Museo di Sant'Agostino | Musei di Genova
Museo di Sant'Agostino | Musei di Genova
ontology of music stringontology of musicartistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art (BT 5).
ontology of music stringontology of musicartistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art (BT 5).
That primordial
artist is, of course, the plane of immanence of nature itself. And composition
of this sort is “imitation of nature not a reproduction of nature actual
forms but an imitation of its virtual power, or, as Cage often put it, imitation of nature in her manner of operation(see Cage in Cox and Warner
2004; on this notion of “imitation of nature†as the imitation of the “art
impulses of nature†see BT 2). Since the mid-twentieth century the experiments
of Varèse, Schaeffer, Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others have given rise to
a new sonic or audio culture that considers music-sound as a natural flow on a
par with other such flows (geological, genetic, linguistic, etc.). In the noise
composition of Merzbow, the concrète performances of Francisco López, the
soundscape recordings of Chris Watson, and the electronic signals that course
through the work of Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Kaffe Matthews, and in so
much experimental music today is disclosed the field of musical becoming, the
virtual domain of music that, in his first book, Nietzsche called “Dionysian.â€
Like the white noise of the seashore in which Leibniz and Deleuze heard the
Dionysian, experimental music today offers “a musical mirror of the world†(BT
6): an aural image of the distinct-obscure world of natural becoming, the
dissonant play of forces that makes possible the world of empirical particulars.
Music, Science, and the Interpretation of Existence (Reprise) With this, we can
finally return to and unpack the passage with which we began. Recall that, in GS
373, Nietzsche criticizes “scholars†for “never catching sight of the really
great problems and question marks.†Among these scholars, he singles out
“mechanistic material scientists†for their merely “human†horizons,
interpretations, and perspectives. Such interpretations take the world to be
composed solely of discrete, sensible, and quantifiable entities. And they take
natural change to be a matter of the causal interactions of these entities. Such
positivist, reductionist, and mechanistic interpretations, Nietzsche insists,
are superficial, stupid, meaningless, and worthless. A the end of the passage,
he briefly notes that music provides a potent counter-example, asserting that,
insofar as it cannot account for music, positivist and mechanist science fails
to provide an adequate interpretation of the world. At the outset, I urged that
we take this musical example to be making not merely a phenomenological point or
a point about aesthetic value, but a deep ontological claim about the way the
world is. Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche is urging us “to look at science in the
perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life†(BT, “Self-Criticism,â€
2), arguing that aesthetic interpretations of the world are better, richer, and
more naturalistic than scientific ones. More specifically, I take him to be
pointing back to his thesis in 510 christoph cox The Birth of Tragedy that music
is an ontological echo that provides us with an aural representation of the very
nature of things. What music shows us, I have argued, is that the domain of
individuated, actualized, fully constituted, empirical subjects and objects is
premised on the domain of becoming: a virtual, transcendental realm of
differential forces. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche calls this domain the
Dionysian. Such a domain precedes and exceeds the horizon of the human and calls
for a “transcendental empiricism in contrast with everything that makes up the
world of the subject and the object†(Deleuze 2001: 25). Aptly enough, the
symbol of Dionysus is the satyr, “that synthesis of god and billy goat†(BT,
“Self-Criticism,†4), a creature at once post- and pre-human. Tragedy
(literally, goat-song) affirms nature and becoming as virtual powers that
generate and supersede the human along with every other actual entity.
