Augustine’s account in the
Book IX of his ecstasy at Ostia remains unsurpassed in its poetic force, yet unusual, as a description of religious experience, in two particular respects. First of all, ...what he describes is not a “vision” of God, but an experience of
. Second, it is not a solitary but a
experience (e.g., with his mother, Monica). This essay considers the significance of these two elements by analyzing the relation between his description in Book IX and the understanding of
that he develops in
. Drawing also on Book X (on memory) and Book XI (on time-consciousness) in the
, I investigate a particular type of flowing memory – what I call, “perfect” memory – that characterizes the temporally ordered movements of musical rhythm, showing that it is in this type of memory that Augustine finds God.
If, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world,” and if Merleau-Ponty is accordingly often described as a philosopher of the body or a philosopher ...of painting, how are we to understand the apparently new turn to music that Merleau-Ponty makes toward the end of the final completed chapter, entitled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” of The Visible and the Invisible? I argue that the course of the “Chiasm” chapter moves from a concern for the reciprocal intertwining of body and world to a concern for the Ineinander of temporality. Thus, there are two dimensions involved in forming Merleau-Ponty’s chiastic structure of the flesh: the fecundity of the sensible world in the dimension of simultaneity and the transcendence of the subject in the dimension of succession. The aim of this article is to explore the part of this structure that pertains to the temporal movement of transcendental intersubjectivity. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s adaptation of Husserl’s term, Ineinander, I trace the musical context of the term from Merleau-Ponty’s course notes, “Philosophie aujourd’hui” to the final passages from the “Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, understanding the Ineinander as it pertains to the relation of past and present. Contrary to the overflowing sense of presence experienced by the body in the world, the Ineinander is characterized by succession—by the écart—and finds its natural expression in the movement of music. Thus, the chiastic structure at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh expresses not only the immersion of a body in the world that sees; it expresses also, as that which is no longer and that which is to come, a creative, melodic movement of time.
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. ...Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists' masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty's thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty's most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
Abstract
Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, I apply the laws of mereology—the study of parts and wholes—to the analysis of time-consciousness in his On the Phenomenology of the ...Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), arguing that Husserl’s phenomenological solution to problems raised by empirical psychology in the late nineteenth century concerning the relation between subject and object was inspired by a rethinking of the notion of intentionality in terms of an extensional whole. Turning, then, to descriptions from Husserl’s careful analyses of tone and melody in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), I claim that melody’s structure of expression pertains specifically to retention (which I distinguish from recollection) as a nonindependent part of a flowing whole. This mereologic reformulation helps us think through the problem of how a melody is perceived in time. Furthermore, I show how, according to Husserl, there is a unity of the sensation of “tone” and the “flow of consciousness,” and I argue that by understanding this unity as a whole of nonindependent parts, we grasp a significant insight that illuminates phenomenology’s overall aim of considering the evidence of empirical science together with the formal laws of logic.
I draw upon Edmund Husserl’s classic text,
On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893
–
1917)
, in order to reframe some of his insight regarding the structures of inner ...time-consciousness and lay the groundwork for a few claims of my own. First, I show how musical expression is constituted in relation to the flowing movement of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, by carefully distinguishing between
retention
and
recollection
, I clarify, on the one hand, music’s ability to support
access
to memory proper (i.e. memory as a representation of the past) and, on the other hand, its ability to keep the past “in play,” so to speak (i.e. as an experience of nostalgia—as a perception of the past in terms of protentions that pertain to the present). In this way, we come to understand how music offers a unique memorial capacity—it makes possible the
life
of the past, as the vital movement of absolute subjectivity. Throughout the essay, I refer to Josquin’s motet
Ave Maria…virgo serena
in order to clarify the specific temporal structures that are at issue.
How does music (as Proust tells us) have the power to speak to us as if it were a living being, endowed with subjectivity? Do we empathize with music? Ordinarily we consider our perception of ...subjects as subjects, through empathy, to pertain to flesh-and-blood persons; this article asks how it is possible for us to empathize with the ordered movement of aural sensations in time. Drawing upon Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl's work on Querintentionalität and Längsintentionalität in Husserliana X, I show, first of all, how the temporal structure of inner time-consciousness pertains to the ordered structure of musical expression; secondly, I investigate how the other as other is given with respect to retention and protention. My claim is that musical expression, insofar as it partakes of the potentiality of protention in particular, is creative and opens the possibility for that which is other-than-myself.
Abstract
Memory plays an integral role in music listening and music performance. But what specific memory structures do we employ when we engage with music? Taking Aristotle's De memoria et ...reminiscentia as principle guide, I aim to press upon a matter of central interest to the phenomenologist of music, focusing on the relation between memory proper µνήµη and recollection ἀνάµνησις. Drawing upon Physics IV and De anima III, I clarify a two-fold temporal structure-a structure comprised of sensation and flowing continuity-at work in the experience of remembering. Finally, I claim that music, through the ordered expression of its successive sensations, pertains directly to ἀνάµνησις but supports access to µνήµη, as well.
Memory plays an integral role in music listening and music performance. But what specific memory structures do we employ when we engage with music? Taking Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia as ...principle guide, I aim to press upon a matter of central interest to the phenomenologist of music, focusing on the relation between memory proper ... and recollection .... Drawing upon Physics iv and De anima iii, I clarify a two-fold temporal structure-a structure comprised of sensation and flowing continuity-at work in the experience of remembering. Finally, I claim that music, through the ordered expression of its successive sensations, pertains directly to ... but supports access to ..., as well.
In the Phaedo – a dialogue investigating the immortality of the soul – Socrates compares himself to the swans of Apollo who sing “most beautifully” before they die. Working principally from the ...Phaedo (but also Timaeus, Parmenides, and Philebus), the aim of this article is to determine the relation between the song of the swan and the song of the philosopher. First, we examine the use of language in human song as a way to consider the other side of logos: logos not only as word but logos as ratio – i.e., as a relation between temporally-ordered terms. This ratio we then examine as the sense of before-and-afterness that Aristotle explores, in Physics IV, as the “number of movement” that is time; for, through the counting of this “number of movement” (accomplished by the soul), we begin to understand how swans (through song) and philosophers (through dialogue) share a temporal orientation toward what transcends the present moment. This temporal orientation, I argue, pertains to sempiternity, an ageless or undying ἀθάνατος movement of the soul. Thus, I conclude that philosophy as “the highest kind of music” (Phaedo) – like the song of the swans of Apollo – concerns itself with the undying state of the soul and, hence, with ethos.
I read the whole of Augustine's Confessions (not merely book XI) as an extended essay on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, understanding the Confessions as a performative text—as a text that ...enacts or performs the very content it describes. The key to this reading lies in a careful study of Augustine's use of psalms and hymns in his work, centered upon “Deus, creator omnium.” This hymn not only appears in book XI but forms an important structural element (as referenced also in books IV, IX, and X); it plays a similar and significant role in Augustine's De Musica as well. Through his interpretation of the performance of “Deus, creator omnium” in De Musica, Augustine presents a highly sophisticated notion of rhythm that discloses a nonlinear account of time essential to my reading of book XI of the Confessions; memory comes to be understood as illuminating not only the past but also the present and future. Moreover, the centrality of rhythm in De Musica allows us to understand how the structural whole of the Confessions is organized rhythmically, performing a “beginning” that serves as origin only retroactively, through relation or proportion to the end.
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