Cosmo-Musicological Interlude

Petey, don’t you sometimes wonder about sound and vision? Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” If so, music must be liquid architecture.

I’ll go you one better: color is the sound of matter, brightness its volume, and texture its timbre.

First, can I buy some pot from you? Second, how is music even possible? In his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Victor Zuckerkandl asks

what must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?

If he’s asking me, it is because music itself, in its very structure, tells us something of the nature of reality.

I am, therefore I jam?

Well, music had better be important, otherwise I’ve wasted much of my life listening to it, and I’m about to waste some of yours. So it is heartening to read that “Music is not only an art. It is a clue to the cosmos,” nor is it “just one phenomenon among many but the secret key to understanding the whole of reality” (Leithart).

For Zuckerkandl, “The knowledge of space that hand and eye possess is exactly matched by their ignorance of time.” Therefore, “A true image of time must be an image for the ear, an audible image made of tones.... Thanks to music, we are able to behold time."

Big claim.

Agreed, but what have I learned, exactly, from all my listening? For it is not as if music conveys propositional statements about the nature of reality. Rather, its very form is the message it conveys. Its mere existence leads us to wonder in what kind of Cosmos it is possible for it to exist. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a Cosmos without music would be an unforgivable oversight.

That settles it: today’s the day I’m gonna grab my trombone and blow.

Augustine, for example, “recognized that music offers special insights into the nature of time,” for it is the quintessentially temporal art, and seemingly testifies to an irreducibly positive character of time’s passage, not to mention a holism that unites the individual notes as the melody moves from anticipation to fulfillment.

Music itself has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: outside the context of the melody the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. This reflects one of the fundamental complementarities of existence, i.e., of continuity amidst discontinuity and vice versa.

Thus it is impossible “to take in music in a moment” but “only through the process of listening”: “Music forces time upon us, but shows us that the passage of time and the patience it demands are gifts to be received rather than evils to be endured” (Leithart). Otherwise the best song would be the shortest and fastest, or maybe just a single note pure and easy, like a breath rippling by.

Our mysterious interior relation to the external world is likewise mirrored in music, what with its “overlapping and interpenetrating” qualities.” Time itself shares “precisely this layered musical quality,” such that the structure of music “is a trace of the form of the whole cosmos” (ibid.). This is very much in contrast to an atomistic — and therefore tonedeaf — world of pure external relations, in which no note could be related to any other.

An eternal siren blast.

Schopenhauer thought of music as an “unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.” Thus, “our imagination is... susceptible to music” and “seeks to give form to that invisible yet lively spirit-world which speaks to us directly, and clothe it with flesh and blood.” But with Schopenhauer the glass is always half full of emptiness, so music is ultimately a reflection of the same old impersonal World Will.

Nevertheless, he gets the broad outlines correct, in that “we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing,” such that the “unutterable depth of music” reveals the “truth, the inner nature, the in-itself of the world...” Music itself is “a perfectly universal language,” but unlike, say, the universal abstractions of mathematics, it is both embodied and experienced in the body. Thus, “we might just as well call the world ‘embodied music’ as ‘embodied will.”

Here is the good news: “The inexhaustible variety of possible melodies corresponds to nature’s inexhaustible variety of individuals, physiognomies, and ways of life.” But with Schopenhauer there’s always a catch, for “the transition from one key to an entirely different one, since it breaks the connection with what went before, is like death, in so far as the individual ends there...”

It’s that kind of attitude that makes Schopenhauer such a cosmic buzzkill.

Yes, on the one hand, the impersonal Will in which we participate while alive “lives on, appearing in other individuals,” but this has no connection to us. We’re still superfluous, but at least the meaningless will that willed us wills on forever.

If only Schopenhauer had thought this through a little further. Again, he read the Upanishads every night, but had first encountered the Bhagavad Gita, which is known as the Song Supreme. Evidently, he found the Gita more a poetic summary of the unadulterated metaphysics of the Upanishads. The latter regard the world as illusory, and therefore advise escaping it via renunciation. Schopenhauer saw the Upanishadic sage as a fellow inward traveler much like himself who prefers to step off the annoying wheel of karma. You might say that our square laddie was a quiet living man — one of those chaps who prefers to hibernate in the silence of his room, in an atmasphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.

A pensive man of philosophic joys, who likes to meditate and contemplate, free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise?

