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The principle: beginning and foundation 0:00 Yes, so hello everyone, a new episode of MusicoSophie. Here, we're going to develop more precisely the meaning of the approach, since we're going to talk very, very precisely about music and philosophy. I don't know any more than that, but I'll hand it over to you, Dominique, and hello to you. Well, hello, hello, Aymeric, thank you, hello everyone. Once again, I congratulate myself on the fidelity of our confined comrades and friends. And yes, today, I would like, I'd like to discuss with them an old problem, music and philosophy, roughly, because I'll introduce it without further ado quickly with an excerpt from Plato, that is, starting at the very principle of philosophy itself. I prefer the word principle to beginning, not to name myself, but because principle in the sense where we say from the outset or in its principle.
1:06 I don't know why you say that this way, principle in the sense of how. And there you go, principle, both the chronological beginning, the init, or principle, principi, etc. We find it in French in 'prince,' which means the first one, the first child of the king. So, in the chronological sense, indeed, Plato is the first system of philosophy strictly speaking, written, that has come down to us. I say written, if we don't count his master Socrates.
1:39 And also, principle in the sense of what, at every moment of time, since the beginning, continues to support, right? What Descartes would have called continuous creation, right? To support, ontologically, the thing we're talking about, when—I don't want to give a long speech about it—but when the Gospel of John begins with what is translated as 'in the beginning was the Word,' in fact, the term he uses is arche, in Greek, because he's the only evangelist.
2:11 Arche, which is both chronological, of course—we find it in 'archaic,' 'archaeology,' what is ancient, what is at the beginning—but also principle. That is, what continues to animate, at every instant, that without which everything would collapse if the principle did not remain active. So, philosophy, from its very first system of civilization in Plato, I begin without further ado with a quotation.
Socrates' dream in the Phaedo 2:42 Is it by chance? From the Phaedo, that is, from the last dialogue—Socrates's last dialogue, Plato's last dialogue, but it's situated just before the Republic, so it's the second-to-last of the first period of Plato's dialogues. The so-called Socratic dialogues, precisely, before the great metaphysical dialogues that came after the Republic. This is a reminder. But from the pitch point of view, as we'd say today, it's the last time Socrates converses with his disciples, since the discussion takes place in his prison, just before they drink the hemlock.
3:22 But nothing to make people cry, on the contrary, he asked for the women to be sent away. I don't know who's lamenting, etc. We find the somewhat Mediterranean, somewhat sexist side of the Greeks here. And so, we stay... Yes, it's a bit euphemistic, but he stays with his disciples, who have the more or less good taste to choose as their topic of discussion whether the soul is immortal.
3:53 Which, at the moment he's about to drink the hemlock, isn't very nice. Imagine if we couldn't manage to demonstrate that the soul is immortal—not very nice. There you go. No, no, but it actually goes rather well. And in any case... I'm not going to retell the whole dialogue, which is a great classic of Platonism, a marvel, a work of art as Plato's works often are. So, precisely regarding the work of art, Plato is an immense stage director, who knows what he's doing. He's not only a great philosopher, he's a great writer.
4:24 So, there's a prologue, as is often the case with Plato. And it's in this prologue that we find the quotation I wanted to bring up, which introduces our problem of music and philosophy well. Socrates says to Cebes: 'It's strange, last night I had a dream.' So, his last night. A figure dressed in white appeared to me and said, 'Socrates, make music, compose!' I wondered what that could mean.
4:54 Because, of course, in antiquity—and Freud, much later, would salute this reflex—more importance was given to dreams. It's not said to be a mere physiological disturbance. We know that beyond causes—which is important too—there's also meaning. Except that, of course, in popular superstition, it's a meaning that's supposed to be substantial, real, corresponding, like my grandmother who dreams that someone is going to die and then afterward they die, and she says, 'You see, I sensed it.'
5:28 It's not in that sense, of course, that Freud speaks of meaning—it's that it has a symbolic significance. It's like Caesar's wife, who had dreamed of his death. There you go, exactly, just before the Ides of March. She had told him not to go to the Senate, I believe. So, here, Socrates, with his reflex as a man of antiquity, wonders, 'I wondered what this dream could mean, of course.' And then, I told myself, but actually, he's asking me to continue what I've always done.
6:02 Not to abandon philosophy to make music, but to do what I've always done. And here we have this rather surprising statement, in the sense that music is the highest philosophy and that it is indeed philosophy that I'm engaged in. So, the complicity that goes this far here, between philosophy and music—it's not just a matter of saying, 'There are philosophers who attach great importance to music.' I don't know, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, of course, yes.
6:32 No, no, here it's a matter of music being the highest philosophy, that it is indeed philosophy that I'm engaged in. So, this is nothing new to you, who know the languages, particularly the classical languages and letters. And as they say in Les Femmes savantes, 'He knows Greek, madame.' In France—I'm not talking about you, but about Trissotin. Yes, yes, let's play Trissotin and Vadius. So that he's well regarded right away: 'He knows Greek, madame, on a sonnet perfumed with Attic salt.'
Mousikè, art of the muses, and the rhythm of verse 7:04 Yes, in fact, we should do an episode with someone who's truly very learned, Victor Sarkis, whom you know well. Yes, I'd be delighted. A scholar in the field, of course. And especially in humanism, there you go. There you go. And precisely, it's not to you that I'd point out that 'musicking'—we mustn't fall into anachronism here either. This isn't music in the sense of, say, me listening to a Beethoven quartet in my room.
7:34 It's the Muses. There you go. That's what the Greeks called the Muses. The beginning of the Odyssey is 'Andra moi ennepe, Mousa.' That's the invocation of the Muse. There you go. The bard immediately invokes the aid of the spirit, as a Christian preacher would say, right? Of the Muses, right? Of course. That is, of the whole ensemble of the Muses. That's what's important. That 'musicking' is what will later be called with Wagner the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, or the visual arts, that is, the set design, for example.
8:12 Because otherwise, that's the term, the Muse. But of course, there you go. Gesture, dance, speech, the text, Sophocles's text for example, but also the chorus—that's precisely what it means. And it's very likely, correct me if I'm wrong, that Sophocles's or Aeschylus's text wasn't spoken the way I'm speaking right now, in a prose tone, but was chanted rhythmically.
8:45 The stasima, that's it. There you go, since, let me note in passing, poetry... it's almost the total work of art, the truce of the quarry, in fact. But there you go. Now, 'music' designates that. The ensemble of all the arts—visual arts, the arts for the eye, for the ear, dance—converges, converges toward one and the same... toward one and the same outcome. It's the striking result which is the culmination of Greek art, which is dramatic art.
9:19 I say dramatic art to include comedy as well, of course. There you go. So, 'musicking' is all that. But still, let's come back to music in the strict sense now, because the text was, we'd say today, 'slammed,' I don't know. It must be recalled here, because we're no longer used to this, especially in France, in French literature, where poetry is distinct from prose, and it's only at the end of the line that there's rhyme. I'm simplifying, but roughly, that's it.
9:50 So, it's only at the end of the line... We're the exception compared to... There you go, of course. That's what I mean by France. That's when you see it's poetry, whereas in German, as well as in ancient Greece, it's throughout the whole line that you're in poetry, insofar as it's the rhythmic element that distinguishes poetry from prose. For example, the succession of long and short syllables, the recurrence of combinations between longs and shorts, called dactyls, iambs, trochees, spondees.
10:23 There you go, there you go, there you go. Yes, the anapest, you find it often in fables, you know, that's it. That is, two shorts, one long. The Greeks already called it the anapest, it's very common. So, there's indeed a musical, auditory, auricular parameter, in the strict sense, already in mousike, that is, in the ensemble of the arts.
Anaxagoras and that without which the cause would never be a cause 10:58 But still, I mean, it's significant that Socrates, precisely, explains his dream by saying, 'But that's what I do.' So, what can explain this connection that Socrates makes—more than a connection, a quasi-identification—between the highest philosophy, or as Plato often says, those who philosophize in the true sense of the word 'philosophy'—I'll open a parenthesis here—and not like Anaxagoras, who is also discussed in the Phaedo, which is why I'm citing it, a passage that shows both Plato's materialism and his non-positivism.
