Andreas Dorschel

In his writings, Richard Wagner imagines art as something natural. This paradox was only befitting for Wagner’s contradictory historical stance: that of an eminently modern artist loathing the modern world. For him, nature served as a yardstick apt to find the modern world deficient on all counts. But how can something ahistorical, nature, be used to judge a historical phenomenon, modernity? To arrive at the verdict Wagner was keen on, he had to fill his concept of nature with historical content attributed to myth.

We judge actions to be rational if means are adequate to ends. In modern societies, innumerable actions are interconnected into complex systems. Does rationality, then, become a feature of systems? If so, it will not do to view means in the light of ends, Niklas Luhmann maintained. In ‘The Concept of Purpose and Systems Rationality’ (‘Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität’) (1968), he defined the rationality of systems as their capacity to reduce complexity (“Reduktion von Komplexität”); in his later work, Luhmann elaborated and partly transformed that account. Dorschel and Kettner put his views under scrutiny.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.