The Music of Reason: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Plato

By Michael Davis

In recent years, the field of cognitive psychology has begun to explore the rootedness of rational thinking in subrational inspiration, insight, or instinct—a kind of prediscursive hunch that leaps ahead and guides rational thought before the reasoning human being is even aware of it. In The Music of Reason, Michael Davis shows that this "musical" quality of thinking is something that leading philosophers have long been aware of and explored with great depth and subtlety. Focusing on the work of three thinkers traditionally viewed as among the most poetic of philosophers—Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato—Davis reveals the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's "prerational" foundations.

Davis first examines Rousseau's Essay on the Origins of Languages: Where Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music to demonstrate that revealing the truth, or achieving individual enlightenment, requires poetic techniques such as irony, indirection, and ambiguity. How philosophers say things is as worthy of our attention as what they say. Turning to Plato's Lesser Hippias, Davis then reconsiders the relation between truth-telling and lying, finding the Platonic dialogue to be an artful synthesis of music and reason.

The "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" that Plato placed near the core of this thinking suggests a tension between the rational (scientific) and the nonrational (poetic), or between the true and the beautiful—the one clear and definite, the other allusive and musical. Contemplating language in Rousseau, the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and playfulness in Plato, The Music of Reason explores how what we might initially perceive as irrational and so antithetical to reason is, in fact, constitutive of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296600

Michael Davis

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PRELUDE

Music and Reason

A string made taut and plucked gives us a sound. The same string with the same tautness, its length now halved by pressing it to the board beneath it, when plucked gives us the same sound but higher. Ever since the Pythagoreans, with considerable reason, this has been understood to be the foundation of the science of music. There is no denying the harmony of music and mathematics. Yet its very ground is puzzling. Once the octave is recognized as a phenomenon, we develop elaborate understandings of it. But what of this original recognition—the sameness of these notes that underlies their difference? And what exactly are we doing when we apply words like higher, lower, and deeper to this difference in sound? By measuring lengths (even with length, measuring requires that we treat continuous phenomena as made up of discrete parts—as mathematizable), we are able to reproduce the notes bookending our octaves. Our success seduces us into understanding what we have done by way of the language of linear measurement, a language that does not really reflect how we are able to recognize that two sounds are the same, and yet different—one higher than the other. Our puzzle is simple: What does it mean for a sound to be high? Do we look down at one sound and up at the other? Nonetheless, however obscure this initial ground, there is no denying the mathematical character of music. The reason of music is safe.

What of the music of reason? Why should it be an issue for us? In Greek, mousikē is the art or science of the Muses, and in addition to what we call music, includes epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry; history; dance; and astronomy. In the first line of the Odyssey, Homer asks the Muse to tell him of the man of many ways. In the first line of the Iliad, he appeals to an unnamed goddess to sing of the wrath of Achilles. Apparently, the Muses are inspirational—providing something otherwise unavailable to us. They are the poetic sign that we are not simply the authors of our own thoughts. We are not altogether in control, for even at our most rational (perhaps especially then), our reasons have unknown origins. They come out of the blue. Thoughts, insights, revelations, brainstorms—they all startle us; coming from within but seeming to come from without, they signal that we are unaware of our own depths. At our best, we surprise ourselves. Hesiod has the Muses themselves tell us that they know how to speak (legein) many lies like the truth, but that they also know how, when they will, to sing (gērusasthai) truths (or truly) (Theogony 27–28). We are surely first inclined to think this means that sometimes they tell the truth and sometimes they don’t—one never knows. But Hesiod’s language reveals hidden depths. Hesiod, the poet, is inspired by the Muses (he is struck by a thought) to reveal that the Muses themselves reveal that, when they wish (when it strikes them?), they may reveal in their song the many truths they conceal in their logos (where they speak—legein—lies like the truth).¹ Accordingly, for Hesiod it is not clear whether there can be any logos that is simply true. If the lies of logos are the truths of song, does this mean that insofar as reason (logos) is truth-telling, it is musical? Often when we sing, without knowing where we are going, we know where we are going.

