Music and the Limits of Philosophy

During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed what was then a radical idea: that human reason and its most profound product, philosophy, had definite and determinable limits. Before Kant, being a philosopher was thought to entitle one to speak with knowledge and authority on practically any topic whatever. After all, since Plato and Aristotle, the subject matter of philosophy was taken to be ‘being’, and, since anything that exists must share in ‘being,’ then anything whatever was fair game for the philosopher. Kant, however, suggested that what we take to be or exist is a matter of what we, as human beings, are capable of experiencing and knowing. Since philosophy was a form of human knowledge, then any limitations upon human knowledge would also circumscribe the range of topics appropriate for philosophy. In other words, there were just some things about which philosophy had little or nothing important to say.

Kant mapped these new contours of human reason using a twofold strategy. On the one hand, he tried to demonstrate that anything that we could possibly know must first be capable of appearing to us in the space and time of our own experience. On the other, he attempted to show that actually knowing such an appearance involved characterizing it in terms of fundamental concepts which allowed us to make verbal statements about it. Without experience, there was nothing to talk about; without concepts, there was nothing meaningful to say.

Originally Kant had been concerned with the status of scientific knowledge about natural objects and felt confident that his view confirmed its procedures and results as well as outlined its limits. However, when, in his third major work, The Critique of Judgment (1790), he turned his attention to humanly produced works of art, he discovered another sort of limit to philosophy. He found that, while philosophy could make some headway in clarifying in very general terms the sort of experiences and ideas that define an object as an artwork, it had little or nothing to say about the particular and unique meaning of any individual artwork or artistic style.

In a move which was adopted by most of his successors among the Romantics and German Idealists with respect to artworks, he outlined a sort of ‘compromise position’ by claiming that there was a hierarchy of ‘artforms’, based on the degree of ‘conceptual content’ that a given artform possessed. At the top was poetry, since it employed language and its conceptual determinations could thus (at its best, in his view) express philosophical ideas. By contrast, at the very bottom of the hierarchy was music, which he characterized as a “mere play of sound sensations.” Following Kant’s view, music became, for most philosophers immediately after him, a sort of absolute limit or ‘zero point’ for philosophical reflection and interest, a place where philosophy encountered its own limits and could only remain silent.

This at least helps us better understand the philosophical problem posed by Led Zeppelin. For a philosopher influenced by Kant (which so many have been and still are), music which lacks any very sophisticated lyrics or verbal content and is mainly driven by sound and rhythm represents a limit for philosophy. Lacking the conceptual content which is an absolute requisite of philosophy on this view, there is, for the philosopher, indeed nothing further to say. To slightly pervert a phrase of Frank Zappa, “I’ll shut up; you can play yer guitar.”

Nietzsche’s Re-evaluation of Music

In the time separating Kant from Nietzsche, both philosophy and music changed dramatically, moving along trajectories that ultimately crossed in the figure of the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), whose works provoked Nietzsche’s first major publication, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). Wagner’s eccentric megalomania drove him to style himself as the premier philosopher as well as the foremost composer of his age. In his own self-styled philosophical publications, he claimed to have succeeded in doing precisely what, to Kant, was the impossible: to have made music thoroughly philosophical and to have expressed philosophy in the form of music. He promoted his ‘music dramas’ (most of us would call them operas) as what he called ‘total works of art’, productions which mustered all other artforms—including music, painting, architecture, acting, and poetry—into what he regarded as a total and final philosophical view of the universe. In this respect, he probably anticipated certain types of modern epic filmmaking as well as such conceptual rock performances as The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

While the young Nietzsche had no desire to return to Kant’s rationalistic ‘limits of philosophy’ in the face of music, he also came to think that something important about both music and philosophy had been perverted by Wagner’s grandiose visions. However, unlike Kant, who championed conceptual philosophy against the “mere play” of music, Nietzsche took the side of music against the abstract conceptual idiom of philosophy as well as Wagner’s attempt at a forced wedding between them.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is most famous for introducing the distinction between the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’. The namesake of the first was the Greek sun-god Apollo, the symbol of heavenly luminosity, clarity, individuality, self-control, intellect, reason, and civilization. That of the second was Dionysus, the subterranean god of intoxication, violence, excess, irrationality, and the ‘darker forces’ within human beings and brute nature. Ultimately, Nietzsche developed this opposition into a conflictual cosmic vision which manifests itself in every register of human experience, social life, and history.