The pessimystical Schopenhauer saw renunciation as a pointed No to a pointless world, whereas the Gita presents renunciation more as the Yes to a higher source. Thus, the Gita’s more optimystic counsel just didn’t resonate. Perhaps it sounded too Christian, which others have compared to a form of bhakti yoga, the yoga of worship and devotion. The Gita relates the warmth of a personal relationship between a god and his devotee, but Schopenhauer would have no doubt preferred a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition than to ever let a Theos in his life.

∞

In an essay called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the “fundamental entities” of the world “is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature.” Of course, the particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, so the former may be analogized to notes, the latter to melody and harmonic structure. Andrews suggests that “both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music.” There can be no music without matter-in-motion, so our lives are a musical matter.

Perhaps the Incarnation can be analogized to the composer jumping into and taking part in his own composition?

Yes, “Word made flesh” is very much analogous to “composer become music.” This is especially apt because it factors in the dynamic/temporal element, not just the spatial/static.

In any event, Zuckerkandl concludes that a God “enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music,” and “Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?”

If that’s the case, how lucky will God be when he meets John Coltrane and gets to hear A Love Supreme for the first time!

It brings to mind the philosopher E.M. Cioran, who suggests that “If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.” For Cioran, Bach was a singular proof of God, and vice versa, for “When you listen to Bach, you see God being born.”

Along these lines, Einstein, after hearing Yehudi Menuin perform a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, scurried backstage, grabbed the violinist, and exclaimed “Now I know that there is a God in heaven.” If this isn’t a cosmotheandric way of listening to music, then it is a musical way of hearing cosmotheandrism, for it implies that the cosmic absolute of physical light is trumped by the aesthetic Light that streams into the Cosmos from God knows where.

Eh, Bach is overdoing it. Rather, Howlin’ Wolf is sufficient.

That is true. As Sam Phillips muttered upon first hearing him in the studio, This is where the soul of man never dies. Not to muddy the waters, but it is indeed a mystery how such a limited form as the blues can serve as a channel for the spirit. As Noël Coward quipped, it is “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Three chords and the truth.

Which reminds me of something Mike Campbell (Tom Petty’s lead guitarist) says in his autobiography. He grew up in a poor household with few records, mainly Johnny Cash. His father would listen to them repeatedly while “staring off into space.” One day he asked his father why he liked Cash so much, and he responded that it was because he “sounds like the truth.” Which of course he still does, but why, and how?

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Agreed, but we want to know why this is all we need to know, and how we can even know it.

Ismist Whitewishing and Clearobscuro Painting

The previous post ended with an observation about ideological fundamentalism: “Around here we just call it ismism to cover all the bases, whether religious or secular.” Picking up where we left off:

The root error of false clarity is the pretense of explaining the superior by means of the inferior. Why pretend it is possible to accomplish this? Because on the one hand the Anthropos loves and is ordered to truth, but the self-enclosed ismist attempts to know the intellectual object of a higher level by means of a lower one which eclipses it. Thus, “those who pride themselves the most on their objectivity are precisely those who most lack the superior sort of objectivity”— of metaphysics in general and of cosmotheasndrism in particular

Which is why a cosmotheandric metaphysics is both more objective and true than those lesser sciences that study only this or that limited and contingent object. Conversely, cosmotheandrism illuminates those principles that cannot not be; and to say that they are necessary is to say they are eternal. Thus, “It is immensely important to distinguish the clarity of what is purely and simply true and that of what is true only in a secondary and partial aspect, all the while being essentially false” (ibid.). For example, physics is exquisitely clear in a limited sense, but becomes extremely unclear, if not outright false, if applied to the intrinsically unlimited which is superior to it. In other words, to imagine that O can be mapped by physics is but a grandiobtuse form of ismism.

This or that science surely discloses truth on the plane appropriate to its object and method. But this very truth can be “placed in the service of the false doctrine that diverts that [truth] from its end. In such a false doctrine, truth is the slave of error“ (ibid.).

For example, as we have seen, evolutionary psychology illuminates a great deal about the Anthropos. But to suggest that natural selection explains everything about the human station is but another blindingly false clarity — and indeed a form of mental and spiritual slavery.

Why slavery?

Because the superior is thereby constrained by what is properly subordinate to it, so it is as if thought has kidnapped itself. This kidnapper is like some internal fascist magistrate policing what we are permitted to think.

I’m gonna think about whatever I feel like I wanna think about, gosh!

