Materialism, Metaphysics and Music

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"Just as behind all religion and all spiritual philosophy there is a metaphysical assent---the affirmation of Being---so behind materialism and the materialist explaining away of history there is a metaphysical negation---the denial of Being---which is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the materialistic position. In Berdyaev's words: 'Man must either incorporate himself in this mystery of Not-being, and sink in the abyss of Not-being, or he must return to the inner mystery of human destiny and unite himself once again with the sacred traditions' that are the true basis of the historical process."

---Christopher Dawson, 'Christianity and the New Age' (1931)

"The normal man has an obscure sense of the existence of a spiritual reality and a consciousness of the evil and misery of an existence which is a slave of sensual impulse and self-interest and which must inevitably end in physical suffering and death. But how is he to escape from this wheel to which he is bound by the accumulated weight of his own acts and desires? How is he to bring his life into vital relation to that spiritual reality of which he is but dimply conscious and which transcends all the categories of his thought and the conditions of human experience? This is the fundamental religious problem which has perplexed and baffled the mind of man from the beginning and is, in a sense, inherent in his nature."

---Christopher Dawson, 'Christianity and the New Age' (1931)
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Lorenzo's Speech on Music in 'The Merchant of Venice'.

LORENZO:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Enter Musicians

Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,
And draw her home with music.

[Music plays]

JESSICA
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

LORENZO
The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
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[Lorenzo and Jessica's dialogue restated in Modern English:]

LORENZO
How beautiful the moonlight’s shining on this bank! Let’s sit here and let the music fill our ears. Stillness and nighttime are perfect for beautiful music. Sit down, Jessica. Look at the stars, see how the floor of heaven is inlaid with small disks of bright gold. Stars and planets move in such perfect harmony that some believe you can hear music in their movement. If you believe this, even the smallest star sings like an angel in its motion. Souls have that same kind of harmony. But because we’re here on earth in our earthly bodies, we can’t hear it.

[...]

JESSICA
I’m never in the mood to laugh when I hear sweet music.

LORENZO
That’s because your soul is paying attention to the music. Take a wild herd of animals, or young untrained colts, leaping around like crazy, roaring and neighing loudly, which they have to do because it’s in their blood—but if they happen to hear a trumpet, or any kind of music, they all stand still. Sweet music makes their wild eyes peaceful. That’s why the poet Ovid wrote that the great musician Orpheus could make trees, stones, and rivers come to him by playing music. There’s nothing in the world that can resist music. The man who can’t be moved by the harmonious melodies is fit only for treason, violence, and pillage. His soul is as dull as night and dark as the underworld. Nobody like that should be trusted. Pay attention to the music."

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A few notes of explanation:

As with Christopher Dawson, if you are one of the 'previously converted', it is fairly easy to organize a speech, or a sermon, in which you preach to the converted. So, a great deal of the literature that is out there is just that: a preaching to the already converted. They seek out those texts to reinforce what they already understand or feel deeply inside and the texts enable them to bolster their descriptions and explanations.

To those people (I am one in fact), the message about 'materialism' and 'metaphysical negation', is a real concern which is far more than merely intellectual. It is pretty clearly it seems to me an issue of the 'psyche' and thus 'psychological' and existential. It seems always to have to do with a man's perception of himself as a soul in a flesh body in a world of 'becoming', mutable, transient and in so many senses ineffective. And it goes without saying that the image of death is always there, harassing man's consciousness and his peace. But as we all know, we are in an historical process which has---this must be faced I think---soundly decimated the possibility of seeing and understanding the spiritual and the metaphysical as solid things, as 'real things'.

I am quite fascinated by this: the death of the possibility of explaining anything in spiritual and metaphysical terms! It is not really that 'God has died' but that language and concept have no way to explain to the self, to the ego, just what in fact is being talked about! So, we either resort to outmoded lingo which we call up from historical and conceptual graveyards, and thus render ourselves a little ridiculous in the face of a descriptive system which is totally superior and also ascendent: the clear and factual speech of science, of mathematics, of biology and of physics.

In the face of that (a descriptive system in ascent) the religionist, it seems to me, resorts to all manner of rhetorical tricks. Since his meanings are no longer grounded in a metaphysics that he can coherently explain and which his audience agrees on, he seems to resort to taking the essence of the message that had been derived from those metaphysics, and restating them in a clearer prose. Take for example Dawson, above.

