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.

Sentimentality: this term has had an odd career that converted it from an expression of praise into one of abuse. The obvious suspicion is that the word ‚sentimental‘ has had an entirely different meaning in the 20th and 21st centuries (when it has been deployed for abuse) as compared to the 18th century (when it had been used for praise). Scrutiny shows, however, that this is not the case. Rather the very same aspects of sentimentality that had appeared to, e.g., Sterne as a feat of human imagination, came to be seen from the 19th century onwards as betraying dishonesty. Hence what may look like mere linguistic change implies a substantial philosophical disagreement. Yet mustering the arguments against sentimentality, it turns out that we should be better off with a descriptive account of this attitude. Specimens of sentimentality are not failures vis-à-vis a norm of rationality; whether we like them or not is a matter of taste.

Opera is a paradoxical genre. For it seems self-defeating to create an illusion of reality by means of the theatrical apparatus if the art form’s central mode of expression, lavish singing in all kinds of circumstances, defies realism anyway. A solution to the paradox is implied by the 18th century turn of European philosophy of art from mimēsis to aisthēsis. In terms of aesthetics, reality is no longer an object of imitation but rather the impact upon and presence for a consciousness – that are actually heightened by singing. Of course we remain aware that to deal with everything in the mode of singing is in a way surreal. But then the simultaneous production and suspension of illusion turns out to be not a fault of art; rather it features as one of its peculiar achievements.

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers', performers', improvisers' and listeners' bodies, as well as the works' and technologies' figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities' scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

In the December 2013 issue of the periodical ‚Merkur‘, philosopher Andreas Dorschel presents a literary experiment. In the spirit of 18th century Enlightenment, he feigns an apocryphal letter including philological apparatus; it is – mind the boldness – a response letter by the Corinthians to St Paul’s first epistle. The ancient port city, multicultural, of syncretist religiousness and libertine in erotics, rejects the disciplining by the apostle. (Summary by Gustav Seibt, ‚Die Häresie der Abgrenzungen. Andreas Dorschel entwirft ein korinthisches Christentum‘, in Süddeutsche Zeitung 293, 19 December 2013, p. 14)

In "Resonanzen", scholars and artists explore aspects of memory and recollection in music. Composers Georg Friedrich Haas and Isabel Mundry set out how their art involves memory (as well as oblivion). Music historians Laurenz Lütteken, Nicole Schwindt and Klaus Aringer scrutinize the role of memory in early modern music; Anselm Gerhardt, Peter Franklin, László Vikárius and Harald Haslmayr follow up the theme for compositional practice of the 19th and 20th centuries. Aaron Williamon adds a psychological perspective on memory in musical performance.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his early work, both appropriated and transformed Friedrich Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education. Art must cease to be a mere object of private pleasure and turn into a medium of public communication – this is the vision both philosophers share. As Nietzsche assigns the rôle held by language in Schiller to music, he shifts the project’s meaning. Yet both authors have to address the paradox that art, cut off from political and economic structures they disapprove of, is meant to change these very structures. While Schiller’s response to the paradox terminates in nearly confessed resignation, Nietzsche’s solution is threatened by simplistic euphoria.

Neodarwinian ethology, today above all represented by sociobiology, is conceived of by responsible exponents as a descriptive and explanatory theory that cannot include any normative declarations. Still other, indeed notable, authors belonging to the discipline in question, either underhand or frankly employ prescriptive or evaluative judgments, — or they claim (what is not an insight of natural science) that it is impossible to provide a rational foundation for prescriptive or evaluative judgments. (Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson even assert the latter without relinquishing the former.) — Several functional explanations of normative validity claims advanced by Michael Ruse, Edward O. Wilson, Donald T. Campbell, Florian von Schilcher and Neil Tennant are designed to show that prescriptive or evaluative judgments cannot be justified. The reasonableness of this move is, however, dubious, because it implies strategies of raising oneself into a privileged status or of rendering the position of oneself immune from criticism by shifting it among the objects of the theory. Then Wilson's concept of 'evolutionary ethics' is thoroughly — and critically — analyzed. The suspicion that Wilson's fallacies in the transition from biological facts to moral norms are of exemplary nature is finally examined on the basis of tenets advanced by Herbert Spencer, Wolfgang Wickler, and Hans Mohr.

‘Logos’ is the Greek term for word, and language is indeed the realm of logic in a way that imagery never will be. While clearly not all use of words is argumentative – in fact, most is not –, their sequentiality brings them closer to argument than images, given the simultaneity of contents within the latter. In images, there is no discrete number of definite signs – the sort of thing language has in its vocabulary. The relations between colour and form are not systematized through rules. There is no grammar of the image, or only in the faintest of metaphorical senses. Words tend to demarcate, to classify and to delimit; images are inclined to transitions, continua, metamorphoses.