However, it was the realm of art that first provided Nietzsche access to this vision and that has remained its most fertile ground for application. Specifically, Nietzsche came to view music, understood in its most elemental sense as rhythm, perhaps chanting, and dance, as the most fundamental and ‘Dionysian’ of the artforms and that from which, early in the Greek world, others emerged under the ‘rationalizing’ and ‘civilizing’ influence of the ‘Apollonian’. The view of art developed in The Birth of Tragedy then became an attempt to recover the importance of music and its ‘Dionysian’ powers from the ‘civilized’ and, to Nietzsche’s mind, decadent forms that art had assumed in the history of European culture since the Greeks.

One crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s discussion was that philosophy itself, as inaugurated by Socrates and Plato, was a wholly ‘Apollonian’ countermeasure directed against the psychic and political chaos associated with the spirit of essentially ‘Dionysian’ music, something that helps explain Plato’s negative attitude toward art as well as later critics’ moral outrage at the ‘immorality’ and excesses of such rock bands as Led Zeppelin. Still, Nietzsche insisted that the Greek tragedies were born from the ‘spirit of music’ and that philosophy (initially in the form of the Platonic dialogues) in turn emerged from them as an assertion of Apollonian authority directed against the violence and chaos enacted in the Greek tragedies.

Nietzsche, then, is important for our discussion of Led Zeppelin for two reasons. First, he completely reversed Kant’s view of the relation between philosophy and music. Where, for Kant, the ‘defect’ of music was its lack of any ‘conceptual content’, positioning it as the least philosophically accessible and significant of the artforms, for Nietzsche music became just the opposite, that art which not only lay at the basis of philosophy but from which philosophy stood to learn the most about its own subterranean origins, motivations, and nature. On a Nietzschean view, it is exactly the fact that the music of Led Zeppelin is so viscerally ‘Dionysian’ and so lacking in ‘Apollonian’ verbal or philosophical content that makes it interesting and important to the philosopher.

Second, in suggesting that there was a subterranean connection between music and philosophy, Nietzsche opened the possibility for the philosopher to speak meaningfully and productively about music, something that Kant had entirely disallowed. Nietzsche, then, would encourage us to leave the self-affirming security of more traditional philosophical problems and concepts in approaching Led Zeppelin and risk creating a new language in which to describe and reflect upon the visceral and mostly unconscious effects that draw us to their music in the first place.

Still, there’s a danger lurking in Nietzsche’s view of the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast when applied to music like that of LZ. It is that, so long as we continue to proceed as traditional Apollonian philosophers, when we confront and try to describe something essentially Dionysian, we will tend to convert the Dionysian into another, if somewhat different, version of our own still Apollonian view. Nietzsche is often claimed to be, among other things, a forerunner of psychoanalysis and existentialism and, read in this way, there is a tendency to try to find some sort of ‘deeper’ philosophical meaning expressed in the music. While this ‘depth approach’ may be helpful in thinking about bands like Pink Floyd, whose lyrics and music lend themselves to psychoanalytic or existential analyses, we’re still inclined to say, in the case of Led Zeppelin, “That’s also not why you listen to their music; you’re still not getting it.” So what to do?

Music and Deleuze’s Philosophy of Surfaces

In the eighteenth chapter of The Logic of Sense (1969), the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) presents what he calls “three images of philosophers.” He characterizes the first image as that concerned with ‘height’. He associates it most closely with Plato and says that “the philosopher’s work is always determined as an ascent and a conversion,” such as Plato describes in his famous ‘Cave’ image. More generally, the ‘philosopher of height’ emphasizes the mind and works with and thinks in terms of ideas, concepts, and linguistic meanings, those universals that transcend the world of ordinary experience. Beyond Plato, this image could also describe all approaches to philosophy that emphasize logical reasoning, verbal meaning, and the analysis of propositions and texts. The philosopher of height clearly corresponds to what Nietzsche called the “Apollonian.”

