Can Songs Actually Substitute Philosophy?
At present I’m sharing one other extract from my new guide Music to Elevate the Useless. It is a particular function for subscribers to The Sincere Dealer—the one place proper now the place you may learn my guide.
Every chapter could be loved by itself. You don’t have to learn them in sequence or of their entirety. However if you wish to take a look at the opposite sections from Music to Elevate the Useless, click here.
This chapter has an uncommon title: “Can Songs Really Substitute Philosophy?” That’s an audacious query I don’t ask flippantly. I’ve devoted lengthy years to philosophy, and have had the good thing about studying from among the deepest thinkers on the planet. The claims I make for music right here could seem excessive, however I consider that, if you happen to be a part of me on this inquiry, you’ll discover them persuasive and mind-expanding.
I’ll proceed to share sections of this guide on The Sincere Dealer—roughly at a tempo of 1 chapter per thirty days.
By Ted Gioia
I have to make an ungainly admission right here. What I’m attempting to convey can’t actually be instructed in a guide— at the very least in a roundabout way. That’s the unhappy actuality of our strongest songs.
They all the time resist translation into printed textual content. Solely listening to is believing.
The incidentals and exterior particulars could be written down, however not essentially the most very important points. The map will not be the territory. A traveler’s guidebook—whether or not for your loved ones trip or that musical journey to a distinct airplane of existence—can by no means function an alternative choice to the journey itself.
Perhaps this seems like a failure on my half. However the finish result’s the truest type of musicology. Any real entry into the essence of music should settle for that music operates in magical methods past the grasp of verbal equivalency. That’s nearly the definition of nice music.
A music author—what a tragic oxymoron!—can be a metaphysician. You’re chasing after clouds. It’s really even worse than that, as a result of a cloud has extra substance than a music. To pursue musicology signifies that you reside out this absurdity as a vocational necessity. However that hardly adjustments the truth that it is an absurdity.
Music itself supplies its personal justification—extra highly effective than any textual content—and every one in all us has felt its energy. But persons are skeptical once I say that songs provide a pathway to the next stage of existence—or what we name the nice life.
That appears to be asking for an excessive amount of. Songs can’t actually information you on a life’s journey, can they?
“The ancients knew that knowledge needed to be sung or chanted. That is the precise basis of Western rationalism.”
However the day-to-day expertise of passionate music followers tells us that this really occurs on a regular basis. Whole generations search—and discover—their values and priorities in songs. Historic eras are even named after music genres and kinds.
The Twenties have been often known as the Jazz Age—as a result of commentators grasped, maybe instinctively, that the dominant values of that interval originated in sizzling music, not chilly, sterile texts. The identical might be mentioned of the Swing Period or the Age of Woodstock and different generational markers.
In reality, complete existence—punk, hip-hop, nation, and the like—incessantly take their names from music genres. This isn’t mere happenstance, however a telling reminder of the constitutive energy of music in human life.
Folks create their worldview and life-style from their playlists—not philosophy books. That’s true in the present day, simply because it was true hundreds of years in the past. Perhaps it’s much more true now.
However the stunning factor—as we will see under—is that even the good philosophers knew this.
We shouldn’t be stunned. After we research the legacy of precise visionaries, we discover that experiential elements—musical and in any other case—are all the time extra necessary than written texts. In his detailed research of the imaginative and prescient quest among the many Plains Indians (mentioned in chapter four), Lee Irwin retains reminding his readers that the participant seeks energy, not ideas, on this journey: “Actual desires of therapeutic should lead to acts of therapeutic; desires of warfare should result in profitable raids; desires involving extrasensory notion have to be proven to be true.”
You possibly can’t simply speak the speak, because the saying goes; sooner or later you should stroll the stroll—which can be a dangerous one. Extra to the purpose, you should additionally sing the music. That’s as a result of this sort of journey, for the Plains Indians and different conventional societies, is invariably accompanied by music. Typically the songs are realized throughout these empowered desires.
This leads me to a different admission, even perhaps stranger than the primary: specifically, that sleeping and dreaming will play a bigger function on this work than in another music guide you’ve ever learn. Particularly when you think about that this music guide focuses on heroes and their quests, it’s comprehensible that you simply would possibly anticipate accounts of battles and adventures. Little did you notice that snooze time would determine extra prominently right here than sword fights.