“Dionysian art,†Nietzsche writes, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of
existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We
are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful
end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence â€" yet we
are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort14 tears us momentarily
away from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment
primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in
existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear
necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which
force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the
universal will. (BT 17) Gay Science 373, then, offers an ontology, an ontology
alternative to the ontology of positivistic science, an ontology guided by
music, which, Nietzsche suggests, provides an image of natural becoming or, in
other words, “will to power†as a “pre-form of life.†The passage perhaps
invites the objection that Nietzsche, the perspectivist, has no right to offer
such an account of the way the world really is. To which Nietzsche would no
doubt respond, as he does in another passage in which he presents the will to
power as an interpretation counter to that of mechanistic science: “Supposing
that this also is only interpretation â€" and you will be eager enough to make
this objection? â€" well, so much the better†(BGE 22). See also 3 “The Aesthetic
Justification of Existenceâ€; 6 “Nietzsche’s ‘Gay’ Scienceâ€; 8 “Nietzsche’s
Philosophy and True Religionâ€; 9 “The Naturalisms of Beyond Good and Evilâ€; 12
“Nietzsche on Time and Becomingâ€; 30 “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Powerâ€
Notes I thank Keith Ansell Pearson for insightful comments and suggestions that
prompted this essay and shaped its argument, and Daniel W. Smith for helpful
comments along the way. 1 This term is only suggested in the passage. Yet
Nietzsche first introduces the term Ãœbermensch earlier in The Gay Science
(§143); and Book V, in which GS 373 appears, was added in 1887, following the
publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which the Ãœbermensch is a central
figure. 511 nietzsche, dionysus, and the ontology of music 2 The argument that
art trumps science is a key feature of The Birth of Tragedy and remains
important throughout Nietzsche’s corpus. See e.g. BT, “Self-Criticism,†and GM
III. 25. For more on this issue, see Cox 1999: ch. 1, esp. pp. 63â€"8. 3 In the
literal, etymological sense in which Nietzsche often uses this term: meta:
beyond or above; physics: nature. 4 For a more sustained anti-Hegelian reading
of The Birth of Tragedy, see Deleuze 1983. 5 For Nietzsche, “being†has two
related meanings. On the one hand, it names distinct and subsistent empirical
particulars, individual entities. On the other hand, it names metaphysical
entities that are not affected by becoming or change. As a naturalist,
Nietzsche holds that there is only becoming and change and, hence, that,
strictly speaking, there are no autonomous, subsistent empirical particulars.
The illusion of empirical beings, Nietzsche holds, is due in part to the
Platonist projection of metaphysical being into the empirical. 6 This notion of
“unity†or “unit-hood†(Einheit) is surely different from that of the
“primordial unity†(Ur-Eine) spoken of in The Birth of Tragedy. The former
clearly refers to the (Apollonian) illusion of unity and individuation
characteristic of empirical beings, while the latter refers to the
indistinctness characteristic of the realm of becoming or the Dionysian. Aware
of this potential confusion, the later Nietzsche qualifies his talk of becoming
and the Dionysian as “unities,†describing them instead as continuums or
multiplicities. 7 For a rich, Deleuzian and Nietzschean
artist is, of course, the plane of immanence of nature itself. And composition
of this sort is “imitation of nature not a reproduction of nature actual
forms but an imitation of its virtual power, or, as Cage often put it, imitation of nature in her manner of operation(see Cage in Cox and Warner
2004; on this notion of “imitation of nature†as the imitation of the “art
impulses of nature†see BT 2). Since the mid-twentieth century the experiments
of Varèse, Schaeffer, Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others have given rise to
a new sonic or audio culture that considers music-sound as a natural flow on a
par with other such flows (geological, genetic, linguistic, etc.). In the noise
composition of Merzbow, the concrète performances of Francisco López, the
soundscape recordings of Chris Watson, and the electronic signals that course
through the work of Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Kaffe Matthews, and in so
much experimental music today is disclosed the field of musical becoming, the
virtual domain of music that, in his first book, Nietzsche called “Dionysian.â€
Like the white noise of the seashore in which Leibniz and Deleuze heard the
Dionysian, experimental music today offers “a musical mirror of the world†(BT
6): an aural image of the distinct-obscure world of natural becoming, the
dissonant play of forces that makes possible the world of empirical particulars.
