Music and human existence

Abstract

This thesis investigates the proposition that music plays a crucial role in human existence. More so than the other creative arts, music has been overlooked as a proper subject of philosophical investigation. Philosophy’s hesitation before music can be mainly attributed to the significant challenge posed by music’s seemingly indefinable nature or what Theodor Adorno terms its “enigma”. Unlike the analytic philosophy of music, which tends to view music as an abstract object of knowledge, my thesis investigates music’s remarkable ability to transform and enrich human existence. I do this by examining music in terms of a dynamic lived experience. This thesis demonstrates how music’s transformative effect stems from its intertwining with the interrelated corporeal, affective, intersubjective, temporal and spatial dimensions of existence.

With recourse to Adorno’s philosophical aesthetics, this thesis begins with an analysis of why music’s enigma poses problems for traditional philosophical frameworks which seek to define it. Chapters two and three then examine how Schopenhauer and Nietzsche give music an elevated place amongst the creative arts through their claim to its ability to embody the metaphysical foundations of existence. I argue that the early Nietzsche improves Schopenhauer’s account by claiming not so much that music alleviates human suffering but that it provides the means of affirming life. Chapters four and five move beyond dependence on a metaphysics of Will to conceptualise music’s transformative power in terms of lived experience through Alfred Schutz and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophies. Schutz’s philosophy examines how music is based on the intersubjective and temporal dimensions of existence. However, I identify a problem with Schutz’s privileging of the mind over the body in the musical experience. My analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression addresses this limitation by emphasising how music draws its creative power from the corporeal and affective aspects of experience. By investigating music in ways that emphasise its integral place in existence, this thesis thereby provides a potential starting point from which to redress music’s diminished presence in the philosophical literature.