An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  What now of melody? This phenomenon too, which seems so easy to recognize, is immensely hard to pin down. When we hear a melody we hear something begin, at a definite point in time. But what begins? And where exactly? A melody introduced by an upbeat, like the main theme of the last movement of Brahms’ First Symphony, can be heard as beginning either on the upbeat, or on the downbeat to which it leads. For many people it begins somewhere between those two, in mid-air, so to speak. Once begun a melody proceeds through musical space - but not necessarily to a definite ending (think of the melody that opens Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto). Nor, while it lasts, does the melody require there to be sound. The main theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony consists largely of silences: but the melody continues uninterrupted through these silences, quite indifferent to the presence or absence of orchestral sound. It is almost as though the sounds point to the melody, which exists elsewhere, in a ‘useless space’ of its own. Here is a striking illustration of the distinction between the physical world of sounds, and the ‘intentional’ world of music.

  The difficulties that we have in defining melody are duplicated in the case of harmony. Both melodies and chords are ‘unities’: musical entities with distinct parts, which are nevertheless heard as one. Yet they are unities of different kinds: the one a unity across time, the other a unity of simultaneous tones. Not every sequence is a melody, and not every ‘simultaneity’ a chord. Both diachronous and synchronous unity in music admit of many varieties. Thus we distinguish, among diachronous unities, between melodies, phrases, motifs and themes. A phrase is heard as incomplete, while a motif is heard as a living, moving ‘building block’ - a ‘palpitating stone’. Themes may be melodic or merely ‘architectonic’, like the theme built from fifths that opens Berg’s Violin Concerto, and which could hardly be described as a melody (a ‘tune’).

  Likewise chords exist in many varieties: consonant and dissonant, open and closed, saturated and unsaturated. Some ‘demand resolution’, while others stand complete in themselves. What makes a chord the chord that it is depends not merely on the tones and the intervals that compose it, but also on the musical context in which it occurs. What in Mozart would be described as a ‘half diminished seventh’, appears in Wagner as the famous ‘Tristan chord’ - the difference being not in the pitched sounds from which it is composed, but in the musical syntax which subsumes it. Tones may sound together, without forming a chord, even if they are, from the acoustic point of view, part of a single harmony. In classical counterpoint we seldom hear the simultaneities as chords, since each voice is, so to speak, running through them without pause. The unity of a chord seems to be sui generis: it is a unity that we ‘hear in’ the tones, but which is not reducible to their physical concurrence.

  The critical feature of melodies, motifs and phrases is the presence of one or more ‘boundaries’: events which constitute a beginning and end, and which may be more or less permeable, more or less resistant to outside invasion, more or less definitive in bringing the musical movement to a close. Phrases may be open at both ends, like the three-note phrase that opens Mozart’s 40th Symphony. (And here is an interesting question: when exactly does the melody ‘take off’: when does the upbeat end and the downbeat begin?) Or they may be closed at the beginning (i.e. not heard as a continuation of the phrase before), like the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; or closed at the end, like the descending scale motif in the last movement of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. This phenomenon of‘closure’ is often singled out by musicologists as the root of musical structure in the Western classical tradition; but the attempt to explain it in other terms invariably runs into the ground, when it is discovered that we cannot describe it, except by using metaphors borrowed from contexts which are profoundly different from the context of music.

  However difficult it may be to describe what we hear in music, however, there is no doubt that we hear it, that it is utterly immediate and intelligible to us, and of consuming interest. In the useless space of music we hear those musical unities - the palpitating stones of melody and harmony - built into living temples in which we wander freely, released from earthly constraints. The individuals in this musical space - harmonies and melodies - are not like individuals in physical space. For one thing, they can occur simultaneously at two different places, as when one and the same melody sounds in canon. Melodies are events, whose inner structure is one of movement, but in which nothing literally moves. Harmonies too are events, whose inner structure is one of force and tension, creating valencies to which other harmonies congregate and cohere.

  Music, so conceived, is not just a pleasant sound. It is the intentional object of a musical perception: that which we hear in sounds, when we hear them as music. The musical perception involves an imaginative grouping of tones into phrases, measures and chords; and this grouping is subject to emendation as we listen to and study what we hear. Hence music may be both understood and misunderstood: to understand is to hear an order that ‘makes sense of’ the sounds. By drawing someone’s attention to features that he has not heard, or has not attended to, I can make the music ‘click into place’ for him, and the order that was previously inaudible now becomes heard. This order is not part of the world of sounds: only rational beings can perceive it, since its origin is in the self-conscious mind. When I hear music with proper understanding, I am in some sense putting myself into it, imbuing it with a life that originates in me. At the same time this life, projected outwards from its human prison, takes on another character: it moves freely in a useless space of its own, where bodily objects can no longer encumber it. Music therefore offers an image of the subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in response to its own caprice. It does not describe the transcendental subject: but it shows it, as it would be, if it could be shown.