At first blush, all this sounds ridiculous. However, as we will see, there are necessary the reason why musicology ought to offer extra consideration—and respect—to nighttime slumbers.
We’re not accustomed to viewing desires on this means, nor will we pay a lot consideration to the songs transmitted in desires. As a substitute we’re taught to dismiss the dream or imaginative and prescient as the precise reverse of what Irwin claims. To the fashionable thoughts, desires are the place acts have no efficacy, the place nothing is achieved, and no one advantages.
We’re going to see that the precise reverse is true.
“Sleeping and dreaming will play a bigger function on this work than it does in another music guide you’ve ever learn.”
However let’s go away sleep behind for the second, and give attention to what appears an apparent shortcoming of the choice musicology proposed right here. Music can’t actually take the place of a philosophy, no? Isn’t this asking an excessive amount of of a music? Maybe some visionaries believed within the magical efficacy of their music, however that’s all superstitious mumbo-jumbo—isn’t it? Songs would possibly entertain or divert us, however there’s a giant hole between, say, Adele and Aristotle.
This appears apparent, at first look.
However the hole between philosophy and music, on shut examination, begins to vanish. And much more stunning: music holds the higher hand right here. Songs, as we will see, served as the unique supply of philosophy’s authority, and regardless of centuries of veneration of the written textual content, nonetheless maintain a place of primacy—which the philosophers themselves acknowledge.
That was evident from the very origins of Western philosophy, when the primary proponents of this new rational worldview made their utterances in dactylic hexameter. This was not an arbitrary choice, however a necessity.
Hexameter was the musical rhythm required of any nugget of knowledge impressed by a divine imaginative and prescient.
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Guests to the Delphi oracle, acquired solutions to their questions from the Pythia—a girl, impressed by Apollo, who might predict the longer term—in dactylic hexameter.
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We discover the identical meter in Homer’s epics, which (as we’ve got already seen) start with the singer of tales invoking the Muse, the goddess who evokes the poet’s craft.
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And most necessary for our account right here, the hymns of Orpheus and his followers—the final word musical pathways to the opposite world—have been on this identical meter.
Dactylic hexameter is a tough meter. The ancients would have had a far simpler time composing strains in iambics, a lot nearer to the spoken language of the time. The problem was sufficiently massive that students have debated whether or not the Pythia didn’t have assist from associates who translated her utterances into dactyls. However the attraction of this type of expression wasn’t in its ease of use, however the authority it conveyed.
The ancients knew that knowledge needed to be sung or chanted. That is the precise basis of Western rationalism.
In historical occasions, Apollo was credited because the originator of dactylic hexameter, both straight or by inspiring the Pythia. He’s conveniently—and considerably—the god of each music and prophecy, vocations that appear to have little in widespread these days. However they have been carefully intertwined in nearly each historical or conventional society.
This meter was already fairly previous even by the point of the primary philosophers, and was maybe initially borrowed from one other tradition. No matter its sources, the explanations for its status are past dispute. Hexameter was related to communications from divine sources, and was the correct type of expression for any imaginative and prescient or utterance that went past our merely human capacities.
And that’s why it’s so stunning to see hexameter within the writings of the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides. This imposing determine, who flourished through the fifth century BC, is usually praised, together with Aristotle, because the “Father of Logic.” He’s additionally referred to as the “Father of Metaphysics.” And Parmenides performed an particularly necessary function in establishing the sphere of inquiry often known as ontology—which is the research of being and existence, and thus offers with essentially the most foundational questions in Western mental historical past.
In different phrases, Parmenides not solely practiced philosophy, he helped invent it. But after we flip to his surviving work, we discover that he really wrote a music not a textual content. And it’s delivered in the identical meter related to divine inspiration discovered within the prophetic hymns attributed to Orpheus—that are the point of interest of the oldest musicology guide in Europe, the Derveni papyrus (discussed in chapter one).
Nevertheless it’s a irritating music for students. First, Parmenides’s work exists in the present day solely in fragments. The unique hymn most likely contained some 800 verses, however solely round 160 have survived. Even the passages that stay are sometimes obscure.
