Philosophical Notes: Heidegger On Music, Musicians and Meditation

Finally, some hard-core philosophy! Maybe that wasn’t your thought? Well, bear with me because this is pretty simple.

Martin Heidegger was mid-century philosopher. He is very hard to understand at times, at least for me and many others, and even those who explain him are often opaque. As a German in the middle of the 20th century he also has a troubling although vague connection to Nazism (he says “in no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy [as rector of the University of Freiburg] be played down”). And his personal life was questionable in some frameworks. So, why bring him up?

Sometimes intellectual figures make points that clarify our concerns as humans. The fact that they are well-known figures or widely respected or troubled or beautiful or ugly or complex or conflicted or difficult might be set aside if they inspire useful mediations for us. Increasingly this is hard to do with figures whose thinking is abstract but whose failings seem clear in the historical record. We live in an era where moral judgements can seem paramount and subtle deliberation and thinking for ourselves can seem irrelevant. Perhaps we have this wrong to a degree. We don’t condemn the transistor because Shockley was a person of questionable social ideas. We’re not that morally pure, or maybe sometimes we can do compartmentalization when it is useful.

With my compartmentalization brain enabled, I read Ted Gioia’s recent article on Heidegger and music and thought it was intriguing. Especially in light of our attempts here to fashion clarifying ways of thinking of the meaning and methods of being an audiophile.

Gioia observes:

“…you can imagine my amazement when I recently encountered a passage in Heidegger that seemed to promise a solution to the biggest issue of them all—how to live a valid life in the midst of a grasping, technology-driven society. And even more remarkable his solution was focused on music.”

And he goes on:

“Heidegger would probably say that any technological orientation, at its very roots, has this tendency to dominate. That was always implied, even going back to the invention of the wheel, but it gets worse as the tech advances. The very people who pursue this path of progress, in hopes of liberation and personal growth, get dominated by the Frankenstein monster they create. First, you invent the wheel, and soon you’re caught behind the wheel of your car in the hellish daily commute.

The curse isn’t even the technologies themselves, Heidegger would have cautioned—no, not the robots and algorithms and machines—but the grasping, utilitarian attitude that views everything as mere grist for the mill, as content (oh, how the web bosses love that word) to be put to use.

How do you escape this?

Heidegger is elusive on that matter. But in a little-known essay on the poet Rilke he is forced to say something more specific. He loves this poet, and has to explain what Rilke means when he promises how we can become

adventurous, more sometimes than Life is, more daring by a breath. . . There, outside all caring, this creates for us a safety—just there

Heidegger quotes this passage repeatedly, puzzling over how an individual can reach this extraordinary vantage point, above the grasping and manipulating attitudes of our times. This is, after all, not much different than the key puzzle Marx tried to unlock—but Marx thought a whole revolution was necessary to achieve it.

Now Heidegger shocks us by saying, we don’t’ need a revolution. We just need a song.

Yes, simply a song.

This is one of the most surprising passages in all of Heidegger’s work:

“The more venturesome are those who say in a greater degree, in the manner of the singer. Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It is not a willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be produced. In the song, the world’s inner space concedes space within itself. The song of these singers is neither solicitation nor trade.”

Drawing on Rilke, he calls those rare singers “the most venturesome”—namely those who are able to rise above this terrible utilitarian reductionism that destroys both our world and our inner lives. They find their way out through song.”

Now Ted is clearly concerned, if you read his other writings, about how the internet is affecting the music business and the art of music. Those are reasonable concerns, though Ted sees things through dark glasses. Here, I am concerned about the listener and the audiophile. What I see in Heidegger, or really Ted’s focussed bit of Heidegger, is the reminder that music can be more powerful than as mere background pleasantry, like some sort of audiological Glade air freshener. And, the reminder that in the modern context, we can easily wrap music up with the technology involved and then get confused about where the value is.

To address these issues, in this blog I have suggested that audiophiles can make the most of the opportunity of music, by developing their awareness, being involved in the society of music and audio, and by the creative act of “designing and playing the stereo”. More anon.