Composer as philosopher?
Sun, Oct 17 2010, 5:46PM
I've been rereading over an earlier discussion and came across this suggestion:
I was going to say something about what you said about Mozart whom I regard as one of the greatest humanist philosophers in all art, but Tagalie beat me to it.
This puzzles me totally. I though Mozart was a composer - how can he also be a philopsopher?
Sun, Oct 17 2010, 7:01PM
#2
RE: Composer as philosopher?
I'm disappointed that you've declined to treat my question with the seriousness with which it was intended.
I'm very familiar with Cosi Fan Tutte, but I'm still totally unclear about what you mean.
Your answer is really akin to saying that 'if you don't understand, then I can't explain it to you' - and surely the statement about WAM as a philosopher is more interesting and warrants a better response?
Sun, Oct 17 2010, 7:27PM
#3
RE: Composer as philosopher?
Ok I´ll try. First of all I´m shocked that you think there is any contradiction between any man or woman being a philosopher and a composer or any kind of artist for that matter, why do they bother in the first place if they don´t have a philosophy to express. Your own explanation of the second movement of Beethoven´s Fourth Piano Concerto was basically a summation of the man´s philosophy.
As for Mozart and especially Cosi Fan Tutti, I see the opera as a humanist plea for compassion and understanding in human relationships in a world that was only to ready to judge, and still is, based on its religious principles. Mozart´s philosophy was rooted in reality as lived on a day to day basis, not on some esoteric principle with no grounding in reality, this for me makes him a far more modern and revolutionary thinker than Beethoven, who was much more a man of his time. Beethoven was certainly a far more revolutionary composer, but Mozart´s humanism pours out in every bar of his music for me, it is just more obvious in his operas because of the words.
Sun, Oct 17 2010, 8:08PM
#4
RE: Composer as philosopher?
craigm, I'm still waiting for a response to the question I posed you about Mozart in the other thread.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 12:45AM
#5
RE: Composer as philosopher?
Well, Mozart doesn't make it into Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Neither does Lorenzo da Ponte, his librettist. In any case, neither of them can possibly be philosophers in my book - I find them both perfectly comprehensible.
Guillaume
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 9:54AM
#6
RE: Composer as philosopher? RE: Composer as philosopher?
Guillaume
Your thoughts chime with mine. To propose an opera as an illustration of a composer's right to be labelled a philosopher when the libretto was written by someone else immediately begs the question of who is exactly responsible for whatever 'philosophical' content it night have. The point might have had some force if the work proposed was a symphony or a sonata. (As an aside, Da Ponte was also a composer - does that make him a philosopher twice over?)
I suspect where the confusion comes from is (as ever) semantics - in this case the meaning of the word 'philosopher'. Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, as were Schoppenauer, Kant and Hegel. But Mozart was a composer (he wrote music, not treatises). I grant that he was of course an man of some intelligence and sensitivity, of which the richness of a work like Cosi is a testament – but that falls very short of him being a philosopher. The suggestion that someone like Mozart with a certain degree of intelligence and the ability to convey that intelligence should warrant the title of a philosopher is stretching the term so widely that it ceases to mean anything.
The reason I brought this up is because I remember from my art history that Andre Felibien described Poussin as not merely a painter, but a philosopher painter. This was really a bit of spin which proved useful when the French Academie Royale was founded in the eighteenth century – the perceived need to elevate the status of visual artists from mere illustrators. And Felibien did so by associating painting with an entirely distinct (and intellectually more respectable) cultural practice – namely philosophy. Poussin was clearly a great and supremely intelligent a painter, but calling him a philosopher is absurd.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 10:55AM
#7
RE: Composer as philosopher?
Well if you are fond of the overblown waffle that masquerades as philosophy and as you seem to like the word absurd, we can take the reductio ad absurdum whereby if you don´t write philosophical treatises you can´t be called a philosopher and therefore you are correct in saying that Mozart or Poussin were not philosophers.
