If the new musicology was anything, it was an ethical phenomenon*. Even if we agree with Nicholas Cook (and many others) that this movement found a common identity only in its reaction against a previous mode of musical research, this reaction itself was undoubtedly driven by ethical concerns. As Cook puts it, having noted that many of the first generation of new musicologists were in graduate school during the Vietnam War, “a crucial source of the negative agenda of ‘New’ musicology [was] to critique the ideology which said that music transcended the napalm and the body bags” (Cook 2008, 50).1
But what was this ideology that said that music transcended the horrors of war? In a word, autonomy. Writing in 1987, as the wheels of the new musicology were just starting to lift from the runway, Richard Leppert and Susan McClary stated confidently that “the disciplines of music theory and musicology are grounded on the assumption of musical autonomy” (Leppert and McClary 1987, xiii). In order to move beyond this ideology, it would be necessary not simply to propose new models for musical research but also to uncover the roots—and effects—of the older ideology. As Leppert and McClary put it, “alternative models can be proposed and elaborated only after such deconstruction of established paradigms has occurred” (xiii).
Insofar as it sought a new disciplinary history, however, this deconstruction soon demanded an act of construction: that of a narrative of the history of musical formalism. As Alexander Wilfing (2017) has shown, the new musicological project quickly came to adapt, with a remarkable unity and longevity, just such a narrative. According to this narrative, the founding father of aesthetic formalism is Immanuel Kant, who put forward a general theory of the autonomy of art in his 1790 Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment). This formalist doctrine of art, so the narrative goes, was applied specifically to music by Eduard Hanslick in his 1854 treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful). And the story culminates—perhaps via a detour to Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880) and Clive Bell’s Art (1914)—in music analysis as established by, or significantly influenced by, Heinrich Schenker. This music analysis, we are told, embodied a formalist ideology out of which twentieth-century music theory and musicology had not, by the mid-1980s, managed to escape.
Though Wilfing doesn’t put it quite like this himself, this narrative of musical formalism is also a tale of ethical sterility. It is a story of how philosophies of music across the long nineteenth century cut themselves off from ethical concerns – and of the deleterious effects of this nineteenth-century ethical wasteland on twentieth-century musical research. This is a convenient narrative. It is also a narrative that suffers from a number of insurmountable problems. As Wilfing himself shows, its interpretation of Hanslick rests on an almost willful misreading of his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Contrary to his reputation as a foundational advocate for instrumental music, for example, Hanslick declared preferences for vocal or instrumental music “an unscientific procedure for which mostly dilettantish bias prevails” (Hanslick 2018, 24; quoted, in earlier translation, in Wilfing 2017; see also Wilfing 2018 on the relationship between Hanslick and Kant). Nor does Schenker fit easily—or even with difficulty—into any textbook picture of musical formalism (see, for example, Cook 2007). Even Kant himself, as I will discuss, had no discernible intention of founding a tradition of strict aesthetic formalism.2
If this formalist narrative is so unsatisfactory, what alternative stories of nineteenth-century philosophies of music might be available? One common alternative is the narrative of musical idealism, the tale of how music came to be believed capable of putting us in touch with timeless, absolute, or ideal truths. Yet if formalist narratives exclude the ethical by design, idealist narratives all too often exclude it by accident. This exclusion is not inevitable (for a compelling counterexample, see Bonds 2006, chs. 4 and 5). Yet to understand nineteenth-century philosophies of music from the perspective of their flights from concrete realities to timeless truths is to run the danger of portraying these philosophies as ethically numb. Indeed, elsewhere in my own work, I portray the rise of nineteenth-century idealist views of music as explicitly tied to the downfall of an older, eighteenth-century view based in large part on the ethical potential of music’s power to move listeners (McAuley, in press).3
Wherefrom, we might ask, this exclusion of the ethical from our dominant narratives of nineteenth-century philosophies of music? Is it simply a reflection of the reality on the ground—of a century whose musical thought was caught irretrievably between the autonomous and the absolute? Or is it a reflection of our own more recent scholarly preoccupations? In this chapter, I suggest that the latter option is the more plausible. I make the case for this conclusion by attempting to give—in the briefest of outlines—a history of nineteenth-century philosophies of music from the perspective of ethics.
The new musicology is, of course, no longer so new. Though many of its central tenets—such as the refusal of musical autonomy—remain, they have become mainstream to the extent that they need no longer be associated with any particular disciplinary school, and the urge to deconstruct the roots of earlier twentieth-century musicology has long subsided. With that in mind, there’s a danger that this contribution might seem somewhat late to the party—a facile challenge to a moment long passed. Let me state right off, then, that my purpose is not to critique the new musicology. Such critiques are already plentiful, not least from within the new musicology itself, for this was a movement foundationally concerned with sustained self-reflection. To the extent that the new-musicological moment has passed, however, it has itself become a legitimate object of historical investigation. Yet as with so many historical phenomena, its history has been written by the winners. This is why it is all too easy to presume, taking the new musicology’s self-styled history at its word, that the movement really was a liberation from a history of ethical sterility in musical thought reaching right back to Kant. Put differently, few would claim now—writing in 2019—that musicology’s concern with the ethical is new. Yet we can’t quite shake off the lingering belief that, when the movement first emerged in the late 1980s, the new musicology’s concern with the ethical was new. It is this latter belief that I wish to challenge. I do so not by examining the new musicology’s immediate predecessors (for exemplary examples of such challenges, see Agawu 1996 and, noting the ways in which Marxist, and especially East German, musicology anticipated central tenets of the new musicology, Shreffler 2003) but, rather, by examining the longer nineteenth-century history that so many new-musicological tracts saw as culminating in twentieth-century musical formalism.