The second image is that of ‘depth’. The ‘philosopher of depth’ focuses upon all those subterranean desires, passions, and forces that we most immediately associate with the unconscious mind and the existential anxieties that it provokes. Rather than ascending to universal concepts, ‘depth philosophy’ descends, digs down into the tensions and conflicts underlying life, language, thought, and philosophy. Deleuze cites the pre-Socratic philosophers (as interpreted by Nietzsche) as the original ‘depth philosophers,’ but comes to include such modern projects as psychoanalysis and existentialism among them. Again, there’s a strong parallel with Nietzsche’s idea of the Dionysian.

The third image is that of the philosopher concerned primarily with what Deleuze calls ‘surfaces’. The history of philosophy as yet offers only few examples and Deleuze regards this stance as “a reorientation of all thought and of what it means to think: there is no longer depth or height.” For Deleuze, the philosopher of surfaces neither tries to ascend to rational, transcendent ideas nor attempts to unearth the hidden forces and unconscious processes that underlie human life and experience. Rather, he or she holds firmly to the conviction that all is ‘pure immanence’, a flow of lived bodily experience, and refuses to grant philosophical standing or significance either to supersensible ideas or subterranean mechanisms or structures. A philosopher of surfaces doesn’t deny that there have historically been other images of philosophers, but he or she insists that ideas and unconscious structures are mere ‘secondary’ or ‘illusory effects’ of the ongoing flow of our immediate lived bodily experience, effects that can always be reduced to its own operations.

The ‘surface’, then, is exactly where we live our lives, as embodied beings, on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis. As Deleuze describes the human being at the beginning of his most famous work, Anti-Oedipus: “It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.” This is the fundamental stratum of existence that makes up our lives from moment to moment and it wouldn’t be possible to think about abstract philosophical questions or probe the ‘deeper meaning of our existence’ without it. Neither thought nor feeling, it is the immanent and original flow on the basis of which we produce the dual illusions of ‘higher truths’ or ‘underlying meanings’.

When he turns to art, Deleuze, like Nietzsche, gives music a privileged place, but for different reasons. Rather than being a human activity that stands in contrast to the Apollonian and discloses some ‘deeper meaning’ about the hidden Dionysiac element of human existence to us, music is that art most able to ‘sync us up’ with the flow that is our surface life. Here, finally, we’ve gotten closer to saying something philosophical about Led Zeppelin: We listen to Led Zeppelin, not because of the conceptual heights to which the lyrics may lead us or because it sets off speculation about the ‘deeper meanings’ of things; rather, we listen mainly because the music affects us in a very physical, bodily way. The surface flow of our moment-to-moment bodily experience is kicked into another gear and rides along with the rhythm and sound qualities of the music in a way that makes us aware . . . of what? That, for a moment, we are intensely alive and, yes, rockin’. That’s why we listen to Led Zeppelin.

I Got My Flow(er), I Got My Power

But Deleuze doesn’t leave it at this; it turns out that a ‘surface philosopher’ can have a good deal more to say about the music of Led Zeppelin without quoting lyrics or a lot of soul-searching. In fact, much of Deleuze’s philosophy is devoted to developing a new vocabulary with which to describe and analyze ‘surface flows.’

To begin with, a surface is basically a physical or bodily flow of forces. As a flow, it has varying speeds or velocities, just as sometimes, when we’re bored or tired, we say “I’m moving pretty slow today” and on others, when we’re excited or nervous, we say, “I’ve been screaming along all day.” This, of course, has nothing to do with ‘clock-time’ or ‘map distance’ but with the overall flow of our bodily experience. In listening to LZ, though we don’t always think about it, our bodies directly register the differences in tempo between their hard rockin’ numbers and their slower pieces as well the changes of rhythmic flow within a piece. Think, for example, of how “Stairway to Heaven” builds from a slow, ballad-like beginning to the searing conclusion. This, at least as much as its cryptic lyrics, make it one of the classic anthems of rock.

As forces, surface flows also have intensities, exactly as when we describe an experience or musical performance as ‘intense’ or ‘blah’. Led Zeppelin’s music is distinctive and immediately distinguishable from all imitators because it involves an interplay among several distinct intensities: a killer rhythm section; Robert Plant’s signature voice, which often strays from almost a whisper into probably the most intense falsetto scream of any vocalist; and the brilliantly modulated guitar work of Jimmy Page. Such an interplay of intensities can’t be taught and has probably never been equaled.