∞

What is it, asks Garrigou-Lagrange, that “differentiates the philosophical spirit not only from common knowledge but also from knowledge obtained by the cultivation of sciences that are inferior to philosophy”? The former “differs from them above all and essentially by its formal object and by the point of view under which it considers its object.” This or that special science establishes only “the laws of phenomena.” For example, the object of physics is the material world, while the object of mathematics is the quantitative world. But to reduce reality to what mathematics or physics can say about it is an error that is fatal to the intellect, since it obscures its proper object, which is to say, intelligible Being itself, which is unlimited per se.

For Garrigou-Lagrange, “the sciences that are inferior to philosophy, such as the positive and mathematical sciences, in certain senses resemble sense knowledge insasmuch as they have objects that are less universal than philosophy’s object” (which is to say, being). Empirical knowledge, for example, can know only of this or that man. But the intellect transcends the particular and ascends to knowledge of the Anthropos, to the universal. Without this mysterious operation, “no other knowledge would be possible.” Indeed, even to deny it is to affirm it.

Aquinas does not promulgate a theory, much less an ism or ideology. Rather, he is simply describing what we are spontaneously doing when we think: self-evidently we are thinking about intelligible being. The alternatives are to not think at all or to think about non-being. That being is intelligible “is so obvious that it cannot be demonstrated, and so necessary that it cannot be denied without the shipwreck of all knowledge” (ibid). Thus, if perception is reality, then there is no reality, period. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own concepts and perceptions, and will still be there when we look away or leave college.

Having said that, to say reality is also to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality, not a negation or occlusion of it. They only become cognitive thromboses if we reify them into reality itself, or in other words, transform limitless being into a limited concept of it.

For Garrigou-Lagrange, there is at one end an illicit or Promethean “grasping at the divine essence” (a la Hegel), or, at the other, an “essentializing of existence” (a la Sartre or Nietzsche). Which is to say rationalism or existentialism. Neither of these alternatives respects the Tension between the terms of O and Ø. To collapse this tension in one direction or the other creates, on the one hand, the false clarity of scientism or the clear falsity of religionism. On the other hand — or hemisphere — cosmotheandrism respects both the poetry and the precision of the Cosmos. In other words, its evident clarity is grounded in something quite mysterious, and we need to be clear about this blindingly trans-obvious obscurity.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

I count 37 posts so far. I guess we’re finally winding down to the end of Book II, right?

[............]

Right?

Don’t sound so alarmed. Man is the measure of all things, so stop trying to measure what can be written of him. Having said that, “To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative… (Schuon).

We touched on this final measure yesterday with out fifth certitude — that all our cosmic and anthropic clues lead back or up to “a transcendent Foundation to all known reality: cosmic reality, subjective reality, inter-subjective reality, moral reality” (Livi). In short, the Anthropos points to the Theos that in turn points to us — to our theomorphism (Axiom 7). This being the case,

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon).

So we’re not quite done taking the measure of the Anthropos, although we cannot take his full measure until Book III.

Hartshorne’s Neoclassical Metaphysics

One of the first principles of philosopher Charles Harshorne’s neoclassical metaphysics is what he calls “dipolar theism.” It is so similar to our Axiom 2 — primordial complementarity — that some might accuse me of plagiarism, when I am merely stealing the idea. It affirms that metaphysical concepts “have logical contraries which cannot mean anything in utter isolation from one another,” such that “each concept entails a polar contrast to it” (Viney & Shields). Examples of such cosmotheandric complementarities include Absolute and Infinite, immanence and transcendence, necessity and possibility, time and eternity, subject and object, interiority and exteriority, being and becoming, unity and diversity, and more.

Now, denial of one of these polar twins always lands one in the metaphysical soup: this is “a chief difficulty in previous metaphysical theories that suppress expression of a polar contrast,” or what Hartshorne calls the “fallacy of monopolarity.” Monopolar theories abstract and elevate one side of a complementary pair while throwing shade the other, as in the case of, say, materialism, because what would brother matter be without its sister form? Utter unintelligibility. It is very much like saying there could be an outside with no inside, up with no down, or north with no south, when the two define one another.

With respect to these primordial complementarities, although we always see them together, one must be ontologically prior, for there is always one that can account for the other but not vice versa. Here cosmotheandrism break ranks with Hartshorne, because he makes being a secondary crystallization of becoming. But there must first be something that undergoes change, not just change undergoing more of it. If this latter were the case, then no real knowledge of the Cosmos would be possible, because both knower and known would be in constant flux, and there would be no ground under our… actually, we would have no legs to stand on either.

Go flux yourself!

That would be the ultimate insult, because it would consign us to mere change instead of situating us in the cosmotheandric space between being and becoming — or between Absolute and Infinite, transcendence and immanence, time and eternity, et al.