My primary motivation in challenging this belief, however, is not better to understand the new musicology; rather, it is better to understand the nineteenth century. For the new musicology’s strong narrative of musical formalism (and concomitant ethical sterility) continues to dominate histories of the philosophy of music in the nineteenth century. My purpose here is to show, contrary to this narrative, the persistently ethical character of nineteenth-century philosophies of music.
In what follows, then, I provide an alternative narrative of nineteenth-century philosophies of music: a narrative of musical ethics. I focus on three seminal thinkers of the long nineteenth century: Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Of these, Kant is commonly taken as foundational to formalist narratives and Schopenhauer’s writings on music are a high point of many idealist accounts. Reading these thinkers instead for their ethical import thus allows me directly to challenge central convictions of formalist and idealist narratives. These thinkers also form a chain of self-acknowledged influence, from Kant to Nietzsche, via Schopenhauer.
These choices, though, come with blind spots. For one, however great the subsequent influence of these individuals may have been, focusing on such a small number of figures inevitably overlooks important contributions from numerous others, as well as the especial importance of Symphilosophie—literally, “philosophizing together”—to early Romantic thinkers such as Novalis and the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich) in the years around 1800. Starting as it does with figures central to the formalist and idealist narratives, my own ethical narrative also follows them in remaining stubbornly Germanocentric. To this latter point, I offer three brief observations. The first is that a renewed focus in recent musicology on nineteenth-century philosophy and science outside of German-speaking lands is itself challenging implicitly the dominance of formalist and idealist narratives rooted in German philosophy (among a rich literature, see Versoza 2014, Davies and Lockhart 2017, and Zon 2017). Second, the Germanocentrism of these formalist and idealist narratives makes a reconsideration of the German landscape equally necessary. In that regard, my project here builds on recent debates around the work of Eduard Hanslick, whose reputation as a straightforward arch-formalist has been irrevocably called into question (see Grimes et al. 2013, Bonds 2014, Wilfing 2017, Bonds et al. 2017, and Sousa 2017). My third observation is that Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all foundationally influenced by non-German sources (ranging from Hume and Rousseau, to the Upaniṣads, to the ancient Greeks)—and of near-unprecedented influence outside of German-speaking lands.
It remains to clarify that this focus on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche does not mean a narrative of three equal parts. Rather, my most central concern will be with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, a thinker of whom Lydia Goehr has noted that “no philosopher’s writings about music have proved more influential. … Almost the mere mention of his name has come to stand for an entire worldview about the status, meaning, and value of classical music” (Goehr 1996, 200). To reread Schopenhauer is, to indulge in only a slight exaggeration, to reread the history of the philosophy of music in the nineteenth century. Growing from this, my discussion of Kant is intended, in part, to show some of the lead-up to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music, and that of Nietzsche to show some of its fallout.
One of the many curiosities of formalist accounts of nineteenth-century philosophies of music is that, despite taking Kant’s 1790 Kritik der Urteilskraft as the assumed launchpad for artistic formalism in general, they usually pay scant attention to Kant’s comments, in this work, on music itself.4 The reasons for this are clear enough: Kant’s discussion of music, as found primarily in §53 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, is brief, somewhat confused, and distinctly unoriginal. Yet this lack of originality is telling, for Kant is providing a summary of what had been the dominant view of music throughout the eighteenth century. Kant writes:
[Music’s] charm … seems to rest on this: that every expression of language has, in context, a tone that is appropriate to its sense; that this tone more or less designates an affect of the speaker and conversely also produces one in the hearer … just as modulation is as it were a language of the sensations (or emotions, Empfindungen) universally comprehensible to every human being, the art of tone puts that language into practice for itself alone, in all its force, namely as a language of the affects (Affecten). (Kant 2000, 5:328)5
On the face of it, this is as good a summary as any of the eighteenth-century Affektenlehre (doctrine of the affects). According to this doctrine, the purpose of music is to move the affects (roughly speaking, the emotions) of listeners. For earlier eighteenth-century thinkers, this ability to move affects gave music the power to influence humanity for the better. In particular, music was deemed to have positive medical effects, such as curing the bite of the tarantula or lifting listeners out of melancholy (approximating to what we would now call depression). It was, for many, an essential spiritual aid, encouraging appropriate piety and penitence in religious services. And it was widely believed able to sway human behavior toward ethically meritorious ends. As such, though usually considered the lowest of the fine arts, music was generally taken by earlier eighteenth-century thinkers to have a positive ethical significance.6
Kant, however, seems to miss all of this. Although he retains the view that the purpose of music is to move the affects, he does not see the Affektenlehre as endowing music with a positive ethical significance. To see why, we need to turn our attention away from his Kritik der Urteilskraft, and toward his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785) and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788). In these works, Kant suggests—somewhat schematically, but not entirely without merit—that previous ethical theories had been grounded on the presumption of “heteronomy,” according to which, moral laws are given to the individual, whether by God or, for a small number of radical thinkers, by a universal natural law. Kant, however, roots his own moral theory in the idea of “autonomy,” according to which, moral laws are created by the individual. On the back of this, “it is not enough to do what is right, but it is also to be performed solely on the ground that it is right” (5:327; see also 4:399–400). Following this turnaround, Kant cannot grant music the ethical status it had been accorded by previous thinkers, for even when it leads listeners to moral actions, it does so by wielding affective power over those listeners, thus preventing them from freely following moral precepts for the sake of doing what is right. Yet Kant seems not to have sufficient interest in music to come up with an alternative theory. The result is a strange mismatch: Kant keeps the outlines of the Affektenlehre, but within the context of his new philosophical system, the theory seems not quite to make sense anymore. Hence, Kant’s confusion—a somewhat frustrating confusion for those hoping to find Kantian insights into the musical art, but a telling confusion nonetheless. (For a much fuller account of these issues, see McAuley, in press.)