Well as part of my philosophy I believe in free speech, but I completely disagree with what you say. As for Mozart he didn´t write his librettos but he chose his librettists, presumably ones that expressed his philosophy.
For you Hegel was a philosopher presumably because he wrote and published treatises, for me he was an arrogant self obsessed idiot who spent his life writing garbage that had no relevance to anything or anyone, he even had the delusional stupidity to proclaim the existence of a planet philosophically impossible because it didn´t fit in with his system, only for the planet, Uranus or Neptune I can´t remember which, to be discovered when the ink on his page had barely dried. If this sort of stuff, like Plato and his nonsense world of Forms is your idea of philosophy fair enough and you are welcome to it, and I will gladly claim that Mozart was not a philosopher so as to distance him from this talking loud and saying nothing as James Brown put it.
The idea that painters are mere illustrators and that philosophy is distinct and more respectable than art, maybe true in your house, but it is not an objective fact, and personally I think it´s nonsense. Rembrandt and Goya for example as two of my own favourites are two of the greatest philosophers that ever lived. Goya´s Los Caprichos give a view of the human condition that in its profundity and clarity will teach you far more than reading Kant´s Critique of Pure Reason, in my opinion.
Why people want to separate and place narrow limits on fields of intellectual endeavour is something I have never understood because it´s all the same thing, call it art, philosophy, music, stand up comedy, whatever you want, it is just us trying to understand and reconcile ourselves with the world around us, and I think there is a lot more to be gained by not dividing these things, this compartmentalisation is done just to keep academics busy on their summer holidays. If you want to tell me that Mohammad Ali isn´t a philosopher, that is absolutely your right, but I will never agree with you.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 11:27AM
#8
RE: Composer as philosopher?
Orazio, or Horace if you wish, another philosopher, said that the true art lies in concealing the art, for me this holds true also in philosophy.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 11:40AM
#9
RE: Composer as philosopher? RE: Composer as philosopher?
If you want to tell me that Mohammad Ali isn´t a philosopher, that is absolutely your right, but I will never agree with you.
So are you saying Mozart is a philosopher in the same say as Mohammad Ali? This is really using the term so loosely as to make it meaningless.
And Hegel’s influence on Karl Marx is extremely well documented, and no philosopher other than Marx had anything like the amount of influence on the lives of millions and millions of people in the twentieth century – and on into the twenty first. So to say that Hegel has ‘no relevance to anything or anyone’ is a bit difficult to accept.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 1:10PM
#10
RE: Composer as philosopher?
Not for me. Marx I imagine was also influenced by his mother, his father, Engels, even possibly his own life experience, and what his intelligence was able to deduce from that. To say that the Russian peasants who stormed the Winter Palace, or the drivers of the tanks as they rolled into Budapest in 1956 were motivated by Hegel´s dialectic, this for me is impossible to accept.
Marx was influenced by Hegel, Hegel by Descartes, Descartes by Plato, Plato by Aristotle, Aristotle by his uncle Bob, so this uncle is the cause of the Russian revolution and all subsequent misery that lead from this, this is the kind of infantile garbage that philosophers revel in. Beethoven was influenced by Mozart and Haydn, so anything he wrote had nothing to do with him, it is impossible to think for a moment that maybe he had an idea of his own and transformed his influences into something new and personal. Noboby is uninfluenced by others, philosophers of the treatise writing sort think we all live in an individual vacuum, but we don´t, your point about Hegel and Marx just diminishes Marx´s own thought, but in true philosophical style from now on I will refer to Marxism as AristoelianPlatonicCartesianHegelianism, rolls of the tongue just like a page of the Phenomonology of Spirit.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 2:02PM
#11
RE: Composer as philosopher?
I'm not aware of anyone who has suggested that the Russian revolution was caused by a family member of Artistotle. Nor that Marx - whose entire work was concerned with the role of the individual within their wider (capitalist) society - could be accused of thinking that 'we all live in an individual vacuum'. I would have thought that the precise opposite were true.