There seems to be a powerful adversary to such a view. In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato’s Socrates speaks of an ancient quarrel or difference (diaphora) between philosophy and poetry and grounds it in this very issue; their difference consists in their different relations to the truth.² Yet, while the discussion of this issue begins with a critique of poetry, it ends with a poem, suggesting that either the critique is not simply what it seems to be or the myth of Er that ends the Republic is meant to be a new kind of poetry. In a way both are true. Socrates cannot simply dispense with poetry. He repeatedly mentions its charm, and his examples of the ancient quarrel always involve poets deprecating philosophy, never the reverse.³ In criticizing poetry for the falsity of its images, Socrates seems to leave open the possibility of making images while knowing them to be images. He asserts that all imitation wants to be what it imitates—the real.⁴ To explain what he means, he says he will use their usual method, setting an eidos, an idea or form, over a many that they know to be a one but without knowing how they know. Eidos here thus grounds a question. Socrates then changes terminology; artisans are said to look to the idea (ordinarily a synonym for eidos and also formed from the verb to see) in order to know what to imitate, signaling that by a combination of habit and unconscious longing, what was first meant to be a tool of analysis (an eidos) has been turned into a being in its own right (an idea). Behind our own backs, out of a longing we do not even acknowledge, we all make types of the true reality. This is inevitable, and so Socrates’ own critique of poetry of necessity exemplifies what he is criticizing, the idealizing at the heart of all logos.

Poets are what their names suggest, makers, whose work is at a remove of three from the truth.⁵ A painter imitates a couch made by an artisan, who, in turn, imitates not the eidos, a still indeterminate object of inquiry, but the fully available idea of a couch, already an artifact, but made by god. Poets, says Socrates in an image, are like men who use mirrors to make images of the things of our world, things themselves that are mere images of the true world. What it means that the objects of poetic imitation are treated as artifacts themselves, and how one is to make sense of the traditional subjects of the poets—the gods, Heaven, Hades—as objects mirrored by the poets, are two problems by themselves sufficient to make us wonder about the adequacy of this account of poetry. Might Socrates, then, have something else in mind by attacking the poets as imitators of artifacts? An artifact is always linked to some need. Couches are for reclining, tables for eating. But in the hands of the poets, something happens to these artifacts.⁶ The poets seem altogether to conventionalize what is natural.⁷ They are like shadow painters and puppeteers, like those who hold up the artifacts that cast shadows on the walls of the cave in Book 7.⁸ Poetry is so dangerous because it has the power to attach us to the cave—The poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.⁹ In painting images based on the way we always polish up reality—images that become so perfect in its hands as to threaten to replace the reality they imitate—poetry is dangerous, for it could seal off the cave from the light of nature precisely because it seems so powerfully anticonventional.¹⁰ The altogether conventional movement from eidos to idea is a movement into the cave disguised as a movement out of the cave.

Socrates uses as an example of the danger of poetry the man in mourning for his son who wails in private but not in public. His suppression of grief is the kalon, the beautiful or noble, acting to overrule his connection to the real. Like a table or a fork, it enables him to put a natural feeling at a distance. This is somehow what it means to be human. Still, that grief is felt at all is a sign that the project of Books 1–3 of the Republic, education to the kalon, is never completely successful. We all distinguish between what we do in public and what we do when alone by ourselves. This is morality; it is perhaps hypocritical but not for that reason altogether bad. Poetry—idealizing—in some sense makes this possible; it gives us an image of our best selves that we can strive to live up to.¹¹ But it also reveals to us our inner selves and so brings out what morality, engendered by poetry, has been at great pains to suppress. Given what it is, poetry cannot help idealizing this, too. It shows us Achilles’ weeping and makes us admire him for it. This is simply a version of what we all do when, for example, we rehearse to ourselves perceived slights and injustices to ourselves. Repeatedly going over them in our minds, we generate dramas with ourselves starring as victims. This process gradually pushes us further and further from reality as we polish ourselves up as heroes of our personal tragedies. Losing ourselves in this way is particularly dangerous, for it leads us to think we are no longer under the influence of conventional behavior when in fact we are becoming progressively more conventional with each celebration of the injury to ourselves. Socrates is not simply serious about being able to dispense with poetry; on the other hand, he is deadly serious about the way it tends to displace reality in the name of the kalon.

