In recent reading, I caught up with the joyfully provocative (and so well-named) Ted Gioia, whose latest chapter of Music to the Raise the Dead looks at the origins of Western thought and finds not theory, or stand-up, but musical performance: Parmenides versifying in the meter of the bards; Empedocles anticipating Earth, Wind & Fire (but adding water)…
Today, … [Empedocles] is presented as a prototype of the natural philosopher and physical scientist. But what students aren’t told is that he was a singer as well as a philosopher, and composed his works in this same hexameter associated with Orphic hymns and divine oracles.
… not to mention Socrates at the end of Plato’s Phaedo:
The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cultivate music, said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has always been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music.
Gioia’s conclusion is thrillingly overstated:
[Some] readers may have a simple question: namely, when did philosophy finally abandon these superstitious beliefs? When did the discipline give up magical/musical thinking and operate on the firmer ground of human reason?
The short answer is: Never.
His evidence for this gives out around the mid-twentieth century, as does his passion for philosophy:
Nietzsche, … like Socrates, decided to compose his own musical works. He failed to achieve the renown he coveted in this field, yet never lost his obsession with the power of song. In his final years he offered up his most concise evaluation of the art, in an oft-quoted aphorism: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
We could tell similar stories about Kierkegaard, Spengler, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and other seminal thinkers. Sartre even resolves his philosophical novel Nausea with an extraordinary incident in which his protagonist Roquentin cures his existential angst by listening to a jazz record… Songs lead to wisdom that texts cannot reach.
Meanwhile, in the LA Review of Books, a characteristically sensitive review of Adam Kirsch on the end of humanity by David E. Cooper:
Together, [antihumanism and transhumanism] comprise a revolt against humanity that is a “spiritual development of the first order,” in the same category as Christianity and communism—“a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”
Cooper goes on to remark—as I did when I wrote about Kirsch—that he is oddly phlegmatic, given what’s at stake. “That said,” Cooper writes, “I detect a quietist tone to the book”:
Certainly, there is no call to arms… Kirsch quotes with approval the one-time—but now “recovering”—“mainstream environmentalist” Paul Kingsnorth’s remark that “action is not always more effective than inaction.” I suspect that Kirsch shares the same writer’s “longing,” not for “progress,” but for a gentle and personal retreat or “escape” from the ugly world humanity has manufactured.
BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about the history of humanism, via Sarah Bakewell, in the TLS, and spoke to the TLS Podcast (around 28:00). Also in the TLS, the brilliant Rachel Fraser on Kitcher’s critique of contemporary philosophy, a book I reviewed for the LRB.
I love the phrase "joyfully provocative".