“How does music stand to image and concept?” (KSA 1, 104) This query in the aesthetics of media is central to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and related early texts; it shapes both their form and content. Nietzsche searches for a mode of non-conceptual philosophizing; he wishes to organize thought as a sequence of suggestive images – thoughts, that is, about that very relationship. Nietzsche’s success or failure in that endeavour becomes clearer against the foil of the 1795 controversy between Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. These disputants rigidly opposed concept and image; they identified a potential for mediation, at best, in the aftermath. Yet Nietzsche realizes that concepts are images whose character as such fell into oblivion. He undermines the established opposition, too, by introducing sound as a third medium. In spite of these insights, both Schiller and Fichte get clearer about possible coalescences of media than Nietzsche who, at the end of The Birth of Tragedy, forces their harmony by opting for Wagner’s ‘total work of art’.

The work of Richard Strauss has been disparaged as a music designed to be relished (“Genußmusik” was Adorno’s term), lacking any dimension of ‘transcendence’. The notion of ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”), used for characterization rather than disparagement, can disclose crucial aspects of Strauss’s art, though it does not exhaust it. To oppose ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”) to ‘transcendence’, however, either uses hidden theological premises or disregards that ‘relish’ or ‘pleasure’ (“Genuß”), bound to be pervious to its object, does transcend towards it.

Is fear a ‘deficient mode’ of anxiety? This claim made by Martin Heidegger in ‘Being and Time’ (1927) depends on an analysis of intentionality. Emotions take objects: to love, to hate, to fear is to love, to hate, to fear someone or something. Yet anxiety, Heidegger maintains (‘Being and Time’ § 40), is about “nothing” (“nichts”) rather than “something” (“etwas”). Heidegger then turns lack of knowledge or understanding of what one’s anxiety is about into a revelation of “Nothing” (“Die Angst offenbart das Nichts”; ‘Being and Time’ § 40) – a state meant to manifest freedom. Yet freedom is not increased but diminished if and when someone cannot judge the direction, extent and power of a threat. Concrete, determinate thought liberates; someone is less free in anxiety than in fear.

Die philosophiegeschichtlichen, sprachphilosophischen, rationalitäts- und wissenschaftstheoretischen Versuche einer Transformation der Philosophie, der Karl-Otto Apels Lebenswerk gilt, bezeichnet Apel deshalb als »Transzendentalpragmatik«, weil sie ihren Einheitssinn in dem Gedanken finden, daß nichts außer der menschlichen Praxis des Argumentierens die kontexttranszendierende Gültigkeit unserer Meinungen über Tatsachen und Normen ermöglicht. Die einzelnen Beiträge beleuchten Konsequenzen und Probleme des transzendentalpragmatischen Programms in einem breiten Spektrum gegenwärtiger philosophischer Diskussionen, das von theoretischen Fragen der Bedeutungstheorie bis zu praktischen Fragen eines modernitätskritischen Dialogs zwischen »Erster« und »Dritter« Welt reicht.

To call a piece of music sad or joyous need not imply reference to a subjective state. Speaking in this vein, we do not have to attribute sad or joyous feelings to the composer or to the performer. Nor do we predict that listeners will become sad or joyful when they will listen to a performance of that composition. Musical expression is not a mode of consciousness in those who produce it and it is not an effect of music either. Rather, it is a feature of the music itself. Once we have discarded the psychological reduction of expression, the way may be clear to explore the intricate relation between expression and subjectivity. Friedrich von Hausegger’s Music as Expression (1885/87) stands out among the guides to be recommended for a journey along that path.

In design theory, moral categories have traditionally been used in favour of objectivity and soberness to oppose designers' aesthetic narcissism. This use of moral concepts is directed at the individual design object. The situation gets more complicated, however, as soon as the totality (or a large number) of objects of a certain type raises problems which could not have been predicted from features of the individual object as such. The essay attempts to clarify how ethical concepts could be relevant to dealing with such complications.

In his social theory, Max Weber (1864 – 1920) attempts to identify patterns that have distinguished Western rationality. Music, he argues, is one of the domains that exhibit such structures. As a specific instance, Weber cites counterpoint as developed in 15th century Europe and – so he claims – culminating in Bach’s music. “No other epoch and culture possesses it”, Weber asserts. Counterpoint’s rationality is meant to manifest itself in rules; yet Weber’s approach lacks an analysis of such rules. Remarkably, 18th century music theory brought the social meaning of counterpoint to the fore more sharply than did Weber’s sociology of music.