Andreas Dorschel

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.

‘Form’ was a fundamental category of European philosophy from its beginnings in ancient Greece until the 19th century. As Aristotle’s examples show, it originated in craft. Making a pot out of clay is a paradigm case of giving form to matter. During its long career in philosophy, this concept of humble origin expanded into a category for everything: In the 18th century, vide Kant, cognition could have a form (and even had to have it), or ethical decisions, or the experience of beauty. Yet even vis-à-vis much simpler examples objections arise; already a rock, though it must have a shape, will not have form in the same sense as, e.g., a pot. In terms of being true to worldly phenomena, there is a high prize to pay for Western philosophy’s universalization of the concept of form.

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.

Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded and thus lost validity; a moral norm that nobody keeps, however, may still be valid. Yet the latter point does not render the question obsolete whether demanding obedience to a specific moral norm, under certain circumstances, could mean asking too much. The costs incurred might be, on the one hand, individual costs. But there may, on the other hand, also be moral costs of obeying a certain moral norm. For an individual might also have responsibilities towards others near her, e.g., her family or peers; acting in accordance with the strict moral standard, then, could do harm not just to her but also to those who rely, and must rely upon her. Yet to define moral limits to following moral rules appears to be self-defeating.

Art is whatever it is mediated through anticipations of diverse kinds. To the temporal art of music such anticipations are crucial. Composers and performers build up expectations in their musical works and interpretations, thwart them, delay their fulfillment, fulfill them. Some of these expectations arise on the level of chosen genre, others are peculiar to the individual composition. Listeners, correspondingly, may adjust their expectations or, alternatively, attempt to uphold them at any price, turning them into prejudices. And, as anything in art, musical anticipations are prone to ambiguities; they may, e.g., be redeemed at a surface level while being countered subliminally.

In Die idealistische Kritik des Willens [German Idealism’s Critique of the Will] Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Immanuel Kant’s and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ethical animadversions. He objects both to Kant’s claim that „a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same thing“ („ein freier Wille und ein Wille unter sittlichen Gesetzen einerlei“) (Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten AB 98) and to Hegel’s doctrine that „freedom of the will is rendered real as law“ („die Freiheit des Willens als Gesetz verwirklicht“) (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson. Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1923ff., p. 368). What renders freedom of the will real, Dorschel argues, is rather to exercise choice sensibly.

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.

Arnold Gehlen's attempt to give anthropological grounds for morality stems from Kant's idea that being freed from the compulsion of instinct left human beings in need of compensation for the loss of the practical guidance which instinct had hitherto provided. Whereas Kant thought this compensation was to found only in reasoned morality, Gehlen would argue that morality provides recompense by becoming a quasi-instinct that functions without reflection and that needs to be bred into human beings. The author maintains that in comparing animals and human beings. Gehlen posits will as a deficient instinct as deficient will; because each side is characterized as the negative of the other, Gehlen's starting point fails to meet the conditions for a valid comparison.

‚Origin‘ must be counted among the 19th century’s obsessions. Following the lead of 18th century Enlightenment, subverting origins rather than venerating them became a theoretical preoccupation. Yet art – specifically the art of music – dealt with origins in a different way. That way eludes the obvious alternative of either awe or unmasking. It is specifically modern: The work of art attends to its own genesis. The different versions of the beginning of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony disclose a subtle craft of constructing the unconstructed, origin: artificial nature.

Does having some feeling or other ever count as an argument – and, should it? As a matter of fact, not just do persons sometimes refer to their feelings to make a point in debate. Often, they even treat them as irrefutable arguments; for they are, of course, certain of their own feelings. To make a point in debate by reference to one’s feelings, one has got to articulate them. As language is the core medium of debate (though it can be supported by images etc.), feelings, then, have to be articulated in words. These words, to function in communication, must participate in what is general (though not necessarily universal). On that level of generality, other speakers of the same language can contest the feelings – not that they have occured within the first speaker’s subjectivity, but that they are reasonable reactions to circumstances. Hence if feeling is sometimes to be taken seriously as an argument, it is not irrefutable, but rather refutable; and to the extent that somebody insists that it is irrefutable, it cannot count as an argument.