The exact nature of Kantian ethical autonomy was, and continues to be, a source of much debate (see, for example, the range of contributions to Sensen 2013). This much, however, is clear: Kant’s “attempt to anchor morality in freedom” remained the central philosophical touchstone for German ethical thought throughout the nineteenth century (see Katsafanas 2015, especially 473–476). Crucially, the concept of autonomy denotes here not freedom from ethics but, rather, the rooting of ethics in freedom. On such a picture, a music whose purpose is to exercise ethical power over listeners—that is to say, to take away their freedom—can be greeted with confusion at best.
Although formalist narratives of nineteenth-century philosophies of music tend not to dwell on Kant’s own views on music, they do usually advance the claim that Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft founded a tradition of aesthetic autonomy more generally. How plausible is this claim? Kant’s stated intention in the Kritik der Urteilskraft as a whole was not, as many formalist accounts seem to presume, to provide a comprehensive theory of philosophical aesthetics.7 Rather, it was to provide an explanation of the workings of the mental power (or faculty, Kraft) of judgment (Urteil), a project that he believed would unify his radically mind-dependent philosophical system as a whole. Exactly how it is supposed to do so is—due, no doubt, to inconsistencies in Kant’s own thought—a near-impossible interpretative question (for an overview of some of the relevant debates among a vast literature, see Guyer 2009). Yet this central motivating aim cannot be overlooked.
That said, of the two parts into which the Kritik der Urteilskraft is divided, the first is devoted almost entirely to what are undeniably issues in aesthetics. (The second, much less discussed part of the Kritik is devoted to natural teleology.) And Kant does indeed put forward, in §§2–4 of the Kritik, a theory of disinterested beauty, according to which, “if the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation” (5:204). Kant also claims, however, at the culmination of the first part of the Kritik (§59), that beauty is a symbol of morality. Among the reasons that Kant gives for this claim, the most pertinent is that, for Kant, both aesthetics and morality are rooted in the experience of freedom. As Paul Guyer puts it, “it is precisely in virtue of its freedom from all constraint, even that by concepts of morality itself, that aesthetic response can furnish us with the experience of freedom that allows it to symbolize morality” (Guyer 1993, 47).
In the final instance, then, Kant does after all put forward a theory of aesthetic autonomy. Yet this autonomy does not, as narratives of musical formalism have too often presumed it to do, keep ethics and aesthetics at an irreconcilable remove. On the contrary, the very freedom of the aesthetic from the ethical joins the two inexorably together.8
At first glance, Arthur Schopenhauer’s view of music, as contained primarily in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, first edition 1818, henceforth WWV), seems to encapsulate both the absolute and the formalist.9 Music, we are told, has a “serious and profound significance, one that refers to the innermost essence of the world and our self” (WWV I/302). Indeed, music’s significance is so profound that “we can view the appearing world (or nature) and music as two different expressions of the same thing” (WWV I/309). Despite his near boundless disregard for the “drivel and charlatanism” (WWV I/XX) of his German idealist contemporaries, Schopenhauer fits effortlessly into what I have called the narrative of musical idealism. Yet Schopenhauer also claimed that music is a “universal language,” one that must remain dominant in any pairing with words or dramatic action. In a formulation that was to have a famous impact on Richard Wagner, Schopenhauer declared that the libretto of an opera “should never depart from [its] subordinate position” (WWV I/309). Indeed, the human voice itself is “originally and essentially nothing other than a modified tone, just like that of an instrument” (WWV II/512). Here, we have an easy stepping-stone into the narrative of musical formalism: a confident claim that, even when paired with words and action in opera, music remains self-sufficient.
Stemming from vital comments such as these, there is a rich and insightful literature investigating Schopenhauer’s musical thought, and examining its metaphysical aspects in particular.10 Such an emphasis is natural, for Schopenhauer himself regards his project to be one of a “metaphysics of music” (WWV II/511). The fundamentals of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music are as follows: Following the picture first laid out by Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1787), Schopenhauer believed the everyday, commonsense, temporal, and spatial world around us to be inescapably shaped by the activity of human perception. What we take to be our everyday realities are but appearances. In particular, space and time do not have any independent existence but are, rather, forms of perception that the cognitive subject impresses upon the world. Whereas Kant had believed that the ultimate reality behind these appearances would remain forever unknowable, Schopenhauer claimed—while mocking others for thinking the same—that he had discovered the key to unlock this secret world, the world of the “thing in itself.” The key in question was Schopenhauer’s concept of the will (der Wille), of which all appearing reality is, we are told, a mere representation (Vorstellung). Whereas other arts provide insight into particular aspects of the world as representation, music is “a direct copy of the will itself” (WWV I/310).
These are spectacular—indeed, extravagant—claims for music’s metaphysical significance. Within such a system, can music retain any of the ethical significance accorded to it by the eighteenth-century Affektenlehre? In a word, no. If Kantian idealism was an inhospitable environment for the Affektenlehre, then Schopenhauerian idealism is downright hostile. Although Kant had failed to see the merits of music’s power to guide listeners to ethically meritorious action, he had nonetheless retained at least a belief that one could prescribe ethical laws. More precisely, although Kant believed in the autonomy of the individual, he also believed that there existed a set of laws that free individuals ought to create for themselves. For Schopenhauer, however, this is a “manifest contradiction”—it is “wooden iron” (WWV I/321).
In sharp contrast to Kant, Schopenhauer denies the possibility that philosophy could ever prescribe rules for human behavior. That is to say, in the language of his time, he denies the possibility of any practical philosophy. “In my opinion,” writes Schopenhauer, “philosophy is always theoretical, since what is essential to it is that it treats and investigates its subject-matter (whatever that may be) in a purely contemplative manner, describing without prescribing” (WWV I/319). Here, then, there remain no vestiges of the philosophical ecosystem that had nurtured and sustained the Affektenlehre. Indeed, Schopenhauer seems to be denying the possibility of any ethical philosophy. How could music, on such a picture, possibly retain any ethical significance at all?
