate their lives. Music, on the other hand, is audible order in time. Such order may thus appear to be merely imposed on pain; yet it can also reveal something about pain by way of contextualizing it.

Images, or icons, have been made the subject of a ‘turn’. But no new epoch under its sign is looming. The image is just one medium among others. The best we can do is to face what it may and what it may not achieve. Its main competitor is the word – though there is a field of transition between both. Words and numbers surpass the image when one needs to refer to something that cannot be seen – this holds for ‘radioactivity’ just as much as for ‘responsibility’. To unambiguously show a categorial relation like causality or a logical feature like negation in an image borders on the impossible. (The aspiration to symbolize or manifest the invisible, though, has long inspired artistic images.) Pictures are accessible to the illiterate; while a language must be learned, an image seems to admit everyone. Yet that is in part an illusion. Obviously, it is not enough to see an image. To understand it, however, often a number of things must have been learnt in the first place, too.

In the lied, music interprets poetry. Interpretation is not arbitrary. At the same time, there is no such thing as a single correct interpretation of something else – at any rate not of something as complex as a poem by Goethe. Mignon’s song of longing “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, / weiß, was ich leide” can be taken to manifest subjectivity utterly barren within itself. Yet the ability to express that state of mind transcends it; it implies imagination of something else. Thus the freedom achieved in the act of articulation points towards a different sphere of being – “nach jener Seite”. In 1826, Schubert rendered both complementary perspectives musically, the latter in his duet D 877/1, the former in his solo setting D 877/4. Yet that contrast – openness versus closure – conveys only the barest outline. In art, detail is forever crucial to interpretation.

Fado, the urban folk of Lisbon and Coimbra, is an art of nuances. These nuances music takes from poetry; as ‘sung poetry’ (‘poema cantado’ in Portuguese) fados are not to be equated with ‘songs’ that turn the word into a vehicle – a dominant procedure in, e.g., rock music. Again, ‘voice’ in fado does not so much manifest individual expression; rather it is, as it were, ‘on loan’ from tradition. Keeping some distance from dance, too, fado at the beginning of the 21st century could and can resist being swallowed up into the mainstream of global popular music.