11:47 I know I'm being provocative, because Plato is said to be the emblematic idealist. Yet, when he speaks of Anaxagoras, we're in philosophy, we need to dwell on this a bit—Anaxagoras, of all the pre-Socratics, was known for having said that it's not the atom, that's Democritus, it's not number, that's Pythagoras, it's not becoming, that's Heraclitus, it's not being, which is the principle, arche. First, which explains everything, but that the key thing is the nous, that is, intelligence—you find it in notions, in 'noumenon,' words like that—and intelligence, that is, the world is not left to chaos, to chance, which Democritus had had the audacity to be the first to formulate, but rather 'the tooth of chance,' as Parmenides said, I don't know what that means, but that the world, as we'd say today, involves something like intelligent design, you see, there's a kind of immanent finality in the world.
12:48 So, in the Phaedo, Socrates says, I heard it said, I heard it said that a writer, a philosopher, had said that the nous was the origin of all things, which interested me enormously—ancient finalism, Plato, Aristotle—and I procure his book, and I'm very disappointed, because I see someone who begins by saying, indeed, that intelligence is at the origin of everything, but as soon as it comes to a particular case, he invokes the action of air, of heat, of cold, in short—he says it's not coherent, a finalist who suddenly turns mechanist, it's interesting as a problem.
13:27 And here, Plato goes a degree deeper by saying, if he said that all these things—sorry, he first makes a comparison—it's as if, to explain why I, Socrates, am sitting here beside you, one were to say it's because Socrates has bones, and muscles, and tendons, and these tendons have the property of being able to contract, and that's how I come to be sitting here—whereas for the dog, because it has in it a vis dormitiva, so that makes it sleep. There you go, there you go—whereas I'm sitting here because I've been offered a chance to escape, but I judged it better—back to finality, right—to submit to the law of the city, which I've always defended.
14:04 Well. There are those who explain love to you through a complex concept of synapses, you could explain it through Tristan and Isolde, pheromones, that was very much in vogue. Pheromones, pheromones, there you go, that's it. No, no, but of course, of course. And what's more, I mean, a lot of gynecologists abuse this kind of explanation with their patients, right, which gives them an air of authority. Women are fascinated by that, they're supposedly explaining, right, libido, which is...
14:34 Ah, you know all my secrets, well yes, it's a pheromone and a few molecules. So, let's be serious, then. It was Dalí who said, you start out as a beautician, you end up as a gynecologist. Yes, there you go, but that's it, that's it, that's it. Already, and Plato specifies, and here it goes very far, he gets serious, he said, if we said that without these bones and these muscles, I couldn't be sitting here, we wouldn't be wrong. And he says, these people are not giving the cause, but that without which the cause would never be a cause.
15:09 That's where we see Plato's materialism. If there were no matter, nothing would be the cause of anything. Yes, for an idealist philosopher, that's... There you go, there you go, that's why I point it out in passing. That without which the cause would never be a cause. So, yes, and let's now support what makes him say that music is the highest philosophy—I'll pick up my thread—first, there are, and now we come to common determinations that I'd like both to present and enumerate between music and philosophy, especially starting from Plato.
The invisible is not the immaterial 15:50 It's that music appears to be the most immaterial of the arts. Well, the sound element, right, appears much more imponderable, right, than an architectural ensemble, a bronze statue, concrete, or whatever it may be, right, or clay, as God did to create Adam, after all. So, there you go, I mean, music appears—I chose this cautious word on purpose, to avoid falling into idealism.
16:28 Because there are those who say music is immaterial. No, no, if I'm being heard right now, it's because there are vibrations in the air that reach the eardrum, which must vibrate—I mean, all this is no less material than a block of concrete. But it's not visible. Ah, that's a new determination. And that, in Platonic terms... Ah yes, it's not that matter disappears, as we used to say. It's a subtle matter, as one would have said in the days of alchemy, for example.
16:58 Ethereal. There you go, there you go, there you go. And so, already, a first complicity between philosophy, which, especially from the very principle, in Plato, in its history, says it owes itself to the model of mathematics. This is not at all, not at all an encouragement to irrationalism and magic. No, no, Plato, we say indeed, just as he had written at the entrance to his school that no one should enter here who is not a geometer, which doesn't mean we're going to do geometry—it means, on the contrary, leave it at the coatroom, well, at the entrance.
17:33 It's not that. But you cannot enter if you haven't done it, because mathematics is the best prior training for contemplating what? Precisely, the invisible, that is, notions, that which the eye of the soul alone can see, not the eye of the body. Leibniz, an immense philosopher but also an immense mathematician—he doesn't forget that we owe him infinitesimal calculus at about the same time as his colleague, friend and correspondent Newton.
18:04 Leibniz, walking in a park—it was fashionable to teach philosophy that way, walking—would say to his listeners, male and female, 'Find me in the park two identical leaves.' I challenge you to find me two rigorously identical leaves. And when you see the place that equality holds—a particular case of identity, right—in mathematics, remove equality and there's no more mathematics. There are two great categories of relations in set-theoretic mathematics, for example.
18:35 There's the equivalence relation, of which equality is a particular case, and the order relation. A is greater than B, for example. Or A comes before B, the order relation, strictly speaking. So, mathematics already trains us to examine notions which are abstract notions, that is, strictly speaking, not immaterial, but non-sensory. That's especially what's important. It's not through the senses that I'm going to see a circle.
19:10 With my senses, I see rings in the water, things that resemble, right, the notion of a circle. But the circle, for a mathematician, is a sequence of words. It's a definition, I'll say, a logos, that is, the set of equidistant points. I'll give the classic Euclidean definition. The set of points equidistant from one same point called the center, in one same plane. In other words, it's a divine decree. The circle begins to exist from the moment man dares to decree, 'I call this a circle.'
The world bends to the mathematician's decree 19:44 We begin with that, the primary notions, as they're called, in mathematics. There you go. And the astonishing thing is—forgive this epistemological detour, but it matters—the astonishing thing is that the applied sciences, but now, watch out, here we're moving on, we're getting our hands and elbows dirty, so to speak. But no, we're moving to the real, to empirical reality, external reality, applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
20:14 going in an increasing order of complexity. All these sciences are sciences only insofar as they put mathematics into play, that is, a discipline which itself has no need of them. It doesn't need the external world—it's extraordinary—which only enunciates concepts. What's extraordinary is that the external world bends to the abstract decision of the mathematician. Let me take a very simple example, in physics, the problem of measurement.
20:46 If I say this piano is 1.15m, I'm saying something a bit meaningless, in terms of length, of course. What is the meter? It's a decision, it's a human decree. The meter didn't exist in being before man decided it. You know the classic definition has changed a bit since there's been... But it's even more arbitrary now, actually. But the meter is the length of the standard bar kept at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, near Paris. We need to specify this geographically, because if you move it around the solar system, the length could vary.
21:21 and the weight too. Depending on whether you're near the Equator or at the pole, it's a bit flatter. You see, that's important. So, it's really a conventional definition. Now, it's the periodicity of an atomic element, which is much more rigorous. And the most precise measurement of the meter is at the Paris Observatory, which, in terms of timekeeping, has become so refined that it supplies NASA with clocks. I mean, there you go. All that to remind us of what?
21:51 The improperly so-called immaterial side—but what's certain is intelligible in the Platonic sense, that is, an object of the understanding, but which cannot be an object of the eye of the body. Once again, the eye of the body sees rings, whereas only the understanding of the mathematician conceives—not imagines, it's not arbitrary—but conceives and very rigorously enunciates the circle, right? So, conceiving, not just seeing.
Pythagoras, acoustics, and the theory of strings 22:21 There's the connection with music. It shouldn't be too surprising that before Plato, among the pre-Socratics, of course—you guess I'm going to talk about Pythagoras—the first applied mathematics was acoustics, as it happens, which is not a discipline of music—it's about acoustics, of course, which is not irrelevant to music, but it's a part of physics—acoustics, the number of vibrations a string makes per second, that's the frequency, as it's called, it's a part of physics.
22:59 This allows us, of course, to define the baroque pitch standard and distinguish it from the modern pitch standard, depending on whether it's 447 or 433 vibrations per second, I mean. But acoustics is a natural science, unlike music, which belongs to culture—these are the little reminders that need to be made—it's exactly like phonetics, which belongs to the order of nature, because the set of sounds a human throat can produce is due to physiology and the physical constitution of man as an animal, whereas phonology carves out, within that whole set of sounds, right, a grid that excludes some and emphasizes others—there's even no 'u' sound in English.