In the language of current philosophy, the study of philosophical ethics can be broken down into three branches: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics. Normative ethics attempts to prescribe general guidelines for human behavior. Applied ethics searches, often from the perspective of a particular normative viewpoint, for the best ethical responses to particular ethical situations. Metaethics seeks to investigate the nature of ethics in general. Schopenhauer’s claim that philosophy can never be practical is a denial of the possibility of normative and applied ethics. Under the guise of a philosophy that he claims remains “theoretical,” however, Schopenhauer presents a sustained metaethical analysis of the human condition.11
This metaethical analysis forms the cornerstone of Book IV of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, but is presented with especial clarity in Schopenhauer’s more tightly focused 1840 essay Über die Grundlage der Moral (On the Basis of Morals, henceforth ÜGM). In this latter work, Schopenhauer writes that “the concept ought, the imperative form of ethics, has validity only in theological morals, and outside of that loses all sense and meaning. By contrast, I set [philosophical] ethics the task of clarifying and explaining ways of acting among human beings that are extremely morally diverse, and tracing them back to their ultimate ground” (ÜGM 195).
In response to this task, Schopenhauer goes on to unfold an entire metaethical system. This system is rooted in the claim that all human and animal behavior is driven by egoism, “the urge to [one’s own] existence and well-being” (ÜGM 306). Egoism, suggests Schopenhauer, is “properly identical” with the “innermost core” of the human, yet there remain nonetheless actions of “genuine moral worth” in which egoism is absent. As with egoistic actions, these moral actions are driven by a concern with “well-being and woe” (Wohl und Wehe, an unequal pair for Schopenhauer, since well-being is naught but the absence of woe). Yet whereas egoistic actions are driven by a concern with one’s own well-being and woe, moral actions are driven by a concern with the well-being and woe of another.
If I am to perform a moral action, believes Schopenhauer, then I must identify with the suffering of another. “But,” writes Schopenhauer, “this requires that I be identified with him in some way, i.e. that that total distinction between me and the other, on which precisely my egoism rests, be removed at least to a certain degree.” Schopenhauer calls such identification “compassion” (ÜGM 208). From this state of compassion flow the cardinal virtues of “free justice” (the avoidance of one’s actions causing the suffering of another) and “genuine loving-kindness” (the active quest to relieve another’s suffering) (ÜGM 208, 212). In the main body of his Über die Grundlage der Moral, however, Schopenhauer declines to explain how compassion is possible. He simply calls it a “mystery” (ÜGM 209).
In a short epilogic section at the very end of the work, Schopenhauer goes further and suggests that an answer to the question can be found after all, but that it will require a turn to metaphysics (ÜGM §§260–275). More precisely, Schopenhauer suggests that all plurality–all “numerical difference of beings”–requires space and time, on the grounds that “the many can only be thought and represented either as alongside one another, or as after one another” (ÜGM 267). Yet it is a cornerstone of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics that space and time do not represent the ultimate reality of things but are, rather, frames through which the cognitive subject encounters the world. These are the necessary forms of appearances. If space and time are forms of appearance only, thinks Schopenhauer, then so too must be plurality. As such, the ultimate nature of things must be one: “in the countless appearances of this world of the senses [the essence of the world] can really be only one, and only the one and identical essence can manifest itself in all of these [appearances]” (ÜGM 267–268). And this is how Schopenhauer manages to claim both that all human actions are egoistic and that there are actions of genuine moral worth. Moral actions, suggests Schopenhauer, are simply egoistic at a deeper level. At the ground of all compassion is the realization that my neighbor and I are but the same. Taking up the same theme in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer writes that “everyone’s fundamental mistake is this: that we are not-I to each other. On the other hand, to be just, noble, and humane is simply to translate my metaphysics into action … all true virtue stems from direct, intuitive cognition of the metaphysical identity of all beings” (WWV II/690). Here, we can see at a flash how everything that Schopenhauer says about music’s metaphysical significance is also ethical. To understand the metaphysical basis of the world is to understand the ethical basis of the world.
In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer uses a musical metaphor to emphasize the inseparability of ethics and metaphysics:
a mere moral philosophy without an explanation of nature, such as Socrates tried to introduce, is entirely analogous to a melody without harmony, which is all that Rousseau wanted to have … conversely a mere physics and metaphysics without an ethics would correspond to a mere harmony without melody. (WWV I/313)12
Despite the inseparability of the two, ethics retains here the upper hand over metaphysics, for Schopenhauer is clear that melody is to be privileged above harmony. This status of melody is communicated most tastefully in his 1851 Parerga und Paralipomena (Parerga and Paralipomena, henceforth PP), the work that finally brought Schopenhauer, less than a decade before his death, the widespread recognition that had eluded him for so long. Here, Schopenhauer describes melody as “the core of music, to which harmony relates as does sauce to a roast” (PP II/459). If ethics takes the place of melody in Schopenhauer’s analogy, then ethics must be the main dish. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is all gravy. Or as Schopenhauer puts it in Über die Grundlage der Moral, “the final summit in which the meaning of existence as such culminates is the ethical” (ÜGM 261). In the final analysis, however, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is intended to lead to what he calls a “higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint” (PP I/333).
From this higher standpoint, the newfound oneness of metaphysics and ethics is reflected in the oneness of the universe. Of what, though, does this oneness consist? It consists of the will, a blind striving with no ultimate goal. The world of representation around us, by contrast, is full of plurality. This world, however, still has the will as its ultimate ground and, as such, forms a coherent whole: it has a “harmony and unity” (WWV I/99). Unlike the other arts, music, for Schopenhauer, is not a copy of any aspect of the world of representation but, rather, “a copy of the will itself” (WWV I/304). Yet there is still “a parallelism … an analogy” between music and the appearing world. Based on this parallelism, Schopenhauer develops a scheme according to which the ascending voices of musical harmony correspond to the increasing complexities to be found in nature. The bass corresponds to “inorganic nature.” Between the bass and the soprano, “those [voices] closer to the bass are … bodies that are still inorganic but that already express themselves in a variety of ways … the higher voices represent the plant and animal kingdoms” (WWV I/305). The scheme culminates in the melodic soprano voice, which represents “the thoughtful living and striving of human beings” (WWV I/306).