  The space of music is incommensurate with physical space; the time of music is likewise incommensurate with physical time. One and the same melody can be played fast or slow; the ‘pure events’ of music can be reversed, as when a theme is played in retrograde, or a passage runs backwards to its starting point (like the film music in Berg’s Lulu); a motif can be played now as a melody, now as a chord - like the Curse motif in Wagner’s Ring. Although music cannot break free of the prison of time, the temporal order that it reveals stands in no clear relation to the order of physical time. A vast ocean of musical time lies between the great drum strokes of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony: but only a few seconds separate the physical sounds; time moves slowly and sluggishly in the opening measures of Haydn’s Creation, but rapidly, tightly and with the greatest alertness in the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony; time is fragmented in Webern’s Konzert op. 24, and scattered like stars. In these and countless other ways, we find it impossible to hear music simply as a series of events in physical time, related by before and after to the events in the surrounding physical world. Each work of music occurs in its own time, built from those ‘palpitating stones’ that can be shifted freely in both directions. Hence we have the experience, in music, of individuals which ‘take up’ the time in which they occur, and exclude other individuals from being there: as the final tonic chord of a classical symphony drives all rival tones from the place it occupies. In all these respects musical time resembles space: it is a ‘spatialized’ representation of temporal order.

  Of course, not every work of music provides these strange experiences in equal measure. It is only the greatest labour of style and architecture that can place the freely moving subject in this useless space and build there its ‘godly home’. The masterpieces of music may, however, lift us from our time and space into an ideal time and space, ordered by an ideal causality, which is the causality of freedom. From the ideal time of music it is, so to speak, a small step to eternity. Sometimes, listening to a Bach fugue, a late quartet of Beethoven, or one of those infinitely spacious themes of Bruckner, I have the thought that this very movement which I hear might
have been made known to me in a single instant: that all of this is only accidentally spread out in time before me, and that it might have been made known to me in another way, as mathematics is made known to me. For the musical entity - be it melody or harmony - is only a visitor to our time; its individuality is already emancipated from real time, and remains undamaged by all those transformations of musical time to which I referred. We may therefore come to think of this very individual as emancipated from time entirely, and yet remaining an individual. In the experience of music, therefore, we can obtain a glimpse of what it might be, for one and the same individual, to exist in time and in eternity. And this encounter with the ‘point of intersection of the timeless with time’ is also an encounter with the pure subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in obedience to the laws of freedom alone.

  Of course, this does not enable us to conceive how you or I might exist in eternity. But is the difficulty of conceiving this a final proof of its impossibility? Consider another case: we cannot, in the nature of things, conceive of a space that is three-dimensional, finite and yet unbounded. But we can conceive of the equivalent in two-dimensional space (for example, the surface of a sphere). Asking someone to conceive a concrete individual (a person) existing eternally might be a little similar. We might say: You know what it is for a melody, which exists in ideal time, to exist also in eternity. Now suppose the same of a concrete object, in real, physical time. In some such way we say: You know what it is for a two-dimensional space to be finite but unbounded. Now suppose the same thing in three dimensions. And of course you cannot imagine it!

  I don’t for the moment suppose that those last thoughts contain an answer to the problems that have be-devilled us: those of the relation between the timeless and time, and of the relation between subject and object. But they have taken us some way along the route towards the unsayable, and provided us with a guide for the last part of the journey - this guide being not philosophy but music. The philosopher should now take Wittgenstein’s advice, and consign that whereof he cannot speak to silence. He should retrace his steps towards the realm of time and objects - the realm from which all our thinking arises, and to which all our thinking tends.

  12

  HISTORY

  Self-conscious beings exist in time and are also conscious of time, as the condition to which they are bound. Unlike animals, who exist in the moment alone, they take the before and after into constant consideration. And not only the before and after of themselves, but the before and after of the community which contains them, and of the human race as a whole. This is especially true of modern people, who live in the light of history, and who experience the present in relation to the past. History has become a major datum of modern consciousness, and one of the phenomena that we regard ourselves as most urgently required to understand.

  ‘Philosophy of history’ means two different things. On the one hand there is the subject more or less invented by Hegel: the philosophical examination of human history, in order to discover its meaning, and the place of self-consciousness within it. On the other hand there is the attempt to explain what historical understanding is or ought to be, and how it relates to understanding of other kinds - such as scientific, anthropological or cultural understanding. You could express the distinction as that between the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of historiography. Both are large and controversial areas; but it would be unwise to leave the subject without a glance at them.

  Hegel believed that the elucidation of history is one of the central tasks of philosophy. This is for two reasons: first, because all human institutions and collective endeavours are forms of consciousness, ways in which the subject is realized in the objective world. Secondly, because consciousness, in Hegel’s view, has an evolutionary character, driven by reason to advance from more ‘abstract’ and ‘immediate’ forms to concrete and objective realities. It is possible to discover a priori laws of historical development, simply by reflecting on the ‘dialectical’ movement that is intrinsic to ‘spirit’ in its objective form. The philosophy of history expounds these laws, and then shows how to interpret historical events in the light of them, filtering out what is accidental, secondary or merely spectacular, and discovering the Zeitgeist, the ‘spirit of the time’, which is the inner essence of all that happens in an epoque.

