Philosophy and Aesthetics

Abstract

The philosophy and aesthetics of music in the nineteenth century recapitulated the change that overtook music (along with literature, psychology, and medicine) in the century before: the shift of concern from affectivity to subjectivity. Hegel epitomized this shift, and the limitation attached to it, when he posited that music presents the subject with the latter’s own subjectivity, but only in pre-reflective form. For Hegel, the power to articulate subjectivity rested with language, and language, even in song, remained external to music. The idea that this formulation crystallized became the default understanding. It gave rise to two corollaries that would long remain dominant. The first is the idea that music is a vehicle (among the arts, the primary vehicle) of the ineffable and the transcendent. The second—actually the first again negative form—is the idea that music is always fully immediate and cannot, therefore, convey ideas. The music of the era, however—for example in compositions by Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Nietzsche, and Mahler—often resists both ideas in favor of the possibility that music is capable of reflective understanding.