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Can Songs Replace Philosophy?
- butterNaN 3y agoBhagvad Geeta?
- andybak 3y agoDon't know much about philosophy (hopefully you got the reference and sung that line in your head) but I was surprised not to ctrl+f and find a mention of Schopenhauer in this Didn't the famously miserable old sod carve out an exception in his bleak post-Kantian world view for music as some direct channel to truth?
- kar5pt 3y agoHe was talking about instrumental music, not lyrical music.
- syntheweave 3y agoThis is actually the kind of view that Leo Strauss and his followers would support. I often recommend Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines for an exhaustive argument of this viewpoint, which is: * All the early philosophers used esoteric writing. * This can be shown by viewing works like The Republic not as factual explanation of knowledge, but as puzzles that contain intentional error, which the student must decipher to find true meanings. * During the Renaissance, with writers like Machiavelli, a shift began to start arguing for the modern view. * Upon adopting belief in this view in the Enlightenment, scholars could no longer accept esotericism, and parsed older texts at face value, leading to nonsensical interpretations. In this light, encoding in song and story, and encoding with esotericism, both reflect a multilayered approach to knowledge transfer: the goal is not to surface large quantities of facts and figures, but to imprint a very strong impression of a few ideas, one that can survive even false readings by the unbelieving. There is also a technical angle to the modern development, in that reliance on printed word became normalized in the later Renaissance, and therefore, "weakly encoded" ideas could proliferate at scale. Or in other words, the West became sophomoric, capable of knowing a lot of things without the wisdom to apply them usefully.
- kar5pt 3y agoAristotle doesn't seem esoteric in this sense.
- hprotagonist 3y agotell all the truth but tell it slant success in circuit lies too bright for our infirm delight the truth’s superb surprise. like lightning to the children eased with explanation kind the truth must dazzle gradually lest every man be blind emily dickinson all the really good stuff can’t be effed, and i encourage you to see the fierce joy in this.
- mjklin 3y ago“Anything too stupid to be said is sung.” - Voltaire
- timeagain 3y agoWittgenstein: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
- hprotagonist 3y ago"It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood? "--Ludwig Wittgenstein