So, great. He has quoted Berdyaev and makes the assertion (in imperatives) that we 'must' either fully accept the materialist vision/interpretation of objective facts and 'sink into the abyss of not-being', or 'return to the inner mystery' and find a way to unite with whatever is there to unite with in the 'sacred traditions'. There is unfortunately a real paucity here, a lacuna, since it is not so very clear, and is not so very easy to state, just what exactly is to be recovered, or how.

Is it possible, do you think, to admit that the arguments in pro of this manoeuvre of 'returning to the mystery of human destiny and unit[ing] himself once again with the sacred traditions' are ineffective, collapsed, and also misleading? I say this because even if one were to consider and to understand the choices made by certain willful men in the 17th century who proposed radical alternatives and new means to viewing and to understanding what surrounds us, and where we are, and what we are (and took stands against the tyranny of Scholasticism), and like William Blake proposed that this penetration into matter was 'satanic' and would lead to 'satanic' outcomes, even still it simply is incontestable that these new forms of knowledge and the result of them have totally transformed human life, and that life in significant senses has become livable as a result. What religionists speak in those terms? How can the religionist who had been a brake on so-called progress then claim the result of progress as in any way his own? Therefor, the religionist is often a sort of wet blanket, a critical and guilt-slinging ghost from a bygone age who lurks still among us, preaching obscurantism.

Well. There are so many things that need to be put on the board for a real and sensible conversation about 'all that'.

But I also want to jump ahead, which is also a jump backward, to the platonic notion of 'music'. In my own way of understanding things (as a sort of 'afflicted religionist'!) I have to recur to the platonic notion that it is not simply, or only, pure reason that leads me to an understanding , or the possibility of *seeing* on an inner level what is connoted by the idea of Being (God, the origin of all things, of motion, of existence), but that it is more or less simply that I have heard the music (so to speak). And it also seems to me that anyone else who understands Reality through metaphysics of this sort has also 'heard the music'. Meaning, it is not a 'rational thing' but is a question of deep (or should I also mention 'shallow'?) intuition.

The Lorenzo speech, though it may be stilted to some ears, is quite important because Shakespeare and his age understood 'reality' through these means. The notion of music of the spheres, of angelical choirs, and the intelligibility of God and Meaning were not, as they seems to be to us, relics and as I say 'ghosts', but were 'real things'. We still exist and very much so (IMO) in the shadow of these Olde Perception Systems. We face another one; one so powerful and total that I sometimes doubt we can really see it in all its dimension, and yet we also exist in the other, the older one.

[uwot]

Wotcher, Gus. How's things?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Things are pretty well, thanks. I hope the same for you...

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A small correction to the above:

LORENZO
The reason is, your spirits are attentive.

Modern English: That’s because your soul is paying attention to the music.

The modern English restatement is wrong, I think. To say 'your spirits are attentive' means that 'your spirits are preoccupied'. This is more in accord with the mediaeval metaphysic: terrestrial life, like maya, inhibits our perception of 'higher spheres'.

[Immanuel Can]

I am quite fascinated by this: the death of the possibility of explaining anything in spiritual and metaphysical terms! It is not really that 'God has died' but that language and concept have no way to explain to the self, to the ego, just what in fact is being talked about! So, we either resort to outmoded lingo which we call up from historical and conceptual graveyards, and thus render ourselves a little ridiculous in the face of a descriptive system which is totally superior and also ascendent: the clear and factual speech of science, of mathematics, of biology and of physics.

Modern speech has become prosaic, practical, literal and singular (closer to the language of textbook and manual, less like poetry or music), and postmodern speech has become downright cryptic and ambiguous (think of texting, for example). This, I think, has been the result of the scientific, technological and consumer revolutions, which prioritize brevity, concreteness, speed and simplicity of objective over such things as picturesqueness, pregnancy, profundity, abstractness, conceptualization and so forth. Maybe it is this linguistic shift that has done as much as anything to deprive us of the fullness of language necessary for dealing with deep and complex subjects.