23:38 It's the Prague circle that does that. There you go, there you go, ask in English to count to 10, get to 8, they can't manage to say 8, there's nothing you can do. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, no, we tell them 8, yes, that's what I'm saying, 8. So, these reminders are important because Pythagoras was the first who noticed that by putting your finger in the middle of the string, on a lyre—you can do this on a guitar too, of course—half in space, half, it's a geometrical notion, gives half in the ear, that is, gives the octave or the double, it's the same thing, that is, it's the same note, it's do each time, there are different octaves, but each time you just need to put your finger in the middle.
24:24 So, how does a numerical relation, one half, suddenly have a concrete application to the senses, to the ear, there you go. And of course, the Pythagoreans spoke of the music of the spheres, there are the distances between the planets, but there, that verges a bit on mysticism, in that sense, but we see to what extent, via acoustics, the complicity between music and philosophical reflection is ancient and profound.
25:01 And even, well, for once, I'll risk doing a bit of nature-philosophy, philosophy of nature, but one of the most advanced models in today's physics, in theoretical physics—I'm not a specialist, so I'm not saying this model is viable, but still, it has been extremely developed—I'm thinking of string theory, which is one of the most recent historical formalizations of physics, and it's no accident that in string theory, everything is supposed to be vibration in the universe.
25:45 To put it very simply and crudely, my apologies to the specialists, but I mean, there isn't a particle, an atom in the naive sense, that is, a ball of solid matter surrounded by void—that's not how it works. For example, between two atoms there can be a field, and a field is no less material than a particle, which is what Lenin admirably showed in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, right when the notion of field had just been put into equations by Maxwell, for instance, or the Lorentz equations.
26:24 There you see it, the first complicity: music and philosophy have in common the capacity to train us to conceive rigorous things—what could be more rigorous than a Bach fugue?—but in the invisible. That's the first determination; the second is what makes music—we had touched on this a little in our very first conversation regarding what Lévi-Strauss said in the opening of The Raw and the Cooked—when we look at one of the fundamental parameters of music, the three parameters that come up most often, they are rhythm, harmony, melody; one could name others, but they are most often included in one of these three, rhythm, etc.
Rhythm, harmony, melody, and timbre 27:35 It got cut off, Dominique. Say again, last time you were cut off. Oh really, no, I'm saying we mustn't forget that the three most decisive parameters we almost always refer to when talking about music are rhythm, harmony, and melody—in whatever order you like—but we can name others, though those others will be included in one of the three previous ones. I don't know, the aria, the air, the refrain, that's included in the melody category; the chords, the color, that's harmony; whereas, I mean, the meter, the measure, the pulse, all that is the category of rhythm, there you go.
28:25 Timbre, do you put that under harmony? Well, that's a very good question, because it's a factor, it's the instance of music that is most in relation with the material—more than matter, really, the material, what is most material in matter, so to speak. Indeed, we say, moreover, in classifying instruments, the brass, we refer to the material, the woodwinds, the set determining winds together, by combining the two; the strings, the percussion—that's the traditional academic classification in musical anthropology; nowadays we prefer to be more rigorous and say chordophones, membranophones for percussion, membranophones, idiophones—less well known, though the examples are very well known, Spanish castanets are partly idiophones, in the sense of idiom, idiomatic or idiosyncrasy.
29:34 What is specific to something. Exactly, which produce the sound that is specific to that material. Yes, it's a way of not breaking them, but it's easy. There you go, for example, African dancers who put little seed rattles on their ankles with a small string—plants that have seeds inside and make a sort of clicking sound when they move their feet like that, with extraordinary mastery besides—those are idiophones, you see.
30:04 So, you're quite right to bring up timbre, it's present in all three parameters. Let's say I'll grant that timbre belongs to rhythm, because to hear the timbre of a drum, indeed, you do need to strike it and produce a pulse—but what relation do you see between timbre and melody? That's where we get the notion of Klangfarbenmelodie.
30:37 Literally, in French, we translate it as "melody of timbre." How can you make a melody out of timbre? In the order of succession, in what I was mentioning earlier regarding mathematics, in the order relation. I mean that the sound of a bassoon, the sound of a horn, and a flute—I can state them in succession, and that produces a sonic impression that is not the same as if I make a clarinet, a cello, and an oboe follow one another.
Rhythm plunges into the vital 31:07 For example. So there are series of timbres, Schoenberg said. Right. So when we look—if I now isolate the rhythm parameter to come back to music and philosophy—would our musical perception of rhythm have the same significance, would it have the same hold on our sensibility, and on the way certain people essentially say, "I can't listen to that without starting to move"?
31:46 You see, one can fall prey, be the prey, of the signifier. In the Freudian field, one can be the prey of a rhythm, of a measure, so to speak, a bit like a magician who would force you to dance with a flute, forcing you to move in time, in cadence, in rhythm. Well, would we grant such importance to the rhythmic element if, before music even existed, our body had not itself been fundamentally invested with decisive rhythms, whether it be breathing.
32:27 Each time, they're alternations that mark—exhaling, inhaling, breathing, the heartbeats, diastole, systole. So, there's also walking on two legs. Walking on two legs, absolutely. And what's nice—here again a kind of connection between music and philosophy—is that music emanates from what we might call the vital, to speak in empirical and imprecise terms; through the rhythmic element I would plunge into the vital. To take a striking illustration, when we reach such a degree of dramatic tension that the voices fall silent and only the instruments continue to speak, I'm thinking of the funeral march in Twilight of the Gods, Siegfried has just been killed.
33:37 He lies there, everyone falls silent, stunned, dumbfounded, and we hear—boom—this funeral march begins with two timpani strokes that are truly the heartbeat, the beat of emotion, before the event that has just occurred, boom, before the double basses launch into that admirable melody, there you go. So, up to this point, we see, in a more extensive way, the two circles—philosophy on one side and music on the other—increasingly tending to produce what, in set-theoretic language, we always call intersections.
The Essay on the Origin of Languages and the dreamed language 34:26 Which doesn't mean it's the same thing, but that there are elements common to both sets. And that's why, throughout the centuries, I insist on the principle of joining these two disciplines, because if I were to give the chronological history of the relations between philosophy and music, we'd need a whole tempo, since at times it would be a bit tedious.
34:58 But there's another reference that comes to mind here—in my opinion, perhaps not Rousseau's greatest book, that doesn't mean much, but I'm thinking of the Essay on the Origin of Languages—undoubtedly one of the most incisive, and in any case unequaled in a way, in the reflection he carries out on—what?—on the reasons why, because it's called Essay on the Origin of Languages, but there are many questions about music in it.
35:36 For as we had seen elsewhere—I won't dwell on it, but this isn't the moment to forget it either—it is through the same channel, that of hearing and listening, that we learn language, speech, and that we enter the musical universe. And that before knowing how to speak, we were already in contact with the maternal melody, or that of the nurse, whatever the case may be. So, with the voice, even independently of any meaning.
36:12 Where I want to get to with my reference to Rousseau is that Rousseau begins, in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, by contrasting the emotion that visual representations can provide with that provoked by music. And he puts it very well—if you give me a second, I'll look for the text, because it's so, so apt in every word—we mustn't forget that Rousseau was considered by Diderot for writing the music entries of the Encyclopédie.
36:48 So, here's the text. Just need my glasses, there they are. Small parenthesis, we mustn't forget to come back to Plato because I think there are things to say about the music in the Republic. Enormously, enormously.
37:20 With the distinction of modes and all that, of course, of course. But right now I'm dealing with the fundamentals before we get to the debate. This isn't what I was looking for, but I come across a reference to Plato. So, I'll just open the volume to page 53 of the Ducros edition of the Essay on the Origin of Languages.
37:51 I hope you can see it more or less. There. On page 53, we find this: This language would have many synonyms to express the same being through its different relations. It would have few adverbs and abstract words to express these same relations. It would have many augmentatives, diminutives, compound words, expletive particles to give cadence to periods and roundness to sentences.
38:21 This language he dreams of would have much irregularity and many anomalies. It would neglect grammatical analogy in order to attend to euphony, to number, to harmony and the beauty of sounds. Instead of arguments, it would have maxims. It would persuade without convincing and depict without reasoning. He's actually talking about music there. It would resemble the Chinese language in certain respects. No, but people always say these reflections are Eurocentric. Even so. The light—it's a mythical China meant to contest the world.