However for a lot of students, essentially the most unsettling side of Parmenides’s work is its shamanistic tone. On the very outset of his music, the thinker explains that he’s taking a mystical journey to a different realm, the place a goddess will impart divine knowledge. The journey takes place on a supernatural chariot, the place mysterious ladies function his guides. And the chariot makes a rhythmical sound with its wheels, which Parmenides compares to the music of a pipe. The entire work, in reality, conveys a way of rhythm, pushed by the incantatory and repetitive nature of the phrases.
There are obstacles alongside the best way, and Parmenides encounters a form of crossroads problem, the place he should navigate his means within the face of paths related to the gates of Night time and Day. And when these are opened, they too make the sound of pipes.
“Using the phrase is extraordinary,” classicist Peter Kingsley has remarked. “It’s the one time in the entire Greek language that it’s ever utilized to doorways or components of doorways.” It’s price noting that this rhythmic music—in contrast by the thinker to the instrument syrinx, named after a goddess whose magnificence impressed Pan to invent the panpipes—is the one noise or sound described in the complete work.
We’ve seen all these substances repeatedly in our research of music that reaches one other plain of existence—or raises the lifeless, as I put it quaintly within the title of this guide. We’ve seen these chariots again and again. We’ve encountered the crossroads repeatedly. In each occasion, they’re related to magical songs.
Now we see all these substances once more. However—amazingly!—they preside on the delivery of Western rationalistic philosophy.
No person has instructed you this earlier than, however our STEM worldview originated in magical songs.
Regardless of the obstacles, Parmenides’s journey is price its dangers, as a result of the goddess imparts a uncommon divine knowledge to her customer. And that’s the a part of the story posterity has celebrated, the philosophical data Parmenides brings again from his journey. However anybody conversant in the shamanistic custom of music-driven visions from otherworldly journeys can see that these nuggets of perception are hardly ample to tell apart Parmenides from others who’ve undertaken comparable quests.
Shamans all the time declare that they return with knowledge from the journey. What separates Parmenides from these different visionaries isn’t a lot what he realized on his magical chariot—his pronouncement on the timelessness of actuality, which is in the present day essentially the most celebrated a part of his teachings, would have been expressed, ultimately, by different thinkers—however the truth that it was written down in any respect. Earlier than Parmenides, visionary data of this kind wasn’t preserved in writing or at the very least not in a sufficiently coherent means that would affect later thinkers. However because of his transformation of music into textual content, the magical quest, beforehand the area of singers and mystics, might now develop into the plaything of sophists and philosophers.
Essentially the most well-known of those was Plato, who wrote a puzzling dialogue a few assembly between Socrates and Parmenides. The historic context of the dialogue is questionable—Socrates was born round a half-century after Parmenides, so a deep philosophical dialogue between them is unlikely, though maybe not unattainable. However the respect accorded Parmenides on this work is noteworthy.
“No person has instructed you this earlier than, however our STEM worldview originated in magical songs.”
He’s given heart stage, and employs the strategies of the Socratic dialogue as dialogue chief—a job invariably assigned to Socrates himself in different contexts. The clear implication is that the older thinker served as mentor to the youthful. Maybe simply as hanging, this dialogue goals to point out how carefully Parmenides’s personal views are aligned with Plato’s later concept of concepts, probably the most highly effective schemas within the historical past of Western thought.
In different phrases, each the discursive strategy of philosophy and its most well-known foundational concept are offered as outgrowths of the knowledge Parmenides introduced again from his rhythm-driven imaginative and prescient of a better realm. Philosophy and music coincide, however the musical expertise lays the muse for every part—summary discourse solely comes later.
However there’s yet another side of Parmenides legacy we have to think about earlier than shifting on, and it exhibits how all of the items of our puzzle match collectively.
In 1962, archaeologist Mario Napoli uncovered the marble base of a bust of Parmenides in Velia—the house of the influential Eleatic faculty of philosophy in historical occasions—with an inscription that linked this thinker to a convention of therapeutic clergymen. Different close by archeological finds counsel that this website might have been a middle for an uncommon type of drugs often known as incubation, and that the clergymen right here seen Parmenides as an esteemed predecessor of their neighborhood.