To me, the poverty of "language and concept" seems to derive from this more than anything else. Whether the referent in view is any less plausible as a result is quite a different question, logically speaking. Maybe our loss of metaphor, irony, plurality of intention and so forth renders us dumb when it comes to such matters.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

'I perceive', said the Countess. 'Philosophy is now become very Mechanical'. 'So mechanical', said I, 'that I fear we shall quickly be asham'd of it; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madame, had you not formally a more sublime Idea of the Universe?' [Fontenell, Plurality of Worlds, 1686].

The above quote heads up the chapter The Rejection of Scholasticism in Basil Willey's 'The Seventeenth Century Background'. His analysis of this century helped me a great deal to understand the vast shift in the way 'reality' is viewed and also described.

But more than that: the methods and means launched in that century enabled man to manipulate matter as a result of his clear seeing of it. By losing sight of the Heavens, or turning away from them, he gained power in the Earth.

It will be interesting to include some quotes from this title as well as 'Theopoetic---Theology and the Religious Imagination'* by Amos Niven Wilder (brother of Thornton Wilder). He seems to do the same thing I discern Dawson doing: He extracts the essences of *meaning* which arose out of the Old Metaphysic and handles them independently of the metaphysic.

It leads one to wonder if the *meanings* then can subsist independently of the metaphysical (symbolic?) structure which brought them into being? But that is problematic for the belief system and seems eventually to act as an acid on it, too.

Without a clear and precise and tangible language with which to describe whatever we mean when we refer to the metaphysic, we seem indeed to be in the realm of poetry. (And poetry took a big hit, too, in the seventeenth century...)
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*Theopoetics

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The gains rendered to practical man by the rejection of Scholasticism were tremendous and undeniable---this is Basil Willey's assertion and one almost impossible not to accept, and 'Though no one denies the extent of our gains, it is more often of our losses that we are now reminded. Nature, according to the mechanical philosophy, writes Professor Whitehead',

• "is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. However you disguise it, this is the partial outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century. No alternative system of organizing the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reining, but it is without rival. And yet---it is quite unbelievable. This conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities... The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians for the use of mathematicians. The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about. The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning but not interfering, has foisted on to philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact. Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined." ['Science and the Modern World', chap. iii]

Making reference to the 'emotional implications' of seventeenth century science, Professor E. A. Burtt writes:

• "It was of the greatest consequence for succeeding thought that now the great Newton's authority was squarely behind that view of the cosmos which saw in man a puny, irrelevant spectator (so far as a being wholly imprisoned in a dark room can be called such) of the vast mechanical system whose regular motions according to mechanical principles constituted the world of nature... The world that people had thought themselves living in---a world rich with color and sound ... speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals---was crowded now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world, hard, cold, colorless, silent and dead---a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity. The world of qualities as immediately perceived by man became just a curious minor effect of that infinite machine, beyond. In Newton, the Cartesian metaphysics, ambiguously interpreted and stripped of its distinctive claim for serious philosophical consideration, finally overthrew Aristotelianism, and became the predominant world-view of modern times." ['The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science', pp. 236-7]

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

• 'It is not only reining, but it is without rival.'

Basil Willey was writing in the 1930s and the quotes above are from around that time or a bit earlier. But if a view structure had no rival then, how much more is that the case now. So much so that, as far as I am aware, there is not even the possibility of enunciation of alternatives to the 'mechanical view'. In my own case it is in this area that I lack knowledge [of what might be happening in the philosophical world in terms of alternatives]. But what I do note, or think I note, is the attempt, constantly, to bring back to life the Old Ghosts: the descriptive systems of former, collapsed, metaphysical viewstructures and to assert---as psychological remedy---the values contained therein.

And, to go further, it also seems to me that if it is required to hold to value that is such a part-and-parcel of man's make-up he must resort to outrageous manoeuvres to preserve, shall we say, his integrity, he will do it. To assert the soul---as just one example---is therefor just such an outrageous manoeuvre!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

To Lead
propose Mercury!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

1977
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[Worth listening to].

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Waldo Frank's 'The Re-discovery of America', written in 1929, is a singular, strange, but intense study, and the part I have opted to include here is preamble to his assertions about what 'America' means, or can mean, but likely more what it doesn't mean, and where meaning failed. It is an exceptionally critical work. Waldo Frank is little-known in the US but became quite popular in Latin America. He attempted to build an intellectual and cultural bridge between English North American culture and the cultures of the South---little successfully. I came across Frank first in Spanish and when I began to read him was pretty amazed...