38:56 In certain respects. Greek, in others. Arabic, in others. And there, the allusion to Plato: Extend these ideas in all their branches and you will find that Plato's Cratylus is not as ridiculous as it appears to be. Because it's an absolutely staggering dialogue, you know, the Cratylus, full of wordplay. I wonder how translators manage to get through it. It's a piece of virtuosity—since we're talking about music—incomparable, and some have said it might be a way of caricaturing discussions among sophists.
39:30 Here, Rousseau takes it very seriously. There. But I'm alluding to a passage. Sorry. I had noted it there. But I had noted it: From this alone it follows evidently that the origin of languages is by no means due to men's first needs.
Languages are born of the passions, not of needs 40:10 So already, Rousseau takes the opposite stance from the dominant pragmatism of Anglo-Saxon, English origin at the time. No need to say Anglo-Saxon since the only representatives are the English at that point—America is still only embryonic historically. So, against pragmatism, that is, we find here Marx's critique of mechanistic materialism, or of Feuerbach, who is wrong, in the Theses on Feuerbach, to consider only nature to replace religious alienation, rather than history.
40:54 For Rousseau, it's alienation as externalization, not simply an Entäußerung and not simply an Entfremdung. There is an Entäußerung and an Entfremdung, which Hyppolite, in a somewhat convoluted way, quite rightly at times, calls "extraneation" to distinguish it from alienation. Well, "extraneation" isn't very common. He says: from this alone it follows evidently that the origin of languages is by no means due to men's first needs. It would be absurd that from the cause that pushes them apart should come the means that unites them.
41:25 Where then can this origin come from? From moral needs, from passions. And Rousseau's great thesis in this book is that what caused man to move from the state of nature to civil society is the passions. The origin of languages is not eating, drinking. On the contrary, he says, that's what pushes them apart. There, we are rivals—there won't be enough for everyone, the game, etc. But on the other hand—since animals too are excellent hunters—on the other hand, and here we come to it, all the passions bring men together that the necessity of seeking to live forces them to flee from.
42:02 So we clearly see this dichotomy. It's neither hunger nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger that tore from them the first voices. The fruits do not withdraw themselves from our hands. One can feed on them without speaking. One pursues in silence the prey one wants to devour. One might even say that the true predators, the felines, who are perfect predators, take pains to maintain the most absolute silence as they advance.
42:36 The fruits do not withdraw themselves from our hands. One can feed on them without speaking. One pursues in silence the prey one wants to devour. But to move a young heart, to repel an unjust aggressor—there we move from seduction to supplication—to repel an unjust aggressor, nature dictates accents, cries, laments. These are the oldest words invented. And that is why the first languages were song-like and passionate before they were simple and methodical.
43:12 All this is not true without qualification, but I will come back to it afterward. A small remark that shows a scholar's scrupulousness here, not just a philosopher's. So, a striking text, since we clearly see his dichotomy. But that doesn't stop... I'm sorry to be wasting time. There. It's there, it's there.
43:46 It's hard, because I have it on Facebook, I'd need to look it up on the computer. The excerpt I'm looking for, which I often quote—yesterday I was doing an interview with Antoine Vintan, the economist, and he told me, "Ah, if I weren't [gagné], I'd know this text by heart." So sometimes it happens that I don't know a text by heart. We should also tell him he always forgets his keys, his phone. Yes, but that... memory is very selective.
The well, place of the first rendezvous 44:17 So, are we disconnected there? No, we're going to disconnect and pick back up. No, because I don't want to... There, the text is found. There, sorry for this interruption during which I had to look for my source. I'm doing it on purpose, coming back to this word, because we're going to talk about wells, about sources. And believe, believe your servant who has lived in the Sahel, in sub-Saharan Africa, where water is the most precious thing there is.
44:53 I was able to observe in situ just how right Rousseau was, without ever having set foot in those regions. What he's about to say, I've seen it, several times a week, at the wells. There, there, so, at the well, there formed the first family bonds. There were the first meetings of the two sexes. So, this ties into the thesis that the origin of speech is the passions and not Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism.
45:29 The young girls came to fetch water for the household. That's utility. The young men came to water their flocks. That's vital necessity. There, eyes accustomed to the same objects since childhood began to see them as sweeter. We must not forget our society has become so freed from certain puritanical rules of traditional or archaic society that we've forgotten boys and girls did not mix like that.
46:03 Right? Neither in the same places nor at the same hours, etc. So, there, eyes accustomed to the same objects since childhood began to see them as sweeter. All the more so since the wells, as I was also able to observe in Africa, are always set apart from the centers of the village or town. One can speak to a girl there without being spied on by all the matrons or the censors of the community. The heart was moved by these new objects.
46:33 An unknown attraction made him less wild. He felt—this is Rousseau—he felt the pleasure of not being alone. The man who would write, as his testament, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, says here: "He felt the pleasure of not being alone." Water became—not a need, but a desire not to be alone. Water became imperceptibly more necessary.
47:04 The cattle grew thirsty more often. "One arrived in haste and left with regret." I wanted to bring in this excerpt because, as I say, I've seen it happen several times. The boys and girls talked at the well with that modesty characteristic of these societies, but nonetheless, I mean, with a freedom and an ease that one never sees in the city, let alone in the household.
47:34 There you go. I should point out, for example, that in sub-Saharan Africa, a child of 12 or 13 speaking to his father—because Samia will say to him, "go ask papa if he knows where the [call] is"—will never look his father in the eyes while speaking to him. That just isn't done. It's not only between the sexes, it's also forbidden between the ages. The child lowers his eyes and says, "Mama, they're asking for you on the phone."
Sound constitutes the subject; objectivity in Kant 48:04 Yes. So, you wanted to illustrate the origin of languages in relation to sociality, in relation to society. What I wanted was to show that Rousseau posits sonic material, the universe of sounds, as being at the origin not only of speech, but moreover of sociability—but that it's the same bond.
48:35 I don't know. The bond between subjects. Yes, it's constitutive of the subject, whereas in the pragmatist version, it's because we are already constituted, we're already a homo economicus, we already have our business plan, and then we need language. There's already a human nature. Of the sophists and the like. There you go, there's already a human nature, in a word, that is what you just said—already constituted, and of which afterward, language, music, would be merely a few attributes.
49:06 No, there is first of all a plasma, if I may say so, it's not an intersubjective relation in the most defensible sense, which is not at all ineffable here, quite the contrary. Kant speaks of the intelligible community. And I would even say that we often confuse the notion of materiality and objectivity. Objectivity is essential to scientific discourse, for example, the notion of objectivity.
49:37 But it is not necessarily linked to materiality in the atomistic sense. I mean that when we say A equals B implies B equals A, we cannot say that this is subjective. We can say that all subjects — this is why I illustrate it to talk about intersubjectivity — all subjects agree on this. For a Papuan from New Guinea, if A is the brother of B, B is the brother of A.
50:08 You see? What is called symmetry in language, in symbolism. But where I want to get to with these examples is that, precisely between Rousseau and Kant, a strange process takes place: the notion of objectivity shifts into interiority — not subjective interiority, not into the romantic interiority of the individual, but into collective interiority.
50:38 That implies then that what is constituted is the collective. You mean from Kant to Rousseau, there? Yes, well, from Rousseau to Kant. There's more and more of the collective in Rousseau, or else I haven't understood correctly? Of course, of course, of course. No, but I mean, Kant theorizes a shift in the term objectivity — forgive me, by reminding, by not using the same term — we're going to talk about the Gegenstand and the Objekt.
51:09 There, we'll speak German to understand each other better. There are two words for object in German, there are several, but there are mainly these two. Gegenstand, which literally means what stands against, there facing you, exactly as we say obstacle, object in French, the 'ob' there is what is in front of my nose, isn't it? Hence the term obscene, too, for that matter — it's not what is in front of the stage. There. That's Gegenstand, that's the object in the sense we see in the subject-object relation, for example, isn't it?