It is easy to laugh at this notoriously bizarre picture, this “idea of such unparalleled silliness” (Young 2007, 152). Yet at its root are the simple claims that melody and harmony require one another and that the interconnectedness of musical notes is reflected in the interconnectedness of nature (and vice versa). Further, the picture in which all voices beneath the melody find analogies in nonhuman aspects of the world of representation is a fleshing out of Schopenhauer’s equation of harmony with metaphysics. That the melody represents “the thoughtful living and striving of human beings,” on the other hand, is the ground of Schopenhauer’s equation of melody with ethics. Schopenhauer expands on this notion in a passage worth quoting at length:
Now the essence of a human being consists in the fact that his will [Schopenhauer is referring here to the individual human will, but sees this as grounded in the one, ultimate will] strives, is satisfied, and strives anew, and so on and on, and in fact his happiness and well-being are nothing more than the rapid progress of this transition from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, since the absence of satisfaction is suffering and the absence of a new desire is empty longing, languor, boredom; correspondingly, the essence of the melody is a constant departure, deviation from the tonic in a thousand ways … always followed however by an eventual return to the tonic: in all these ways the melody expresses the many different forms of the striving of the will, but it always also expresses satisfaction by eventually regaining a harmonic interval and, even more, the tonic. (WWV I/307)
Here, melody gives us an important insight into the nature of will—whether the individual human will or the one ultimate will—which is that its very nature is striving. In the twists and turns of melody, we are given insight into both suffering (which Schopenhauer sees as unfulfilled desire) and well-being (which Schopenhauer sees as fulfilled desire). And suffering and well-being are at the very root of Schopenhauer’s metaethical system.
Schopenhauer expands this analogy in various ways, the most important of which in the present context is his equation of modulation with death. In his Über die Grundlage der Moral, Schopenhauer lays out two opposing worldviews that one might live by, each of which comes with a distinctive attitude towards death (ÜGM 270–274). According to the first, “I have my true being in my own self alone.” This view, holds Schopenhauer, is the source of all egoism, and he who holds it sees in death “all reality and the whole world perish along with his self.” According to the second worldview, “My true, inner essence exists in every living thing.” This view is the source of all compassion, and he who holds it “loses at death only a small part of his existence: he endures in all others, in whom he has indeed always recognized and loved his essence and his self.” Music, for Schopenhauer, shows the truth of this second view:
Modulation from one key into another, completely different one entirely abolishes any connection to what preceded it, and so is like death in so far as death brings the individual to an end; but the will that appeared in the individual lives on afterwards, just as it was alive before, appearing in other individuals whose consciousnesses nonetheless have no connection to that of the first. (WWV I/308)
Just as a modulated theme lives on in a new key, so too does the essence of an individual—indeed, the shared essence of every individual—live on after death.
Yet the idea that death is not final is only one articulation, albeit an especially evocative one, of the broader metaphysical view that all is one. Music also expresses this insight more generally through its expression of emotion. Music, writes Schopenhauer:
does not express this or that individual and particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly, as it were, the essential in all these without anything superfluous.
(WWV I/308–309)
At first glance, this is a statement avant la lettre of a common position from the analytic philosophy of music. According to this position, represented most famously by Peter Kivy (see Kivy 1980 for an early, canonical statement), the emotion heard in music is not the expression of any actual emotion, such as that of the composer or the performer but, rather, the semblance of emotions in general. Music is expressive of such emotions in its mimicking of their general forms. Kivy’s favorite example is that of the St. Bernard dog, whose facial expression appears to humans as sad, regardless of the emotional state of any given dog at any given time. Hence Kivy’s theory has become affectionately known as the “Doggy Theory.” Schopenhauer’s position, however, is almost diametrically opposed to this view. The reason that music does not express individual emotions is not that it expresses only the surface contours of emotions. Rather, it is because, at the most fundamental level, there are no individual emotions. There are no individual emotions because there are, ultimately, no individuals. To hear in music sorrow or joy in themselves, rather than any particular sorrow or joy, is to become aware that all is one. It is, by extension, to become aware that your neighbor’s pain is your own pain, your neighbor’s joy your own joy.
Music, then, provides another way of communicating that which Schopenhauer communicates in his philosophical metaethics. Yet it is more, it seems, than just another way. For while Schopenhauer alludes frequently to the difficulty of his philosophy, music “is instantaneously comprehensible to everyone” (WWV I/303), it is “powerful and urgent” (WWV I/304). Music, then, can communicate these metaethical truths to listeners who might lack the philosophical vocabulary to understand them conceptually. Indeed, Schopenhauer thinks that philosophical understanding is not enough to breed virtue. But the “powerful and urgent” effect of music, it seems—though Schopenhauer does not say this explicitly—might be able to persuade its listeners where philosophy can only enlighten its readers.