However what occurred in these incubation facilities bore little resemblance to what we’d name philosophy these days. Practitioners of this artwork served as custodians for particular locations, temples or caves the place divine powers might be accessed, however solely in desires.
The Greek geographer Strabo describes how one in all these incubation facilities operated two thousand years in the past:
“They are saying that those that are diseased and provides heed to the cures prescribed by these gods resort thither and stay within the village close to the cave amongst skilled clergymen, who on their behalf sleep within the cave and thru desires prescribe the cures. These are additionally the lads who invoke the therapeutic energy of the gods….And typically the sick give heed additionally to their very own desires, however nonetheless they use these different males, as clergymen, to provoke them into the mysteries and to counsel them. To all others the place is forbidden and lethal.”
The similarity with the Native American imaginative and prescient quest (described in chapter four) is hanging. In reality, some students seen the resemblance a century in the past.
However what we didn’t recognized till just lately is that the origins of Western philosophy take us again to the exact same custom—the place impressed visionaries talk with divine powers in a trance or dream state. Philosophy texts might reward Parmenides because the “Father of Logic,” however apparently an entire flourishing priesthood inherited a distinct legacy from him, one associated to desires and cures and journeys to a harmful various realm the place precious data is likely to be gained.
Parmenides is not any remoted case. The early historical past of Western philosophy was formed, at nearly each juncture, by visionary experiences, shamanistic exploits, and highly effective songs. The case of Empedocles, from the technology after Parmenides, is much more hanging on this regard. At present, college students of philosophy are taught that Empedocles’s most important contribution to Western tradition is the traditional distinction between the 4 parts of earth, air, hearth and water. He’s offered as a prototype of the pure thinker and bodily scientist. However what college students aren’t instructed is that he was a singer in addition to a thinker, and composed his works on this identical hexameter related to Orphic hymns and divine oracles.
Much more hidden from view is Empedocles’s declare that, like Orpheus, he might convey again a soul from the realm of the lifeless. And his surviving texts include many different grand assertions: Empedocles says he can educate individuals easy methods to management the course of the winds, change the climate, treatment the ravages of growing older, and different extraordinary issues. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that Empedocles was worshipped by many followers as a quasi-deity, and he even made claims that he was a god and deserved this therapy. When he got here to your city, you anticipated miracles, not a philosophy lecture.
In classicist Hermann Diels’s influential version of pre-Socratic writings, compiled greater than a century in the past however nonetheless broadly referenced by students in the present day, these boasts are moved to the again the textual content, though Peter Kingsley suggests “they nearly definitely belong proper firstly.” In his uneasiness over the intrusion of magic into Greek philosophy, Diels claimed that these passages about elevating the lifeless are a humiliation. They have to be interpreted symbolically, as guarantees of what science might in the future present. However anybody conversant in shamanistic practices round world could have no doubts about Empedocles’s claims or the character of his vocation.
He’s lethal critical. And critical concerning the lifeless specifically.
Passages comparable to these satisfied classicist F.M. Cornford, a technology after Diels, that we should view “the thinker as successor of the seer-poet.” Cornford realized how a lot resistance he would face from students in his discipline, who “have assumed that enlightened rationalism is essentially in opposition to the superstitious beliefs and practices of a now out of date faith.” However in his ultimate guide Principium Sapientiae, left uncompleted at his demise, Cornford confronted this ingrained assumption head-on, and confirmed in nice element how nearly each side of early Western philosophy drew on the weather we might solely describe as shamanistic.
Though later students comparable to E.R. Dodds and Peter Kingsley have expanded our consciousness of this core side of the Western philosophical custom, its implications are nonetheless poorly understood—and nearly by no means acted upon within the day-to-day life {of professional} philosophers. And for an excellent purpose: the entire institutionalization and pedagogy of philosophy would want to alter radically to assimilate this visionary method to knowledge.
In a wierd type of means, a musician has extra freedom to pursue this path than an educational thinker.