Music, Science, and the Interpretation of Existence (Reprise) With this, we can
finally return to and unpack the passage with which we began. Recall that, in GS
373, Nietzsche criticizes “scholars†for “never catching sight of the really
great problems and question marks.†Among these scholars, he singles out
“mechanistic material scientists†for their merely “human†horizons,
interpretations, and perspectives. Such interpretations take the world to be
composed solely of discrete, sensible, and quantifiable entities. And they take
natural change to be a matter of the causal interactions of these entities. Such
positivist, reductionist, and mechanistic interpretations, Nietzsche insists,
are superficial, stupid, meaningless, and worthless. A the end of the passage,
he briefly notes that music provides a potent counter-example, asserting that,
insofar as it cannot account for music, positivist and mechanist science fails
to provide an adequate interpretation of the world. At the outset, I urged that
we take this musical example to be making not merely a phenomenological point or
a point about aesthetic value, but a deep ontological claim about the way the
world is. Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche is urging us “to look at science in the
perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life†(BT, “Self-Criticism,â€
2), arguing that aesthetic interpretations of the world are better, richer, and
more naturalistic than scientific ones. More specifically, I take him to be
pointing back to his thesis in 510 christoph cox The Birth of Tragedy that music
is an ontological echo that provides us with an aural representation of the very
nature of things. What music shows us, I have argued, is that the domain of
individuated, actualized, fully constituted, empirical subjects and objects is
premised on the domain of becoming: a virtual, transcendental realm of
differential forces. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche calls this domain the
Dionysian. Such a domain precedes and exceeds the horizon of the human and calls
for a “transcendental empiricism in contrast with everything that makes up the
world of the subject and the object†(Deleuze 2001: 25). Aptly enough, the
symbol of Dionysus is the satyr, “that synthesis of god and billy goat†(BT,
“Self-Criticism,†4), a creature at once post- and pre-human. Tragedy
(literally, goat-song) affirms nature and becoming as virtual powers that
generate and supersede the human along with every other actual entity.
“Dionysian art,†Nietzsche writes, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of
existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We
are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful
end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence â€" yet we
are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort14 tears us momentarily
away from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment
primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in
existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear
necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which
force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the
universal will. (BT 17) Gay Science 373, then, offers an ontology, an ontology
alternative to the ontology of positivistic science, an ontology guided by
music, which, Nietzsche suggests, provides an image of natural becoming or, in
other words, “will to power†as a “pre-form of life.†The passage perhaps
invites the objection that Nietzsche, the perspectivist, has no right to offer
such an account of the way the world really is. To which Nietzsche would no
doubt respond, as he does in another passage in which he presents the will to
power as an interpretation counter to that of mechanistic science: “Supposing
that this also is only interpretation â€" and you will be eager enough to make
this objection? â€" well, so much the better†(BGE 22). See also 3 “The Aesthetic
Justification of Existenceâ€; 6 “Nietzsche’s ‘Gay’ Scienceâ€; 8 “Nietzsche’s
Philosophy and True Religionâ€; 9 “The Naturalisms of Beyond Good and Evilâ€; 12
“Nietzsche on Time and Becomingâ€; 30 “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Powerâ€
Notes I thank Keith Ansell Pearson for insightful comments and suggestions that
prompted this essay and shaped its argument, and Daniel W. Smith for helpful
comments along the way. 1 This term is only suggested in the passage. Yet
Nietzsche first introduces the term Ãœbermensch earlier in The Gay Science
(§143); and Book V, in which GS 373 appears, was added in 1887, following the
publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which the Ãœbermensch is a central
figure. 511 nietzsche, dionysus, and the ontology of music 2 The argument that
art trumps science is a key feature of The Birth of Tragedy and remains
important throughout Nietzsche’s corpus. See e.g. BT, “Self-Criticism,†and GM
III. 25. For more on this issue, see Cox 1999: ch. 1, esp. pp. 63â€"8. 3 In the
literal, etymological sense in which Nietzsche often uses this term: meta:
beyond or above; physics: nature. 4 For a more sustained anti-Hegelian reading
of The Birth of Tragedy, see Deleuze 1983. 5 For Nietzsche, “being†has two
related meanings. On the one hand, it names distinct and subsistent empirical
particulars, individual entities. On the other hand, it names metaphysical
entities that are not affected by becoming or change. As a naturalist,
Nietzsche holds that there is only becoming and change and, hence, that,
strictly speaking, there are no autonomous, subsistent empirical particulars.
The illusion of empirical beings, Nietzsche holds, is due in part to the
Platonist projection of metaphysical being into the empirical. 6 This notion of
“unity†or “unit-hood†(Einheit) is surely different from that of the
“primordial unity†(Ur-Eine) spoken of in The Birth of Tragedy. The former
clearly refers to the (Apollonian) illusion of unity and individuation
characteristic of empirical beings, while the latter refers to the
indistinctness characteristic of the realm of becoming or the Dionysian. Aware
of this potential confusion, the later Nietzsche qualifies his talk of becoming
and the Dionysian as “unities,†describing them instead as continuums or
multiplicities. 7 For a rich, Deleuzian and Nietzschean
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