51:43 I see the tree there, I am the subject, the tree is the object. And then there is Objekt, the Latin root, isn't it? As is often the case in Nordic languages, both repertoires exist, if I may say so. Now, when he speaks of the objectivity of A plus B, A equals B implies B equals A, there Kant uses the word Objekt, so there is an objectivity that doesn't mean it's external to my thought, but that it is common to all thinkers, common to all thinkers, which presupposes the constitution — this time truly external — and which presupposes a material relation, hearing, among subjects.
52:27 There, that's what we're recalling. Now, where you're right about the little mix-up we made between Rousseau and Kant, you're right because maybe you're alluding to it, or it's a happy coincidence with Hegel's thought, but Hegel will make a muted reproach to Kant for having shifted a fundamentally political problem of Rousseau's onto moral ground. That would be interesting, it's another problem, but there will be...
Aside: censorship, Hegel and Kant 52:57 Or Hegel's critique of the social contract too. Of course, but that's a thesis I would recommend to young people. How, isn't it, the social contract with citizens gathered together, to express the general will, becomes the community of ends or the moral law, doesn't it? There. There's a pretty good angle too, it's Losurdo's book on Kant, 'Self-Censorship and Compromise in Kant's Thought'.
53:28 Excellent. And that one, we also see, well, indeed, one simply couldn't say everything in the Germany of his time. But of course, and then, it's funny, it's not the first time I've seen a correlation between two individuals as different as Losurdo and our late comrade Jacques D'Hondt. Because Jacques D'Hondt used to say that a good part of the convoluted or difficult side of Hegel's prose came from the precautions imposed on him by the all-powerful censorship that policed him in his lectures in Berlin.
54:01 because it's an anachronism to believe he worked for the national education system, that's a republican and rather modern notion — he worked for the ministry of religious affairs, that was his employer. And in the ministry of religious affairs, he wasn't going to, like Mr. Hegel, incite our young people to look toward the French Revolution. What's all this business? There. The one he called the great professor of law in Paris, which designated Napoleon. Yes, we can clearly see objective right in Hegel.
54:31 It's interesting because the essential mission entrusted to the censor at the time was to go, sort of like an informant, into Mr. Hegel's lecture. And then, come tell us whether this gentleman believes in God. If that's the main question, well then, good luck — subject, predicate — but I pity the censor who had to settle the matter. Where the other one dragged him along, so to speak, is the contingency of its necessity. We find that in the proof of God's existence.
55:02 So to speak, the contingency of its necessity, or the necessity of its contingency. Hence the censor going mad. It's often the doing of Marx and Engels on Hegel, atheist and antichrist, I don't know what. But yes. There, it was so clear. No, but since even a Lenin himself says that this passage of the Logic is the most materialist and at the same time the most idealist and contradictory, because it's a feast — so imagine the censor. Yes, that's it. Yes, there it is... Well, anyway. There.
55:33 I'll take advantage since we're on this edge to point out to those listening to us — it's not directly related to music, but it's so rare that I'm afraid I would regret it if I didn't point out, didn't seize this occasion to point out. There has just appeared on a site I recommend, called on Facebook 'Le Gros Rouge qui tâche'.
56:04 It's easy to remember, isn't it? Founded by our comrade Benjamin Lelouarn, an excellent contribution from yesterday morning by Victor Sarkis on the Marx-Hegel relationship, precisely. There. Signed — I know it's excellent. Oh no, no, it's exceptional. I allowed myself to salute it in a comment, even though I make clear I don't agree with everything, but what does it matter. The points of disagreement are purely semantic points where I would sometimes replace 'materialist' with 'naturalist' or something like that, so as not to mix up positivism and Marxism.
56:45 But somehow, I mean, it has a truly exceptional dialectical rigor, with a reversal of the for-or-against, it's wonderful. There. So I'll repeat the article, 'The Marx-Hegel Relationship' signed Victor Sarkis, on the site 'Le Gros Rouge qui tâche'. There. Look it up on Facebook and you won't be disappointed. All the contributions are top-notch.
Rousseau the musician facing Rameau 57:16 There. I'll stay on my Rousseau chapter to recall all the same that his essential livelihood his whole life was copying music. There were no photocopiers, no reprography, no scanners, no printers. So it's a thankless task, but it was a way for him to make himself independent of the powers of this world. A bit like Spinoza, who ground lenses for optics, already, isn't it.
57:47 So that confirms Rousseau's motto, 'Vitam impendere vero' — to make one's life depend on the truth. That's how I translate it, I don't know, to keep the metaphor of hanging in there. To suspend one's life on the truth, that would be the ideal, to suspend one's life on the truth. But why do I recall this activity? To recall that he was a musician, a composer, and that he could have — we'll come back to his motto — made a living from it, because he had a very early 'people' success.
58:21 I say 'people', it's an anachronism, but what today we would call 'people'. He suddenly had the whole court with him, Pompadour herself, who was mad about what, his opera, a fairly short opera, a pastoral, as they say, isn't it, Le Devin du village. Right? We've already discussed the Rousseau-Rameau relationship — this, no, Rameau's Les Indes galantes, that doesn't have the power and subtlety of Rameau's music, it's charming, there are charming tunes.
58:57 But that's not what interests me, it's the fact that Rousseau could have made a living from it and that he refused the pension that Madame de Pompadour wanted to give him for the occasion. Ah, was that on the occasion of Le Devin du village? I don't know that part. Absolutely, there. It's true that it was the era of, if I'm not mistaken, the Querelle des Bouffons. Yes, exactly. The querelle... yes, because between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists, that is, the Italian and the French.
59:29 There are at least two such quarrels. That is to say, the Italians, toward whom Rousseau leaned, that is, a primacy of melody over clarity of diction and text, which would be more French, well, which is deemed French at the time. Of course, the Chevalier Gluck, despite his Germanic-sounding name, it's characteristic — it has always been so with French diction, isn't it, even if in Italian coloratura you no longer understand anything of the text, right?
59:59 When it's on the same syllable that there are flourishes and vocal virtuosities, isn't it, in the extreme high register. Whereas even in Carmen, you hear very well 'l'amour est enfant de bohème'. There, I mean, the text and the diction of the text remain clear and communicated. There, that's to say, well, since we're there and we're talking about the relations, here specifically, between philosophy and music, between the philosopher Rousseau and music, that would be more accurate — I'll recall here that Rousseau skirts bad faith, well, skirts — sometimes he jumps right into it, in his polemic against Rameau.
1:00:44 When he goes so far as to say the human ear cannot hear more than two sounds simultaneously, so there's no point making complicated chords, isn't there? He who knew very well that this was false, he himself on the harpsichord played far more than two sounds at once. But he's right on a higher plane than that of strict acoustics, if I may say so, on a plane that only Clouscard categorized, the worldly, the fashionable-society plane.
1:01:14 It's to take the opposite stance from what was fashionable at the time in the salons. That is, Rameau's music, it's interesting. And there, where Rousseau, in a way, doesn't come off so badly from the point of view of the history of music, is in the fact that Rameau, who is by far the greatest musician of his time, French in any case, even without specifying it, I say that because Bach admired Couperin, I don't know if he knew Rameau as well, but Bach had enormous admiration for Couperin.
1:01:49 He's in Anna Marie's — Anna Magdalena Bach's — notebook. Anna Magdalena. I don't remember, I think there are Couperin's 'bergeries' to play. There, the valiant Anna Magdalena. I said 'the valiant' in the sense of enduring many pregnancies. Yes, clearly. But Rameau is an immense musician, but still, he's the last one, these are the last flashes of Ancien Régime music. You can't say it opens a future, Rameau, unlike Haydn, for example, who with his ruptures — we saw this the other time — with his ruptures, with that, suddenly, his unexpected side in musical narrative, will, so to speak, lead on to Beethoven, from the point of view of music history.
1:02:41 We can't say it's a Beethoven suddenly giving rhythm an importance it never had at all in the Baroque era, where rhythm and meter... In Rousseau, there is the voice that emerges, the utterance, like a singularity, in a drama in formation — one could draw it toward the Beethovenian logic. Indeed, I don't speak idly, because there, where Rousseau is superior, from a musical point of view, with many caveats, to Rameau — dare I say — it's in his prose.
Language is neither nature nor convention but connivance 1:03:14 In his prose, Rousseau is the greatest musician of his time — there, I'm stretching the terms a bit. When it comes to composing notes, there's no comparison with Rameau, Rameau's the man, of course. There. So I wanted to point that out, but more fundamentally, the role Rousseau gives to music — that is, when he speaks of the origin of the passions, there's always a somewhat crude relation in certain basic problems in the history of philosophy.
