Time in Music and Philosophy

Abstract

The kind of sense music makes, is bound up with how forms of meaning, including in verbal language, are connected to time. Traditional cyclical, epic, and goal-oriented senses of time all play a role in modern musical forms, even though the mythical, religious, and metaphysical content of these forms is hollowed out by scientific advances. The chapter considers aspects of the work of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Dewey, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, focusing particularly on the relations between self-consciousness, time, and rhythm, and on how these contribute to the constitution of meaning. The chapter argues that it may make more sense for philosophy to attend to what music reveals about time which can only be grasped by active participation in music, than to seek a comprehensive explanatory account of music and time.