Even in the present day, this distaste amongst classicists for shamanism runs deep. In his current complete survey of the affect of Orpheus on spiritual and philosophical thought, classicist Radcliffe G. Edmundson III, mentions shamanism solely as soon as in a 450-page work—and that reference is hidden away in a derisive footnote. But, as we’ve got already seen, equivalents to the Orpheus fantasy have been discovered in additional than fifty Native American tribes, and in different cultures all over the world the place shamanism has performed a big function.
The collected proof is overwhelming, but many research of Orphic thought and early Western philosophy function in a vacuum chamber the place anthropology, psychology, folklore, sociology, ethnomusicology, medical sciences, and different disciplines don’t have any bearing. For essentially the most half, solely works of different classicists are thought of price citing, and if related info doesn’t seem of their books and articles, it apparently isn’t price contemplating. But as quickly because the inventors of Western philosophy—Orphic thinkers, Parmenides, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Socrates, and others—are seen on this bigger context, their relationship to the musical imaginative and prescient quest is unattainable to disregard.
That emerges most clearly within the legend related to Empedocles’s demise, a story that conveys all of the grandeur and terror of an Orpheus-type fantasy. Conventional accounts inform us that the thinker leapt into the molten crater of volcanic Mount Etna in Sicily. Maybe that’s not the identical factor as a descent into the Underworld, nevertheless it’s as shut as you will get with out crossing the road between biography and fantasy.
It’s price noting that demise by fiery combustion is usually attributed to shamans—and typically to charlatans, as effectively. Carlos Castaneda claimed that his (maybe fictional) shamanic mentor Don Juan Matus was consumed at his demise by an inner hearth; and Castaneda led his personal followers to consider that he would die in the same method. Evidently, Castaneda’s personal demise from most cancers in 1998 didn’t match the parable. And maybe the story of Empedocles’s volcanic self-sacrifice is equally doubtful. However the persistence of such narratives point out a bigger reality, specifically that visionaries who journey to a different world are burning with some particular hearth.
Then we come to the case of essentially the most well-known of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the esteemed thinker Pythagoras, and all these tensions attain a breaking level. Philosophy is now at a crossroads second itself, with practitioners dealing with the incompatible calls for of rationality and mysticism. Each pathways have been pursued by Pythagoras, a contradictory determine who left an enduring mark on every of those worldviews.
I’ve claimed, in different settings, that Pythagoras “is an important particular person within the historical past of music”—however that’s not how he’s remembered these days. Typical accounts give attention to Pythagoras’s preeminence as thinker, in addition to his contributions to science and arithmetic. Even in the present day, college students of geometry study the Pythagorean theorem as a part of their primary training. However there’s nearly as a lot mysticism as arithmetic in his life story, and he impressed a cult following of quasi-religious depth. Certainly, the time period philosophy fails to convey the true scope and sheer bizarreness of his doctrines and practices.
These have been so excessive that Pythagoras was pressured into exile, alongside together with his followers, who have been seen with suspicion and typically open hostility for his or her various life-style and occult views—about reincarnation, meals taboos and different issues. There’s good purpose to consider that Pythagoras died, together with many disciples, in a fireplace (once more!) intentionally set by neighborhood members who feared the counterculture methods the cult espoused. Some have even in contrast this occasion to the notorious FBI siege on the Waco compound of the Department Davidian cult in 1993, which resulted within the fiery deaths of 76 cult members. The main points are murky, however the bigger image is crystal clear: philosophy, in these early days, was not only a matter of propositions and logical deductions, however a harmful endeavor.
By any measure, Pythagoras is a wierd, paradoxical character. But when we view him as a musical mystic and visionary, slightly than as a thinker, we are able to begin to make sense of the puzzling points of his life and work.
We are able to perceive the outstanding similarities between Pythagorean teachings and the shamanic worldview related to Orpheus, that are so shut that students typically discuss with this with the only time period “Orphic-Pythagorean.” We are able to additionally perceive why Pythagoras was so obsessive about the ability of music—a lot so, that we’d even name him the inventor of music remedy. By the identical token, we are able to lastly make sense of the story instructed of Pythagoras secluding himself in a cave on the island of Samos—a location on an extinct volcano that’s nonetheless referred to as “Pythagoras’s cave” in the present day. This was merely the identical form of incubation setting described beforehand because the connecting hyperlink between the Native American imaginative and prescient quest and the Western philosophical custom.