1:03:50 I can say crude in the sense of non-dialectical, dichotomies not sufficiently dialecticized. In this case, let me explain: as early as Plato's Cratylus, the question is posed — is language by nature or by convention? Right? Do the words we have come from nature? For example, we imitate natural sounds in 'plop', in 'smack', in 'crash', I don't know what. We see it can go very far. Even the rooster's crow — we say we imitate 'cocorico', except the Germans hear 'kikeriki', others 'kikiriki', and the English, who never do like everyone else, hear straight up 'cock-a-doodle-doo', don't they?
1:04:30 I believe. Yes, cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo. Well, why not? But I mean, that certainly proves that the ear is nonetheless quite filtered by cultural codes. But even in 'is language by nature or by convention', your humble servant proposes a third term. To be dialectical, one must move from binary to ternary. A middle term. For example, between raw and cooked, a brutal rupture.
1:05:00 there's the fermented, Tahitian-style fish. That is, it's cooked solely by vinegar and lemon, without flame. You see? Now, as soon as we do that, as soon as we raise the binary to a middle term that unites the two dialectically — that is, that takes two opposites and makes of them a full-fledged notion, a new substance — we have a much richer, more etymologically rich signification.
1:05:33 I'll get to our subject. Language is neither a contract nor a nature. I would say it's a connivance. It's not as clear as a contract. Not everything in it is explicit, but we did not learn to speak the way we learned the highway code, with a bijective relation, as we'd say in mathematics, between sign and meaning. No, we weren't told: this, this means intersection with priority to the right, this means slow down in 100 meters. There, it's precise.
1:06:03 There's a question. That's not how we learned to speak. We threw ourselves into it. With the polysemic character too. And for good reason, we didn't ask each time — the parent, the father, the mother — we didn't ask each time what this means, for every word. And so, by throwing ourselves into it, we inaugurated a long period of human history where there is this polysemy and hence this plurivocity in language, which makes predictable, necessary, so to speak, the emergence of a Socrates one day in the streets of Athens who asks, what do you mean by...?
1:06:50 Not 'what do you mean by' apodictic or ostensive — those are technical terms, I understand, one needs a dictionary — those are terms found in Kant — but what do you mean by virtue, by courage? For example, when we say there's a crisis of overproduction, I ask: from what point do you decide that we're overproducing, or that I'm consuming too much? You've got some nerve deciding that I'm consuming too much in my place — do you know my needs? In fact it's a crisis of realization, that is, production has trouble flowing onto the market, it's not enough relative to...
1:07:34 Well then obviously, it's a bit complicated, so I'm going to produce... Say, well yes, but it's a revolution when you understand that, because you can't say that during the crisis of '29 there was too much milk, since milk was being poured into the gutters to push prices back up. You can't say the children, weren't they, were stuffed with milk. There were plenty who could have survived on an infinitesimal part of the milk that was poured into the gutters. There, that's to show that language, isn't it, is polysemous, and it's often in its interest to be so, so that this stays in the shadows, doesn't it?
1:08:11 It was Baudelaire who put as epigraph to Les Fleurs du mal that admirable extract from our Protestant, d'Aubigné. It says one must pour execrable things into the well of oblivion enclosed in darkness. But vice has not science for its mother, and virtue is not the daughter of ignorance. In other words, let's put it plainly. There is already transparency.
1:08:41 Yes, so between what Rousseau shows us with his account of the origin of language and the passions, is that between the clear convention on the forum — the Athenians, the men going to vote with little cords of fresh paint to shame anyone who arrived late to vote. Citizenship matters, civic duty. And the woman within the four walls preparing food or swaddling the baby, isn't she, or slipping furtively out of the house to go bury her dead brother despite Creon's ban, cut off just like that with an axe — but in what is clearly expressed in the light of day on the forum — I'm turning Latin again — on the agora, on the Pnyx, whatever — I mean, it does not do justice to the depth and the polysemy of language, whose first contact for us is independent of meaning.
1:09:50 That's why I've made this whole long digression. And so, musically, once again, the infant, the one who is very small and does not yet have access to the stage of speech proper, nonetheless hears adults exchanging sounds among themselves, doesn't he, or even speaking to him directly. So the relation to music and to language are extremely close and impose, don't they, on the intersubjective dimension what linguists call, if I'm not mistaken, continuous parameters, which are often marginalized in linguistic study, precisely because we don't find them in writing — we need speech in act to find them.
The hierarchy of the arts in Hegel's Aesthetics 1:10:39 There. So, I'll give a quick chronological continuation — the next step will be Hegel, roughly, in his Aesthetics, I'm speaking here only of the status of music in his Aesthetics, where music appears as the penultimate stage of the representation of the Idea, doesn't it?
1:11:09 There's a hierarchy of the arts according to whether one is further from or closer to the Idea. So there's architecture, which is sunk into the sensible with its three dimensions, the most material sensible. Painting, in which, says Hegel, only two dimensions are retained — that's interesting, because Hegel is telling us that painting has always been abstract, even when it paints saints or columns and temples, all painting is abstract because painting, insofar as it unfolds on a surface and not, like sculpture and architecture, in a volume...
1:11:50 All painting abstracts away one dimension of the real. Yes, in passing. And then here comes music, where there's no longer any spatial dimension at all. On the other hand, we've shifted into the order of time. A melody is a duration, from the point of view of the framework in which it inscribes itself. But he doesn't give it — he doesn't say that it's the ultimate expression, like Plato, of truth.
1:12:24 That, he reserves for poetry. But look how ambivalent this is. We saw earlier that what makes a piece of speech poetic and not merely journalistic prose is precisely the entry of the musical element. To the point that I regret not speaking Chinese or Arabic — a language I would have loved to be able to speak, especially when it's recited by masters of hadith recitation, for example, I mean.
1:12:55 You recognize right away that someone is reading a poem even when you don't know the language. Through mere recurrence, through rhythm, through... That's it. So, afterward, there's this possible polysemy, slightly redundant, the superior use of redundancy in information theory, according to various theories, description — one thinks of the Tartu school, for example, the structuralist school, the description of poetry, so there are particular criteria.
Poetic speech subverts language 1:13:30 So indeed, this aspect is a deliberately polysemic quality of the term. A kind of dialectic between the expected and the unexpected. How does speech... You're quite right to say that the musical scene is no longer speaking, since it even expresses itself in a language foreign to the other. Yes, because there's almost a tension between speech and language. That's it, between language and speech. Poetic speech always seems strange. Exactly. A subversion of one into the other.
1:14:00 That's part of it too. In the use of language. I think of Aragon, who returned to genres that seem outdated or old-fashioned, like the ballad, the rondeau — it's often a bit archaizing. Aragon, 'I crossed the bridges of Cé,' that's a bit like a medieval ballad. You find this in Apollinaire too, almost at the same period, a bit before Apollinaire, actually. This way of... But at the same time, when you look closely, when you reread Aragon carefully...
1:14:32 It seems simple, but suddenly you have to reread it because the meaning is strange. So speech, there, surprises the ordinary use of language insofar as it is poetic. Yes, that's exactly it. I think of a remark by Aragon, who said that the first time he read Rimbaud's poem — 'On the bright branches of the lindens a sickly mating-call dies away, but spiritual songs flit everywhere the currants' — he said, 'I thought there was a typo.' 'Flit everywhere the currants' doesn't hold together syntactically.
1:15:05 It should be 'flit among the currants,' no doubt. And upon checking, he said, 'No, it really is everywhere.' That's poetry. 'Everywhere,' almost like an adverb here. There you go. But it's true that there is a constant subversion of speech within language. Both being present at the same moment within the same structure. I mean even beyond any particular poem, in a general way. Exactly.
1:15:35 Yes, absolutely. It's interesting because you take speech in its radical sense. Yes, exactly. But it's the same thing in discourse too. That is, what makes language evolve between us. Yes, exactly. It's not the academies that make it evolve. I wonder if there isn't something to look into on the side of glossematics. Sorry? The... what? The labyrinths and your feelings, what's that? It's the theory of the Copenhagen school, Hjelmslev. Ah yes, that's generative grammar, him.