But for the purposes of this thread this 'preamble' seems highly relevant insofar as it traces how the perception- and description-system that supported 'an old metaphysic' have been undermined. It is not in my view an exaggeration to say that the undermining of the Old Metaphysic quite literally undermines all that has produced our own selves, and thus Larkin's poem---an Aubade is a love poem of the morning, or a greeting to the morning: a deep Larkinian self-sarcasm therefor!---may indicate, among so many other indicators, to what degree we have become 'outcomes' of the undermining of an old, sustaining metaphysic, and if I may push the implied metaphor a bit further how we are 'unable to hear the music' that inspires, or awakens intuitionally, an understanding, an epistemology really, of the soul's existence, and of course 'of Eternity'. These 8 pages are well worth the read and will be background for all that follows...

And despite what one may SAY about all that, it seems more important to understand what happened and how it happened. If we don't know that, it seems to me, we cannot really understand ourselves. We will not be able, at least intellectually, to understand 'all that has propelled us in motion' and that every single act, thought, and feeling, has antecedents, and thus [to push on the metaphor] the ghost of the dead is in us---and speaks!

The ghost of Hamlet's father wanted certain things but he never got them, not as he wished them. A ghost cannot coalesce in the present and for the future what MUST be brought forward. The task before us (if I may speak in the plural) is to bring two radically opposed epistmes, two very different ways of knowing and understanding, back into relation somehow.

I'll give you two centuries to do it. But don't destroy yourself or the World as you bridge the chasm...









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PS: It occurs to me that 'all our metaphors have flown away' which is a rather devious way to put it!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The first phase of Medieval art has a haunting charm beyond compare; its own intrinsic quality is enhanced by the fact that its message, which stretched beyond arts's own self-justification of aesthetic achievement, was the symbolism of things lying behind nature itself. In this symbolic phase, medieval art energized in nature as its medium, but pointed to another world.

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You can see where Waldo Frank gathered material from Whitehead. It is Whitehead's contention that the impetus of early science was anti-rationalistic, having taken a stance against the lop-sided and extremist rationalism of the Schoolmen: those spiders constructing cathedral-webs in speculative air. This makes sense and for this reason he can write:

• "The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning but not interfering, has foisted on to philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact. Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined" [and that] "science repudiates philosophy".

I am quite curious about this charge of anti-rationalism because, oddly enough, I note it (or think I do) in the supreme declarations of those who hold highest the 'rationalist' banners of science and---if I may say---who lead the mortal charge against 'religious content' (connotation) and thus 'rational metaphysics'. I am completely at a loss how to bridge this gap, myself, except through the invocation of, say, some platonic quintessence. But I will keep trying...

[Skip]

the materialist explaining away of history there is a metaphysical negation---the denial of Being---which is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the materialistic position.

Cute BS; bias built in. Sneaky. You want to be mystical, so you frame everything counter to that as also, in some way only evident to you, mystical, but negatively so.
Recounting and/or explaining history without reference to "Being" (whatever or whoever that is) doesn't make history go away; it just strips the patina of sanctity off the bloodshed. If you want to make history more beautiful than it actually is, by all means, set it to music.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I tried to express some part of what I understand you saying with:

In the face of that (a descriptive system in ascent) the religionist, it seems to me, resorts to all manner of rhetorical tricks. Since his meanings are no longer grounded in a metaphysics that he can coherently explain and which his audience agrees on, he seems to resort to taking the essence of the message that had been derived from those metaphysics, and restating them in a clearer prose. Take for example Dawson, above.

The problem here though is---and it takes discipline and some time---to (somehow) carefully retrace the steps that led to undermining the Schoolmen's way of reasoning, for all that it indeed required a corrective, and yet also seeing and understanding how so-called scientific materialism represents also a group of rather extreme biases.

I also think that what Dawson may mean is that there is a profound interrelationship between all the elements of European religious ideation and the very platform upon which scientism---the reining faith of our age---has been constructed. This is one of the larger themes in Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'. Some interesting selections from that work might be useful.

If you want to make history more beautiful than it actually is, by all means, set it to music.

I gather that you have a pessimistic view of history? Is that still your opinion? Is 'history' [the present] now 'beautiful'? What makes it 'beautiful' in your view?