In reality, any sincere try to grasp the total vary of Pythagoras’s actions, which ranged from therapeutic to divination, reveals that he’s extra a magical musician than sober practitioner of rational considering.
What’s happening right here?
Why are the founders of Western philosophy so fixated on music, magic, desires, and visits to caves? It’s price stressing that these obsessions aren’t on the periphery of their vocation, however central to their life’s work. Students in the present day choose to view them as theorists whose legacy consists of texts, however their first followers noticed them otherwise—they have been visionaries on a dangerous path whose music offered them with a connection to divine sources of inspiration.
At this juncture, we have to think about essentially the most seminal determine of all those that presided on the delivery of Western philosophy, specifically Socrates.
Again in Athens across the 12 months 400 BC, Socrates not solely established the important thing ideas and priorities of the philosophical custom, however even formulated essentially the most highly effective approach within the historical past of discourse, the Socratic technique—an method nonetheless practiced in the present day, and designed to advertise logic and rational considering. Absolutely at this level within the story, we’ve got left mysticism, desires, caves, and magical songs behind. With Socrates and his followers, superstition is discarded and hard-headed rationality lastly prevails.
Or does it?
Socrates, for his half, by no means wrote any texts—an inconvenient truth for many who esteem the written phrase because the rock strong basis of philosophy. Most of what we find out about him comes through his pupil Plato, who drew on recollections of his instructor’s conversations in making a collection of “dialogues” that many justifiably think about because the foundational paperwork in Western thought. And the main points offered in these texts current fixed challenges to anybody who desires to purify philosophy of its “superstitious” origins in music and the imaginative and prescient quest.
Allow us to think about Socrates’s personal account of his vocation, as associated by Plato. “In the midst of my life,” Socrates explains, “I’ve typically had intimations in desires ‘that I ought to make music.’”
That is an sudden revelation, however he continues:
“The identical dream got here to me typically in a single kind, and typically in one other, however all the time saying the identical or practically the identical phrases: Make and domesticate music, mentioned the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was solely supposed to exhort and encourage me within the research of philosophy, which has all the time been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and better of music.”
Socrates speaks these phrases within the ultimate hours of his life, as documented in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. And right here, after a dramatic declaration that he has all the time seen philosophy as a sort of music, he expresses anxiousness that he might have misinterpreted his dream revelations: “The dream was bidding me do what I used to be already doing….However I used to be not sure of this, because the dream may need meant music within the well-liked sense of the phrase.”
As he considers this attainable misstep, Socrates decides to spend his ultimate days composing songs. “I believed that I needs to be safer if I glad the scruple, and, in obedience to the dream, composed just a few verses earlier than I departed.” His first effort on this new path was a hymn—the standard means of invoking a deity or divine supply of inspiration.
This is without doubt one of the strangest passages in the complete historical past of Western thought….
COMING SOON: Half 2 of “Can Songs Really Substitute Philosophy?”
FOOTNOTES:
Actual desires of therapeutic: Lee Irwin, The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Nice Plains (Norman, Oklahoma: College of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 28.
Using the phrase is extraordinary, Peter Kingsley, Within the Darkish Locations of Knowledge (Inverness, California: The Golden Sufi Heart, 1999), p. 127.
They are saying that those that are diseased: Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Vol. VI, translated by Horace Leonard Jones (Cambridge: Harvard College Press, 1960), p. 259.
they nearly definitely belong proper firstly: Peter Kingsley, Historic Philosophy, Thriller and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Custom, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 226.
Cornford realized how a lot resistance: F.M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge College Press, 1952), p. 107.
that reference is hidden away in a derisive footnote: Radcliffe G. Edmundson III . Redefining Historic Orphism: A Research in Greek Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge College Press, 2013), pp. 186-187.
an important particular person within the historical past of music: Ted Gioia, Music: A Subversive Historical past (New York: Fundamental Books, 2019), p. 48.
The identical dream got here to me: This and under from Phaedo, translated by Benjamin Jowett, in Plato, The Republic and Different Works (New York: Anchor, 1973), p. 492.