Music and modernity

Andrew Bowie ( Aesthetics and Subjectivity : From Kant to Nietzsche ) challenges the typical postmodern characterization of modern philosophy by highlighting music.  Heidegger views “the growth of the importance of music in modernity as grounded in an attitude to art based just upon feeling ‘which has been left to itself,’ and he links this to the notion that modern culture is the result of a decline from something greater.”  In contrast to poetry and thinking, music “lacks the seriousness of earlier art.”

Bowie thinks this is nonsense: “Anyone familiar with modern music must find this position highly questionable.  The idea that the production – and even the reception – of music is based solely on feelings in the narrow sense is untenable: we would not even hear music as music if that were the case.”

He adds,

“The important consideration here is that the failure of certain positions in modern philosophy to take sufficient account of music often offers a clue to why these positions are indefensibly reductionist in their understanding of modernity.  This reductionism results from their inadequate response to music’s complex relationship to verbal language.  The non-representational, non-conceptual ‘language’ of music is seen by the early Romantics – who were one of the crucial exceptions to this reduction – as enabling us to understand aspects of ourselves which are not reducible to what can be objectively known and which are not to be written off as being merely inchoate feelings.”