  This exhilarating theory had such an impact on nineteenth-century thought that even those like Marx who denounced it acquired the vision and the emotions which it inspired in its followers. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History remains one of the great documents of nineteenth-century culture, and one whose influence is everywhere apparent in our modern — or postmodern - world. It is apparent too in that last hesitation of mine, since it is only a kind of Hegelianism that leads us to think that the ‘modern’ world is over and done with, and that a new and necessary Zeitgeist waits in the wings. In this chapter I shall examine some of the thoughts that have led to this strange conclusion.

  It is impossible to accept Hegel’s philosophy of history: only gross selection, distortion and dramatization can make history look as though it were driven by the human spirit, and only the idealist metaphysics of Fichte and Hegel can make the Zeitgeist idea remotely plausible. Nevertheless, there is sense in the Hegelian picture - not as a philosophy of history, but as a philosophy of historiography. The study of history could not possibly offer theories that explain the past in the way that physics explains the rainbow. Not only are the facts too complicated; the historian has no experimental method with which to test his hypotheses and must rely on unverifiable, and as a rule unfalsifiable, conjecture. Such ‘laws’ as he proposes will be vast, vague and a priori. In the wake of Hegel attempts were made to offer a natural ‘science’ of history, the most famous being that of Marx, who wished to ‘set Hegel on his feet’, by showing that the ‘laws of motion’ of human society are not spiritual but ‘material’. Society is driven by man’s material needs, and the economic steps taken to meet them. No piece of pseudo-science has been more influential than this one, and it is a measure of its a priori character that every practical application of Marxist theory has led not merely to tyranny, but to social and economic collapse.

  We could give up the futile project of a science of historical events, without renouncing the attempt to understand them. As I argued in the first chapter, there are several kinds of ‘why?’-question, and only one of these is looking for a cause. When studying human action we seek for reasons. There are reasons which explain, and reasons which justify. There are also reasons which ‘make an action intelligible’, by enabling us to perceive it in another way. Such reasons may neither explain nor justify but simply redescribe the action, so as to set it in the context of our own decision-making. For example, an action changes character in my eyes, when I see it as part of a ceremony — even when I have no idea what the ceremony is for, or what part this action plays in it. I read the gestures, expressions and movements differently, and what seemed grotesque a moment ago now makes sense. Similarly a costume is perceived differently, according to whether you think of it as daily dress, as dress for a special occasion, as fancy dress, or as a uniform. In answer to the question ‘Why is he wearing that costume?’, you might reply, ‘It is a uniform,’ without saying anything definite about the intentions of the person whose costume it is. For many Parisian intellectuals it came as a discovery to learn that the Maoist costumes which they affected during the 1960s were a uniform. Nevertheless, seeing those costumes as a uniform, you had a greater understanding of the people who wore them. You had found the concept with which to situate their behaviour in the human world.

  Inspired by Kant’s moral theory, the romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) argued that the interpretation of human actions can never be accomplished by the methods employed in the natural sciences. The human act must be understood as the act of a free subject, motivated by reason, and understood through dialogue. The same is true of texts, w
hich can be interpreted, thought Schleiermacher, only through an imaginative dialogue with their author. ‘Hermeneutics’ — the art of interpretation - involves the search for reasons, and the attempt to understand a text as an expression of rational activity, the very activity that is manifest in me.

  A later Kantian philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833- 1911), extended Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical ‘method’ to the entire human world. We seek to understand human actions, he argued, not by explaining them in terms of external causes, but ‘from within‘, by an act of rational self-projection that Dilthey called Verstehen. In understanding human life and action, we must find the concepts through which the other person perceives and acts upon the world. For example, I understand your fear of speaking in a certain place, once I conceptualize it as you do, as somewhere ‘sacred’.

  According to Dilthey, our ways of conceptualizing the world in everyday life do not follow the direction laid down by scientific explanation. Rather, they represent the world as ‘ready for action’. I see the world under the aspect of my own freedom, and describe and respond to it accordingly. This before me is not a member of the species Homo sapiens but a person, who looks at me and smiles; that beside her is not a piece of bent organic tissue but a chair on which I may sit; this on the wall is not a collection of tinted chemicals but a picture, in which the face of a saint appears; and so on. In short, we do not merely enter into dialogue with each other; we are in constant dialogue with the world of objects, moulding it through our descriptions so as to align it with our rational purposes. Our categories do not explain the world, so much as endow it with meaning. When I see the Parisian intellectual’s costume as a uniform, I have found its meaning, as an object of human intention and desire.