Again, monopolar theories allow for expression of only one pole of a pair of complementarities, and thereby exclude or at least downgrade half of reality, most fundamentally the reality of Absolute and Infinite, the latter being the principle or ground of potentiality and therefore creativity, novelty, and becoming. O is an eternally dynamic interplay of these two ultimates, such that the Absolute pole is necessary for coherence and substance, while the Infinite pole is required for potentiality, creativity, novelty, and becoming. The Absolute must express its unrestrictedness through its first entailment, which is Infinititude.

This latter domain of possibility can never in principle be closed; or, one could say that it is openness as such (Axiom 3), hence a ground of continuous creativity from top to bottom. For Hartshorne, God is “the non-contingent ground of all contingency,” thus rendering contingency itself metaphysically necessary. In short, even – or especially, rather – in O there is again no alternative to alternatives, the Cosmos itself being one of those creative and contingent realities that might have been otherwise.

The Infinite is the prolongation of the Absolute into immanent creation, which is vertical causation in action. The Absolute (necessity) must generate contingency (novelty and freedom). Is O thereby “restricted” by its creativity? No, because endless creativity is the ultimate expression of its very unrestrictedness.

Exact Science and the Science of the Inexact

Given the ontological necessities of creativity and unrestrictedness, it seems that reality is equally poetic and mathematical — or, as we have suggested above, it has features ordered to the RH and LH, respectively. We want to be every bit as rigorous and precise as the quantitative approach, but is there such a thing as a rigorously qualitative approach? Can there be a true science of the inexact?

Precision obscurity?

This question goes to what we have said about our lives taking place in the tension between immanence at one end and transcendence at the other, both of these being irreducible mysteries. At the immanent end “there is the kind of ‘obscurity from below,’” which “comes from blind matter, for matter, in a sense, is repugnant to intelligibility, which is obtained by abstraction from matter” (Garrigou-Lagrange). Therefore, the precision of physics ends in the obscurity of the sub-existential quantum realm. Of formless -- AKA prime -- matter, our knowledge amounts to nothing, because there’s nothing to know. Rather, abstraction of its form is the means by which we know it in a secondary sense. Prime matter is unspecified “pure potency” with no actuality, which is just this side of nonbeing. It is unintelligible not because it is too complex, but because it is potency without form — the sub-existential basement of reality where there is simply nothing to know.

Here we might deploy the symbol Ø to stand for this lower mystery, complementing the “obscurity from on high” at the the top. Thus, “As the matter from which we abstract the intelligible is (in a way) below the limits of intelligibility, the intimate life of God is above the limits of intelligibility that is naturally accessible to us.”

Thus the intellect is bound by two horizons that shade off into obscurity, darkness, and mystery, but “Let us not confuse the obscurity that dominates the frontiers of intelligibility from on high with that which is beneath them” (ibid.). For at the bottom end is an unintelligible mystery (Ø), while at the top end (O) is an endlessly intelligible one. This latter is obscure to us not because of a lack of intelligibility, but because it is endlessly intelligible, ultimately exceeding the natural capacity of the human intellect.

Having said that, to the extent that the bottom end is intelligible, it can only be a consequence of the top. In other words, we know that matter reveals itself via intelligible form, but matter alone cannot account for these forms. This is another way of saying that all of the material or efficient causality in the world cannot add up to formal causality, which is the basis of intelligibility.

At the same time, we can trace our Cosmos back to the Big Bang, at which point things not only become obscure but pitch black: “prior” to it is nothing knowable by physics, likewise what is beyond the boundaries of the Cosmos. In other words, the Cosmos is expanding, but into what? For physics, this “into” has no meaning whatsoever, because the Cosmos is all there is. “Before” or “beyond” the Cosmos are nonsense terms.

However, they are only nonsense terms in terms of what physics can say. But who says physics is qualified to say what is before or beyond the Cosmos?

Who uses math to analyze a poem?

The point is, a purely immanent world could never even know it was one, for knowledge is both transcendent and immaterial. Even the leap from existence to experience is literally infinite, to say nothing of the release from instinct to freedom and truth.

∞

There exists a kind of false clarity, which is totally clear, for which reason Dávila says that There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it. In this case, a false clarity can impoverish the mind whereas a true obscurity can enrich it, so long as the thing in question is truly obscure and not just temporarily out of focus.

The same is true of any form of ideological fundamentalism or religious literalism, Around here we just call it ismism to cover all the bases, whether religious or secular.