Nor, more seriously, am I aware of anyone who suggests that the fact that a writer or a composer was influenced by his or her predecessors means that their own achievements are thereby diminished.
I'm also slightly puzzled by a contradiction between what you're saying now - that philosophy is merely 'overblown waffle' and that even Plato produced 'nonsense' - and what you've said previously about the absence of standards in education which produced people incapable of listening to serious music. You can't be simultaneously both anti-intellectual (when it comes to philosophy) and pro-intellectual (when it comes to music).
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 2:48PM
#12
RE: Composer as philosopher?
I´m not anti -philosophy, I´m anti-pseudointellectual waffle, which too often for me gets mistakenly called philosophy. I would not include Marx in the latter, because he was a man who lived in the real world, whose ideas had some practicality and relevance to human beings.
First of all I would recommend that everybody reads Kant, Hegel; Plato and the rest and make up their own minds. I only have an opinion because I had to wade through a lot of these books when I was younger: Some commonly called philosophers such as Spinoza, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein can be rewarding, but most for the quantity of philosophical truth that they revealed to me are as next to nothing when compared to reading Macbeth or Ulysses, or seeing Goya´s late works or listening to too many composers to name.
The problem is that when you label, or they label themselves, philosophers, people think they have something more interesting or truthful to say than the rest of us, which for me is just arrogance, and very oftern they are just waffling among themselves. The idea that for example the mind, or lack of it, that created The Phenomenolgy of Spirit is more rigorous, enlightened, nobler, richer in philosophical truth, or inspired than the mind that created David, or Cosi Fan Tutte is just a pernicious lie for me.
So I don´t see any contradiction; I´m not anti-intellectual about anything, I am anti-waffle, anti-nonsense, anti-imposters and idiots masquerading as great thinkers when they couldn´t explain their way out of a paper bag in plain language, anti-just because you use the word philosopher you somehow know something that the rest of us haven´t figured out for ourselves. I am not anti-philosophy in any sense, only in the narrow sense of what it seems to mean to you.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 3:17PM
#13
RE: Composer as philosopher?
I would have thought that describing the work of Plato as 'nonsense' comes pretty close to anti-intellectualism.
But the important point surely is not that I have a special (and better) definition of a 'philosophy' than anyone else. There is only one definition - which you can find in any dictionary (or indeed in Betrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy) - and that's the one I'm using. To describe someone who merely writes music (or paints pictures) as a philosopher is simply using the term incorrectly. And once you use language without reference to their agreed meaning, communication becomes impossible.
You might as well describe Mozart as a teapot - and then say you didn’t mean a vessel with a spout that can dispense hot liquid.
Mon, Oct 18 2010, 3:42PM
#14
RE: Composer as philosopher?
I described Plato´s theory of forms as nonsense, I don´t see why that´s anti-intellectualism, but if it is, so be it, the fact remains that the theory is laughable in its stupidity.
My claim for being able to call anyone I so wish a philosopher, and saying I might as well call them a teapot is a bit far fetched but as you wish. As for dictionary definitions it is not an English word as you are well aware it is Greek, and means as you know lover of knowledge, which in its broadness suits me fine.
Fri, Oct 22 2010, 12:19AM
#15
RE: Composer as philosopher? RE: Composer as philosopher?
I suspect where the confusion comes from is (as ever) semantics - in this case the meaning of the word 'philosopher'. Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, as were Schoppenauer, Kant and Hegel. But Mozart was a composer (he wrote music, not treatises). I grant that he was of course an man of some intelligence and sensitivity, of which the richness of a work like Cosi is a testament – but that falls very short of him being a philosopher. The suggestion that someone like Mozart with a certain degree of intelligence and the ability to convey that intelligence should warrant the title of a philosopher is stretching the term so widely that it ceases to mean anything.
This was exactly the point of my previous (admittedly somewhat facetious) post and surely clinches the argument - but you never know.
Guillaume
Listen to Cosi Fan Tutte, if that doesn´t answer your question nothing I could add could make it clearer.