1:16:05 No, no, no. It's actually a development of Saussure. There, I thought it was something specific to Chomsky's generative grammar. No, no, no. Ah no, no. And what does he say about the glosso—? About glossematics, I gather. No, it's precisely a complete alternation, the fact that inside language itself these issues are constantly present. Inside itself, especially in musical speech. Since you have two circles: you have the Copenhagen school and the Prague school.
1:16:36 The Prague school more centered on phonology and phonetics. And there's Hjelmslev, much more on these questions of language and speech. I see. On what I've called, with a somewhat generic notion, the continuous parameters. Exactly, exactly — the voice rising, falling, accents, etc. All of that is so as not to leave any room for the irrational. Of course. Everything has a reason, everything can be explained. There is always that cause without which the cause would never be a cause.
Romanticism blurs poetry and philosophy 1:17:08 As you say. There you go, there is no deus ex machina coming in from the side, something ineffable, in poetry or in music. Everything goes through something rational, which implies an immense amount of work — sometimes even collective work, work accumulated over millions of years, but which is well and truly present. Exactly. Precisely — if I continue unrolling the chronology, after Hegel, or even at the same time as him but especially afterward, there's the unleashing of Romantic sensibility.
1:17:46 And here it's interesting — are we still within the philosophy-music relationship, or the literature-music relationship? And the question deserves to be asked, because the boundary between literature, poetry, and philosophy becomes blurred at that point. Hölderlin is a poet who does philosophy. Right? Hegel and Schelling are philosophers who have poetic passages. The sequence about the girl with the fruits in Hegel is a prose poem.
1:18:18 very rigorous — that doesn't mean his thought becomes shaky, quite the opposite. But indeed, I mean, when there are the chapters on the unhappy consciousness or the beautiful soul and its forgiveness, I mean, it has been noted, these are often genuine prose poems. A strange period where poetry and philosophy seem almost to exchange their functions.
1:18:53 Now, I want a clue precisely located this time, in the historical overview Hegel gives at the beginning of his Aesthetics. And he says: there's beauty in Plato, beauty in Plotinus, then the Middle Ages, and then, starting with Kant, it becomes serious — for the first time, a philosophical aesthetics, the Critique of Judgment — and you'd think it's going to arrive at him. No, there are still two stages: Goethe and Schiller.
1:19:27 So it's extraordinary — in the history of reflection, implicitly philosophical reflection on art, suddenly two poets come and insert themselves. And this will of course be the case with Romanticism — I think of someone like Schopenhauer, for example, who at least deserves credit for having developed one of the most interesting discourses on music, if we set aside his Brahmanic-Hindu and Buddhist ravings.
1:20:10 But he readily crosses the line between the non-sensible and the irrational and the immaterial. Whereas we saw earlier that there can be a non-sensible thing, like mathematical equality, without anything irrational about it — quite the contrary. Actually, sorry, let me pick up the thread of what I wanted to tell you about the Copenhagen school — it's above all about considering poetry truly as form and not merely as substance.
Form in Aristotle: distinguishing without separating 1:20:43 We come back to our story of the invisible — the invisible not being the immaterial. I don't know how to unfold it for you because I knew it poorly, so I preferred to gather the information you were providing. Before you said that to me about form, I immediately thought of the concept of form. Yes, that's it, exactly. And of the concept of form in Aristotle — that is, precisely what is opposed to matter but is inseparable from it. That's it.
1:21:13 There, this form here is round. I'm taking 'form' in its most common sense, the visual sense, which is the origin of everything that is Eidos, right? It's visual. So we still find it today in French when we say 'anthropoid apes,' that is, apes that have the look, for the eye of man, seen not too closely. So here's a circular form. But the matter is plastic. The two notions are quite distinct, form and matter, since with the same form I can make it out of wood, iron, gold, whatever I want.
1:21:46 Good. So the two notions are quite distinct, and conversely, with plastic I can make something else entirely, right, than a little lid, with the same quantity of plastic, the same matter. So we do need to distinguish them. I'm trying to explain Aristotle, who here shows prodigious sharpness of thought, but this distinction does not authorize me to separate them.
1:22:17 Yes, that's it. The distinction, for Aristotle, must not go so far as separation. It's an obsession of his when he criticizes the Platonists — more than Plato himself, actually — for having separated the Ideas. All the time — that's the distinction one draws between man in general and a particular man, Jean-Michel Tartampion, fine, except I don't shake the hand of man in general. Exactly. So he exists only in my head.
1:22:49 It's not separable. Whereas the Platonists separated the Ideas, and that's the most important thing. I can't take the circular form, put it in my right hand, and take the formless plastic and put it in my left hand, because it will always have some form. Exactly. Absolutely. And that's it — so if language is a form and not merely a substance, for example, we also have to — and this is where your connection with music is very good — to understand capital, you have to understand it as a relation and not merely as an object.
1:23:20 There you go. Otherwise you get it wrong; otherwise you don't understand that it's a relation. And a relation between men, incidentally. There you go, as a relation. The exploiters and the exploited, even. Hence the importance of the invisible — but not the invisible with grand tremolos and... Ah no, exactly. It's an invisible that can be visible and yet not be seen for what it is. That's it. I often say, for example: I do a report during the Vietnam War, and I show an American soldier shooting a Vietnamese, and vice versa.
1:23:57 And I say, you see, men — it's violence, it's moral reflection on violence, it's the same thing — we make no distinction between the one who is 10,000 kilometers from home, in the process of causing three million deaths, and a people who have just come out of a colonial war against France. That is, what gives meaning to the images we see, and truth, is precisely what is not there, as you say. One would have to give the history, etc., but it's what the image does not show. Exactly. But the image is there in order to hide.
1:24:27 There you go. Image, screen. That's it. It's aptly put. That's why, if essence and appearance of things were conflated, all meaning would be useless. There you go. Hence also the respect Marx had for Aristotle, because the notion of form in Aristotle is where he is most fruitful. I don't know whether there are errors in Aristotle's biology or physiology. But here, to the point that he brings it close to the soul.
Music, a moving form of sonic material 1:24:57 When he says: well, if axes hung from trees, we would say that their edge is their soul — if we didn't know it was artificial, that it's man who made that edge. But if axes hung from trees, one could read the axe's purpose in the edge of its blade. It's magnificent. So, there you have it, music plays — well, this is interesting, it's not a digression we're making, we're rather at the very heart of the matter, because music tends to start from sonic material, which we saw earlier is not properly musical.
1:25:35 There are noises in nature, there are sounds in culture, and additionally, in music. And then there's acoustics, which is a branch of physics, not of music — we saw that. But what turns sonic material — without which, recalling what Plato said to Anaxagoras, the cause would never be a cause; without sounds, which are material, and here one must not be an idealist either — without sounds, which are material, music wouldn't exist. But for it to exist as music, it has to arrange the sounds according to the demands of an ever-moving form.
Orpheus and Rilke's Sonnets 1:26:13 That's where you see how important the temporal element is compared to the spatial element, for painting or architecture, for instance. In other words, music — and it's no accident that Orpheus is the mythological figure closest to it — is the god of transformation, of metamorphosis. I refer readers, of course, to Rilke's admirable collection, the Sonnets to Orpheus. The Sonnets to Orpheus, thank you. The Sonnets to Orpheus — I'll remind you, not of the sonnets themselves, which each deserve to be read, it's not very long, but of the anecdote behind their composition: at that time, Rilke was going through what's called a period of sterility, a crossing of the desert, as they say, right?
1:27:02 In short, the inability to write, as happens even to the best. And it happened that he was corresponding — since he had many female correspondents, with no ambiguity whatsoever. I knew a woman who had known Rilke — well, I'm not that young after all. It was he — she was in the Drôme, working with disabled children — she had known Rilke; her father was a diplomat; she had known Lenin as a child; she had known Bukharin, she was very close friends with Bukharin; she had known Mahler, her father must have been posted in Vienna, in Moscow — and she would tell me he was the kindest person I ever met, but then everything would droop, the eyes, the eyelids — sorry, let me rephrase.
1:27:46 She knew him, in any case, I have it on that. There you go, there you go. No — why am I bringing this up? Because he was corresponding with a Russian woman who had a daughter, fourteen years old at the time of this correspondence, and who — imagine, in Russia, homeland of ballet par excellence and choreography — had set out to become the dancer of the century. And this girl suddenly developed some endocrine illness, as we'd say today, and started putting on weight, and she died quickly, and for Rilke it was like a call from destiny that, as long as she could move, she kept dancing.