In the end then, what are we to make of the ancient difference between philosophy and poetry? What differentiates Plato from Hesiod? Poetry tells lies so powerful that we believe them to be true. But can philosophy dispense with such lies? Plato’s Socrates’ critique of poetry is itself poetic, filled with simile, metaphor, and at its core, the rhetorical slide from eidos to idea—all lies. The difference, if there is a difference, seems to be that if images always lie, if logos is always musical, one can either be aware or unaware of this fact. One can either see the lie as true or see the truth in the lie. The one is the way of philosophy, the other of poetry—and of philosophy that once recognizes the necessity of speaking in images. Socrates speaks of a quarrel between philosophy and poetry, not between philosophers and poets. This may well indicate that there will always be philosophers among the poets and poets among the philosophers.

Still, surely this wedding of philosophy to poetry, of reason to music, is not uniformly accepted. Are all the voices in the history of philosophy poetic? What of the sober Aristotle? What of the founder of modern rationalism—Descartes?

In chapter 7 of On Poetics, Aristotle speaks of the appropriate magnitude of what is beautiful, first in terms of space and then in terms of time. In both cases, he argues that a beautiful object cannot be so big that it cannot be taken in all at once, for the experience of beauty is an experience of wholeness. And a beautiful object cannot be so small that it precludes the possibility of clearly discerning the parts that constitute it as a whole. Aristotle understands the principle of beauty to involve the maximum complexity capable of being taken in all at once, as a whole, whether temporally in memory or spatially. His argument is at first not easy to discern, for Aristotle presents it in a sentence that is difficult to parse grammatically and longer than any other sentence to be found in On Poetics (1450b34–1451a6). It is an extremely ugly sentence, and yet, once one works out its structure—that is, once its pieces snap into place—as if from out of the blue, the wholeness of the sentence emerges, and its meaning suddenly becomes clear. Exhilarated by this discovery, one’s exhilaration is soon doubled when one realizes how grand a thing Aristotle has done, for his sentence is not just an example of what it is about, that is, of beauty as maximum complexity capable of being taken in all at once; in its action, it goes further than his definition. Aristotle demonstrates in action how, by an act of understanding, something at first glance ugly may in the end prove beautiful. Getting this argument shares something with getting the point of a joke. Aristotle’s clever and startling transformation of ugliness into beauty has to do as well with tragedy, and so with the subject matter of On Poetics as a whole, but this is a much longer story.¹² However, this playful little scene is perhaps sufficient to call into question our initial impression of Aristotle’s austere sobriety.

But surely we will find a full-throated defense of the independence of reason from poetry in the work of the founder of modern rationalism—René Descartes.¹³ Near the end of the First Part of his Discourse on Method, Descartes recounts how, when he came of age, he quit entirely the study of letters and resolved to seek no longer any other science than could be found in [him]self or at least in the great book of the world.¹⁴ Descartes uses this image to reject the whole of his previous education in favor of a new mode of thinking that will serve as a foundation for a revolution in science the goal of which will now be to render us like masters and possessors of nature (VI.2). With this method in hand, Descartes will turn away from books to read the world. To understand what he has in mind requires that we examine his thoughts about what was wrong with the old, methodless way of thinking.

The full title of Descartes’s little book (in any edition, it runs fewer than one hundred pages) is Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. It alerts us to Descartes’s underlying assumption: the weakness of reason—its inability by itself to conduct itself. This has something to do with the fact that reason is always someone’s reason; it is always sa raison and never simply la raison. And it has to do as well with Descartes’s advice in an introductory synopsis that if this discourse seems too long to be read all at one time, one may separate it into six parts. Going on to specify the subdivisions of each part, Descartes provides us with a summary version of the Discourse on Method (itself a summary version of his unpublished book entitled immodestly The World, a book which, in turn, is a summary version of the world itself). Descartes’s aim is to help us work through these larger wholes one manageable bit at a time. He therefore suggests to us the source of the weakness of reason: as always someone’s reason, it is always limited by time. Reason cannot grasp wholes all at once and so is forced to begin looking at things in a partial (that is, in a necessarily distorted) way.