Surface flows also experience blockages. We’re all familiar with this when we’re cruising down the ski slope and suddenly catch an edge and fall, or when we’re feeling great and we get a phone call from a bill collector or an angry partner. Interesting things, however, sometimes happen around blockages, since they often create open spaces for altering our ‘trajectories’ (another favorite Deleuzian word) and establishing alternate flows. Led Zeppelin were masters of this device, especially in their live performances, where, in segues between songs or within their trademark marathon improvisations, they would seem to allow the energy to grind briefly to a halt, only to re-establish another and different flow going in new sonic directions. For a great example of this, check out the twenty-five-minute version of “Dazed and Confused” on their 1972 live recording, How the West was Won, which contains, besides the title song, segues into “The Crunge” and “Walter’s Walk,” together with a lot of other ‘flow-blockagenew flow’ patterns.

There are several discussions of musical flows in Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus, where a central theme that we might call “the same (only different)” appears. According to Deleuze, the very heart of musical flow consists in the repetition of beats, themes, choruses, instrumentation, and so on. Illustrated very simply, one beat is meaningless noise, two establish a rhythm, the beginning of a musical flow. The key to music as art (and one important thing that makes it different from machine noise like the ticking of a clock) is that every repetition (which involves ‘the same’) is also different, due to many factors such as its place in the overall song or performance and slight variations in such things as tempo, volume, and instrumentation. For Deleuze, artistic creativity in general is a matter of exactly this: repetitions of ‘the same’, each of which is also ‘slightly different’. Both within individual songs, where verses often alternate with choruses, and in live performances, where every concert goer knows that they often play the same songs but never the same way twice, the music of Led Zeppelin is never monotonous or boring. We always know that, however often we’ve heard a refrain or song, there is always the excitement, too, of anticipating something different that the band will bring to it on every repetition.

Finally, Deleuze also discusses the issue of verbal meaning and lyrics in music. He writes (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 96), “We are not suggesting any correspondence [between music and language]. We keep asking that the issue be left open, that any presupposed distinction be rejected.” His discussion, in fact, seems to suggest that, in the context of music, lyrics must first be fitted to the music’s basic flow and thus serve a role subordinate to the surface flow of the sound itself. Lyrics that are too complicated, poetic, or philosophical (!) can thus distract us from that which is most fundamental about music—it’s surface flows and blockages. Maybe the very fact that LZ’s lyrics don’t overly call attention to themselves is part of exactly what makes their music so popular as rock’n’roll. It’s revealing that sometimes, especially in live performances, Robert Plant simply drops the lyrics, using his amazing voice simply as another instrument (which, to a great extent, it usually is anyway).

Is Led Zeppelin, after All, the Most Philosophical of Rock Bands?

After considering Deleuze, we might be led adopt a new perspective. If we’re still committed to being ‘height philosophers’ like Plato and Kant, we’ll probably say that there’s not much of philosophical interest for us in Led Zeppelin, that their lyrics don’t have much ‘philosophical content’ and that their music isn’t sufficiently ‘experimental’ to draw us into novel aesthetic reflections. If we remain ‘depth philosophers’ like Nietzsche and the existentialists, we’ll probably miss the Angst-driven soul-searching and psychic trauma in the music and lyrics of a band like Pink Floyd. But . . . if Deleuze has convinced us to become ‘surface philosophers’, then we’re likely to say that, after all, Led Zeppelin is one of the most philosophical of all rock bands.

It’s not that Led Zeppelin itself addresses old philosophical questions or articulates new truths, nor that it compels us to probe the ‘deeper meaning’ of our existence. Rather, what they do is enact, amplify, and put us in direct touch with that which is most fundamental in our experience and lives: the bodily ‘surface flow’ in which we exist from moment to moment, in other words, ‘being’ as it is lived and ‘repeated with differences’, not just talked about or analyzed.

That’s why we listen to Led Zeppelin! And, don’t forget, Deleuze has taught us that, if we’re willing think in some new terms, there’s still a lot to say about this. But no conceptual analysis or existential soul-searching needed . . . you have to start by just rockin’ on with the band!