Schubert, melody, and the flowing stream 1:28:34 It reminded him that in the myth, Orpheus keeps singing even as the stones thrown by the Maenads, who are stoning him, strike his head and his heart. So this insistence of music on enduring through time — that is, on continuing this miracle, continuing to sing while everything conspires to interrupt the concert — there is no better illustration of it than Schubert.
1:29:06 When — you clearly see Schubert making sometimes labored efforts to try to measure up to that model that overshadows everyone at the time, Beethoven — the Commendatore's statue, so to speak, for that generation, the young Romantic generation — and he does very fine things, but it's not his best. On the other hand, as soon as a lied takes hold of him, as soon as a melody — that is, something that flows, that resolves itself into the temporal element — I had quoted this line of Nerval's in another context, but here it fits perfectly: 'deliver the purple flowers to the current of the streams,' and there we find 'current,' 'course,' 'flow' — the flow of the trout, the flow of the Fair Miller's Wife, since there's a miller, a mill, the Wanderer too, the Winterreise — each time it's about movement, right — or the Swan Song, the final collection of lieder, because we know it's a legend, but they say swans sing when they know they're going to die — so the journey par excellence, the last one: 'O Death, old captain, it is time, let's weigh anchor,' there you go.
1:30:15 So this may be the deepest relationship to music — this one, the relationship to death. Yes, because once, when we were talking about depression, you told me that music has this cathartic effect, of course — it was said a bit off the cuff, as a remark, because you said, it's bound energy, which is completely metaphorical, it's not bound energy in the physical sense of the term, but you said it still has this capacity to bind things that appear to us as images that have a certain quality, these lying images you speak of, these lying images that don't aim at the whole of reality, that appear to us as so many...
1:30:52 That act as a screen. And that take part in all those figures of neurosis. I'm talking about ordinary neurosis, the kind we're all victims of. If you're not psychotic, you're neurotic. It's the little fantasy — it's not... Exactly. And music, where more sophisticated music is missed by our desire, is precisely because, properly understood, it has this effect — one could say dialectical, one could say... Yes, exactly. It's always the same idea. That's why...
Dialectic: from the statue to the song 1:31:22 If we're being dialectical, let's commit to it — I'll interrupt you for a moment so our listeners don't think we're just juggling words. Dialectical because there is contradiction. Between what? Between the opposite of movement, of becoming, that is, the static state in which I had thought of myself until then. I had made myself into a substance — 'sub-stance,' 'stance,' 'station' — everything that is the negation of time. Stasis, the state, right?
1:31:52 To be careful about playing to reality. Or as my grandmother used to say to her brother, who was a bit mentally disturbed: 'Don't just stand there planted like a garden statue.' You see? That's it. Like a statue — she said, 'like a santon.' I thought I was this, that. And then, I have a magnificent illustration of it in Racine's Phèdre, when Hippolytus, for the first time, discovers he is in love, whereas he thought he would never know the pangs of love.
1:32:28 A bit like the crisis Rimbaud goes through in A Season in Hell, saying 'me, me, me.' 'Enslaved beneath the common law, by what charm...' Yes, that's Racine. 'Carried far from myself...' I wanted to get there in a perverse way by inverting the chronology through Rimbaud. I recall Rimbaud saying, 'I who thought myself a magus or an angel, am brought back to earth, with a rough reality to embrace, and a duty to seek.' A peasant. And well, it's the same here, yes, exactly, do you remember the perfection of that passage.
1:33:01 When Hippolytus finally says, right here, 'enslaved now beneath the common law' — I who thought — I, who watching the shipwrecks of mortals, always thought I would watch the ravages from the shore, enslaved now beneath the common law — what a confession! I believed myself an exceptional individual, and I discover that the law operates within me. 'Enslaved now beneath the common law, by what turmoil do I see myself carried far from myself?'
The trio and Schubert's penultimate sonata 1:33:33 At that moment he is no longer a statue. He is a field, a field of pain, he is an elegy, but he is a field. There you go. For Liszt and Schubert, this is perhaps where it becomes most tangible for you, and at the same time most moving, in Schubert, because you clearly see it's the resolution of a terrible tension, but one that is liberating. Terrible, because he dies at 31, he is overtaken by death — but instead of making something funereal out of it, right?
1:34:05 The listener, especially in his finales, at the time — I'm thinking of two examples, the famous trio that Kubrick uses, right? Yes, that's it, in Barry Lyndon, though he only uses the slow movement. But it's no accident that this theme, which apparently comes from an old wandering folk song, right? Anne Langer, I don't think so. Excuse me.
1:34:41 That old song brings him back in a finale that is calm, reconciled, but never stops from beginning to end, never lets the melos stop. There's that example, and then of course there's his second-to-last sonata, which begins in a Beethovenian manner.
1:35:20 Of course, getting through all these thirds, it isn't easy. No, no. No, then, then the second theme, very contrasted with the first. So there we're in sonata construction, very well. But when he reaches the finale, it's song.
Finitude as good news 1:35:52 That flows, and precisely, there's no interruption, it's only variations, right? There you go. So — 'deliver the purple flowers to the current of the streams' — that will be my conclusion. Music's greatest kinship with philosophy is perhaps its relationship to finitude. I don't like to say 'death,' because that sounds metaphysically dramatic and takes us away from the real problem. It's finitude. And that's good news.
1:36:22 I wouldn't want this to be a funereal conclusion. It's precisely the case that it's not from today that man knows he's going to die. Which animal knows it's going to die? I don't know. It's existed since the first extracted sites, I'd even say, and I'm throwing a stone here into the garden of exploitation, so to speak, it's the fact that when economists have understood that production serves the infinity of human desire, infinite, not in the sense...
1:36:57 But indeterminate. That means we have no right to tell someone, from this point on it's legitimate for you to desire, but beyond that, no, because that's too much. As I said earlier, from what point do you decide that I'm consuming too much—that's a bit much, really. I spend my time calculating, checking prices when I do my shopping, and you tell me I consume too much. I'm not going to exaggerate either. Agreed? The only limit that can be imposed on me is what production allows in my era.
1:37:28 Which means aluminum pots, which were absolutely reserved for a handful of wealthy people at first, now who doesn't have any. Because aluminum was rare and expensive, and the first automobiles and so on. Now, having a car isn't a sign of wealth. It's not in the sense of aluminum. No, but it's very important to bring up death, not at all as bad news, but as good news. Namely what got us out of repetition—every time I saw lions in Africa, in the reserves and so on, they were dozing.
1:38:00 They were sleeping. So it's life that repeats itself, isn't it? I devour, I eat, I sleep, I devour, I sleep—which allowed man to break free from that and thus, suddenly, to inscribe a history. That's where we see that nature has no history. It's not that nothing happens in nature, and there's a gigantic transformation between the primary era and the quaternary era. But it's precisely not axiological. It's that there is a negative desire in man, isn't there, which is not to remain face to face with this paralyzing thought of finitude, which makes it so that nothing is worth anything—and the more production is differentiated and powerful, the more it gives me, to me too, and not only to a few privileged people, the means to set aside this deadly idea by going for a trip to Corsica or to the isles of the blessed.
1:38:53 Exactly. Because I have the leisure for it. That's it, it's... When I say that music and philosophy have their deepest connection in a certain way of denying death without ignoring it, but of sublating it, as you said earlier, well then we really see the Aufhebung. It's always there, present, isn't it, but through song, through melody, whose dimension I consider privileged in music—but not the melodious as such, that's conventional, that's arbitrary.
1:39:29 What is melodious for one person may be dissonant for another. No, no, but melody in the sense that a kid in Africa watching over a car and tapping on a matchbox can produce a melody of rhythm. You immediately hear something that stands out, that becomes articulated. There it is. Well, I'll end on this car watcher. We're all going to go rework Schubert's last sonatas shouting: O death, where is thy victory? Thank you for coming. Exactly. Thank you for this... lesson in philosophy and in life. That's it. And so, until next week, I think.
1:40:02 We'll talk about it in a few days. Greetings to all. Goodbye, dear friends. And thank you again for your faithfulness. Oh,