Yet music does not just speak of well-being and woe: it plays an active role in the creation of well-being and the relief of woe. More than that: it is the “Panakeion aller unserer Leiden”—the panacea for all our suffering (WWV I/309). This phrase takes on great significance given the amount of suffering that Schopenhauer sees in the world. The “fate of humanity overall and in general,” for example, is “want, misery, sorrow, trouble, and death” (WWV I/415). Life, for Schopenhauer, has only one direction: “we have been cast into death ever since birth, and it is only playing with its prey for a while before devouring it” (WWV I/367). Between birth and death, we are either suffering the pain of not having that for which we strive, or the boredom of not having anything to strive for (WWV I/367–368). The experience of beauty, however, can lift us up out of this suffering:
when some occasion from the outside or a disposition from within suddenly lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, tearing cognition from its slavery to the will, our attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing but instead grasps things freed from their relation to the will and hence considers them without interests, without subjectivity, purely objectively; we are given over to the things entirely, to the extent that they are mere representations, not to the extent that they are motives: then suddenly the peace that we always sought on the first path of willing but that always eluded us comes of its own accord, and all is well within us. (WWV I/231)
The most vital source of beauty is, for Schopenhauer, art. Art “repeats what is essential and enduring in all the appearances of the world” (WWV I/217), it “wrests the object of its contemplation out from the current of worldly affairs” (WWV I/218). Art in general, then, provides a temporary relief from suffering. Yet Schopenhauer describes only music using the distinctive Greek word Panakeion.13
Schopenhauer, in fact, uses the word Panakeion on only one other occasion in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. He does so in the context not of temporary relief from the pain of the will, but of its complete renunciation. The highest goal of life is, for Schopenhauer, salvation, and salvation consists in a permanent denial of the will. Building on the experience of aesthetic pleasure, thinks Schopenhauer, “we can gather … how blissful life must be for someone whose will is not merely momentarily placated, as it is in the pleasure of the beautiful, but calmed forever” (WWV I/461). There are, suggests Schopenhauer, two paths along which one might reach this elusive state of the permanent denial of the will. The first involves the cognitive insight that lies at the heart of the ethical life: that all are one. From this insight, we can ascend through virtue and compassion to “complete will-lessness (Willenslosigkeit)” (WWV I/448). This state, however, is hard to achieve: it requires the commitment of a saint to avoid the temptations of the will. Yet it is this route to will-lessness, it seems, that art gives us a glimpse of.
The second way comes through suffering itself. Through personal experience of suffering, we can come to realize the futility of willing:
at every turn, fate frustrates all our provisions for a life of luxury—the idiocy of which is already clear enough in the brevity, inconstancy, and emptiness of life as well as its termination in the bitterness of death—scatters thorn upon thorn along our path, and confronts us everywhere with salutary suffering (heilsame Leiden), the panacea for our misery (das Panakeion unsers Jammers). (WWV II/734)
Here, it is precisely that which ails us which can cure us: the suffering caused by the will can itself lead us to renounce willing entirely. As such, this suffering becomes heilsam: “salutary” or “healing,” but carrying also in this context connotations of “salvific.” It becomes a “purifying flame” (WWV I/464). The illness, here, is its own cure: suffering is the panacea for all our misery.
It is clear that music goes beyond the other arts in terms of its relief from suffering. What I want to highlight here, though, is that it provides for Schopenhauer not just the temporary relief from suffering that all the arts provide but also something approaching, or at least closer to, a permanent relief from suffering: a Panakeion. For whereas the other arts provide insight into aspects of the world as representation, music presents the will itself. Hence music, we might expect, should be able to take us further along that path—the Panakeion of heilsame Leiden—toward salvation.
But this is not quite what Schopenhauer says. For when Schopenhauer describes music’s representation—music’s uniquely direct representation—of the will, he talks no longer of universal suffering, but of happiness and well-being though the satisfaction of the will: the same will that, everywhere else in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, can never be satisfied. Recall that in his discussion of music, Schopenhauer believes the “essence of a human being” to consist “in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, and strives anew, and so on and on, and in fact his happiness and well-being are nothing more than the rapid progress of this transition from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire” (WWV I/307). The idea seems to be that though the striving of the will can never find complete resolution, there is nonetheless a genuine contentment to be found in the process of willing, finding fulfilment of one’s desires, and willing anew. Yet in the context of Schopenhauer’s darkly pessimistic view of the world as a whole, it is, it seems, only music that can coax this optimism out of him.
For sure, to put the matter in musical terms, we will never find a cadence so complete that it ends not just a piece of music, but all music; a cadence so perfect that we need never hear another. But who would want all music to come to an end? It seems that Schopenhauer’s own enthusiasm for music—he was a keen amateur flautist and regular concert-goer—has led him to another way of understanding the will, one that is absent through the rest of the book. Or perhaps it is not Schopenhauer’s own enthusiasm that has led him to this conclusion, but rather the nature of music itself, as it collides with Schopenhauer’s overall system.
Schopenhauer is, in any case, aware of the contradiction. At the close of his discussion of music in Volume II of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung—indeed, as the closing lines of Book III of Volume II—he writes:
Perhaps one or two people might take offence at the fact that according to the metaphysics we are presenting, music, which indeed often has such an elevating effect on our minds and seems to talk to us of worlds that are other and better than our own, serves to flatter only the will to life since it presents its essence, portrays its successes, and ends up expressing its satisfaction and contentment. The following passage from the Veda [cited in Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Dupperon’s Latin translation] might serve to put such thoughts to rest: “And Anand, which is a sort of joy, is called the highest Atma, because everywhere that joy might be, this is a part of its joy.” (Et Anand sroup, quod forma gaudii est, ton pram Atma ex hoc dicunt, quod quocunque loco gaudium est, particula e gaudio ejus est.)
(WWV II/523, translation modified)
The word Atma (a Latinization of the original ātman) here can carry multiple related meanings, but refers in Hindu, Buddhist, and related traditions to the real, essential, or absolute self. The key to this difficult passage, however, lies in the meaning of the term Anand (a Latinization of the original ānanda).14 The term is multivalent, referring primarily to a state of devotional or meditative blissfulness, but able to refer also to sexual pleasure. These two aspects are, Patrick Olivelle has argued, related: within the Vedas, there is an “explicit and unambiguous connection between ānanda as orgasmic rapture and ānanda as the experience of … ātman” (Olivelle 1997, 154). This connection makes sense in the context of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, since Schopenhauer sees sexual desire as one of the fundamental human drives, drives that are formative for the human body itself: just as “teeth, throat and intestines are objectified hunger,” so too “the genitals are objectified sex drive” (WWV I/129). More precisely, seeing sex as an essentially procreative act, Schopenhauer believes that “sexual satisfaction is the affirmation of the will to life beyond the life of the individual” (WWV I/388).15 Elsewhere, Schopenhauer sees such affirmation of the will in almost exclusively negative terms, but here, drawing implicit parallels between musical and sexual satisfaction, Schopenhauer’s love of music seems to give him reason to overcome—if only for a fleeting, climactic moment—his moral fear of sex. Only then, if this reading is correct, can Schopenhauer endorse, as he does, the suggestion that the blissfulness of ānanda is the highest ātman.
Regardless of the exact mechanism, this much is clear: music, for Schopenhauer, can relieve suffering to an extent unparalleled among the arts. As a Panakeion for all our suffering, music can at least hint not simply at a temporary relief from suffering, but at an eternal one. Music can provide an intimation, that is, of salvation. In the end, music, for Schopenhauer, “does not speak of things, but of sheer well-being and woe, which are the sole realities for the will” (PP II/457). Music’s primary import, in other words, is not metaphysical, but ethical.
Music in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then, can offer metaethical insight, it can relieve suffering, and it can offer an intimation of salvation. Together these claims put forward what we might call a new ethics of music: a new way of understanding music’s moral significance that went well beyond the goal-orientated outlook of the eighteenth-century Affektenlehre.
Schopenhauer was clearly proud of his vision of music. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, he claimed that “until I came along, no one even attempted seriously to decipher … [music’s] undoubted significance, i.e., to render comprehensible to our reason even in a general sense what it is that music in melody and harmony signifies, and what it is speaking about” (PP II/458). This claim, however, is surely disingenuous. For the central claim of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music—that music can provide a profound insight into the true nature of things—had been articulated clearly well over a decade before Schopenhauer started work on Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and by none other than Friedrich Schelling, one of the very “windbags” whom Schopenhauer came to so detest (WWV I/XX). More precisely, in his 1802–03 lectures on the Philosophie der Kunst (Philosophy of Art), Schelling claimed that “The forms of music are the forms of the eternal things … the forms of music are necessarily the forms of things in themselves” (Schelling 1859, 501, trans. as Schelling 1989, 115–116; on the roots of Schelling’s view, see McAuley 2013).16
It is not clear whether Schopenhauer had, at the time of writing his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, encountered Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst in particular, but it is certainly possible, since the work circulated in manuscript form around this time, and Schopenhauer was well plugged into the right literary circles to gain access to such manuscripts. More pertinently, though, Schelling’s broad view of art was already developed in his widely read System des transzendentalen Idealismus of 1800 (Schelling 1858, 327–634, see especially 612–634; trans. as Schelling 1978, see especially 219–236), and his view of music in particular—itself anticipated in fragmentary form by Novalis and by Friedrich Schlegel—would have been common currency in Berlin and Weimar during Schopenhauer’s stays in those cities in 1811–13 and 1813–14, respectively. This is important in the present context because Schelling’s philosophy of music, at least as articulated in the Philosophie der Kunst, rejects the musical ethics of the Affektenlehre without proposing a new ethical significance for music. To be sure, Schelling sees a deep affinity between the ethical and the aesthetic, writing that “philosophy treats neither truth, virtue, nor beauty alone, but rather the common element in all three, and deduces them from this one primal source (Urquell)” (Schelling 1859, 382; trans. Schelling 1989, 29). But music, in this picture, and in distinction to the dramatic arts, is given no particular ethical potential—it is, if not ethically numb, then at least simply somewhat ethically insignificant.
Many recent critics have painted Schopenhauer as the originator of the nineteenth-century idealist view of music. To do so, however, is not only to overlook Schelling’s contribution to nineteenth-century musical thought. It is also to overlook Schopenhauer’s real contributions to the course of philosophies of music in the nineteenth century, including not simply his imaginative rethinking of Schelling’s musical metaphysics through the lens of will but, crucially, also his reimbuing of music with a deep ethical significance—indeed, an ethical significance even deeper than that which was afforded it by the Affektenlehre.
Schopenhauer, in other words, did not move music from the ethical to the metaphysical. On the contrary, he moved music from the metaphysical back to the ethical once more. He did so not at the expense of the metaphysical, however, but precisely in, with, and through it.
How, then, did this new, nineteenth-century ethics of music play itself out? I give here but one example: the case of Nietzsche.17 As with Schopenhauer and Kant, Nietzsche too may seem, on first glance, an odd choice for a narrative of ethics, for he sought to develop a philosophical perspective that stood—in the title of one of his most famous works—Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886). Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality, however, was itself an exercise in philosophical ethics, and in its wake, Nietzsche developed more positive ethical perspectives of his own.18
The exact nature of Nietzsche’s ethics is difficult to pin down. This is in part because, unlike Schopenhauer (who spent more or less his whole life developing the position first laid out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), Nietzsche often changed wholeheartedly his views on the most central issues with which he was engaged. It is also because Nietzsche’s rhetorical style—itself a matter of considerable development across his philosophical career—is frequently opaque, albeit while offering also equally frequent moments of poetic lucidity. In this, too, Nietzsche differs markedly from Schopenhauer who, despite the interpretative difficulties to which his philosophy gives rise, sought always to write with the utmost clarity, while lampooning those who—like Hegel and Fichte—he saw as failing in this mission.
All that said, the central ethical argument that Nietzsche develops across his career is as follows: The core metaphysical beliefs of Christianity were, thought Nietzsche, neither plausible nor widely held in the educated Europe of the later nineteenth century. Yet the system of morality that had arisen from Christianity remained. This, for Nietzsche, was a problem because these values, he believed, denigrate the here and now in favor of a transcendent beyond—a beyond that, he thought, did not exist. In opposition to the supposedly life-denying values of Christian morality, Nietzsche sought to develop a set of values that instead affirmed life.
And music, for Nietzsche, can communicate these values in a unique way. As Aaron Ridley puts it, in an essay I wish to engage with closely:
In Nietzsche’s view, … music is a uniquely potent medium for the transmission of values. Indeed, assuming that a soul could, through music, become so imbued with life-affirmation that this became second nature to it, music might even be the agent by which the worn-out life-denying values of traditional morality are finally laid to rest. It is for this reason that Nietzsche’s central critical preoccupation when thinking about music—as can be seen, for example, throughout The Case of Wagner [Der Fall Wagner, 1888]—is whether this or that work speaks for or against life.
(Ridley 2014, 226)
It would be a mistake to presume, however, as does Ridley, that Nietzsche’s position was wholly novel. Citing Schopenhauer as the prime exemplar of a metaphysical view of music that was already widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, Ridley suggests that
Nietzsche was hardly unusual in thinking of music in the general [metaphysical] terms that he did. What makes his thought distinctive is his connection of these, as it were, freely available elements with questions concerning the valuation of life.
(225)
Recognizing the fundamentally ethical nature of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music, however, allows a recognition that Nietzsche was not quite so original in this regard as he might seem, for so, too, did Schopenhauer link in music the metaphysical and the ethical.
It should be stressed with this that the ethical ideas that Nietzsche believes music capable of communicating are wholly different from those of Schopenhauer. In particular, Nietzsche believes what he sees as Schopenhauer’s project of a systematic ethics to be fundamentally misguided. But I highlight only one such ethical idea here, one that stands in especially stark contrast to Schopenhauer’s position. For Schopenhauer, we may recall, the recognition that all are one was at the heart of his musical ethics. For Nietzsche, however, the reverse is true. In order truly to love another, thinks Nietzsche, we must recognize fully the individual’s difference from ourselves. And this, it seems, is an insight that music can provide. In §334 of his Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science, 1882), Nietzsche writes that:
One must learn to love.— This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But that happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way – there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned. (Nietzsche 2001, 334)
For Schopenhauer, then, music shows us that all are ultimately one, the understanding of which is at the root of his ethics. For Nietzsche, by contrast, music shows us that to love another, or indeed ourselves, we must recognize persons as unique, before learning to tolerate and then to love them.
More pertinently, I would suggest that Nietzsche goes beyond Schopenhauer in an important regard, for he sees in music a unique potential to communicate ethical insight to its listeners. To a large extent, this is implicit in Schopenhauer, yet it is developed fully in the work of Nietzsche, who places an especial emphasis on music’s emotional power. To cite Ridley once more:
The way in which Nietzsche envisaged a properly musical philosophy as working—that is, as working directly upon its audience’s soul—owes a good deal to Wagner’s ideas about music, which the younger Nietzsche had imbibed enthusiastically. In the face of a true music drama, said Wagner, “Nothing should remain for the synthesizing intellect to do. … We must become knowers through feeling” [from Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama), 1851]. And this … is exactly how Nietzsche hoped that a philosophy transposed into the “language” of music would affect its readers (or listeners). The priority of “feeling” in this mechanism is noteworthy: both he and Wagner are committed to the view that cognition, ordinarily so-called, is (or can be) consequent upon feeling. And this is a commitment that Nietzsche emphasizes elsewhere: “We still draw the conclusions of judgements we consider false,” he says, “of teachings in which we no longer believe—our feelings make us do it.” And, when it comes to our moral judgments, “We have to learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently” [from Morgenröthe (Daybreak), 1881]. (Ridley 2014, 228–229)
To transform understandings in this unique way is only a step’s remove from transforming behavior: it is to highlight music’s power to effect positive ethical change. In this, there is an utterly foreign but irresistibly compelling parallel to the eighteenth-century Affektenlehre with which we started our story. For, despite the profound differences between ethical perspectives, despite the basic shift from a practical, goal-directed outlook to a more reflective ethical stance, the affective power of music is again a power for ethical good. In the Affektenlehre, however, music’s affective power was seen as acting directly on the behavior of listeners, so threatening, on the Kantian view, their moral freedom. From a Nietzschean perspective, by contrast, music’s affective power can communicate ethical perspectives that will allow listeners to break, where necessary, the bounds of conventional morality, and to make free moral choices rooted in the recognition of human freedom.
This, then, is my alternative narrative—the ethical narrative—of the course of the philosophy of music in the nineteenth century. Kant inherited from the eighteenth century the supremely practical doctrine of the Affektenlehre, according to which music can change the behavior of its listeners to ethically meritorious ends. This doctrine, however, lost its teeth in context of Kant’s ethics of autonomy. At the same time, Kant proposed a theory of aesthetic autonomy, but saw this autonomy itself as serving as a symbol for ethical freedom. Kant having inadvertently disposed of the Affektenlehre, Schelling proposed a new, idealist model of music’s significance, one that paid no explicit attention to the ethical. Schopenhauer rethought Schelling’s model from the perspective of his concept of will, and from the perspective of the supposed oneness of the will in particular. In so doing, he reimbued music with a deep ethical significance, for music in Schopenhauer’s philosophy can offer metaethical insight, it can relieve suffering, and it can provide an intimation of salvation. Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer in believing music capable of offering what I have called metaethical insight, but saw music as communicating a fundamentally different ethical vision, one based not on the oneness of the will but, rather, on the uniqueness of each individual human. Nietzsche also made explicit what was only implicit in Schopenhauer: that music is an especially powerful agent for the communication of moral insights, whatever those insights might be.
In providing such a narrative, I hope to have shown that the course of the philosophy of music in the nineteenth century was not, as a common formalist narrative would suggest, devoid of ethical import but ethically engaged through and through. Or, at least, that this was the case with respect to three key figures of nineteenth-century German musical thought. In so doing, I hope also to have shown that the supposed legacy of this same formalist narrative was, by that fact, merely imaginary.