The problem of reason is nowhere more striking than in the wonderfully ironic opening sentence of the Discourse. Good sense is the best apportioned thing in the world; because everyone thinks himself to be so well provided with it that even those who are most difficult to satisfy in every other thing are not at all accustomed to desire more of it than they have. Now, is this really an argument for the equality of good sense or reason? What is well apportioned here? Isn’t it rather self-satisfaction and natural egoism than good sense? This founding book in modern rationalism thus begins not with a statement of the equality of reason—that is only a tease—but rather with a hint of the inclination that all of us have, a tendency to value ourselves as highly as we can. Not reason but natural egoism is the best-apportioned thing in the world. The first sentence of the Discourse is therefore a sort of joke—like Aristotle, Descartes is remarkably, if discreetly, funny. But why begin with a joke? Isn’t it because we human beings, although we might long to be richer or better looking than we are, so identify ourselves with our good sense that we are disinclined to think we need more than we have? Wanting more good sense would be too much like wanting to be someone else, so that were some god to offer any of us all the good things in the world with only the stipulation that we would lose the sense of ourselves—including the memory of who we are—we would invariably refuse. For what good would this do us? What would distinguish it from death? Descartes begins the Discourse with a thinly veiled ironic claim about what is present in all his readers so as to seduce all his readers into the experience of something nonironically present in them—natural egoism. Rather than telling us, he makes us experience what limits the purity of reason and thereby shows us the underlying need for a method for conducting a reason all too inclined to fall into the trap of wishful thinking.

Now, as readers of the Discourse on Method, we are initially flattered when a distinguished author equates his reason with ours. If we are attentive, however, we come to realize that we have been seduced by artful rhetoric. If reason is equal, Descartes wonders at the end of the first paragraph, what is the source of the diversity of our opinions? He replies that it is surely the diverse ways in which we conduct our thought and the different things we consider. That reason is always someone’s means that it is always rooted in the particulars of our lives—both subjective and objective. But there is more. Descartes goes on to say that, while reason is equal, mind (l’esprit) and soul can both be good or bad although, he assures us, he never presumed to judge his own mind to be better than the ordinary. He even longed to have thought as quick, or imagination as accurate and distinct, or memory as ample or as ready as some others. Nothing but these, Descartes assures us, makes for the perfection of the mind. Good sense or reason may be equal, but these playfully self-deprecating remarks surely indicate that this does not mean that all human beings think equally well. And we, who have artfully uncovered the ironic cleverness of Descartes’s display of his own superiority, have in the process demonstrated to ourselves our own cleverness. We become his coconspirators, and this pleases us. For the second time in as many paragraphs, we have been seduced by way of our natural egoism.

This proneness to seduction is the problem that Descartes’s method is designed to overcome. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes grounds it in the power beauty has over us to make things seem good.¹⁵ We are thrown into a world that our survival requires us to understand. It is, however, a world that is infinitely complex, and we confront it with only finite capacities. With a quick wit and a powerful memory, we can grasp more of it than might otherwise be possible, but more is never enough. We are doomed to fail because we always assume too much from a perspective too little comprehensive. Our natures force us to look at the world in a self-interested way. We survey the world as though it were food and in doing so sort through it as best we are able. We naturally reject moldy bread as inedible, not having leisure for the sort of detached speculation which would allow us to toy with the possibility that what we find initially repulsive might in the end provide raw material for a wonder drug. Ironically, our natural egoism regularly thwarts our natural interest by skewing our thinking in favor of obvious goods that may or may not in the final analysis be good for us. Our natural attraction to things—that we are so easily seduced by beauty—is at once the sign of the deepest feature of our nature as souls and the greatest problem for our souls.

This problem is rooted in our temporality: "But I shall not fear to say that I think I have had the good fortune [beaucoup d’heur] from my youth to have encountered certain paths that have conducted me to some considerations and maxims from which I have formed a method, by which it seems to me I have the means to augment by degrees my knowledge and to raise it little by little to the highest point to which the mediocrity of my mind and the short duration of my life would permit me to attain (I.3). Life is short, and thought is slow—the two problems are essentially one. How is this difficulty to be overcome? Life might be lengthened. In Part VI, Descartes himself will suggest this as the goal of his science, but despite Descartes’s rhetorical suggestion to the contrary, immortality does not really seem possible as a scientific goal, and even if it were, it would lie so far in the future that it would not serve as a solution to the immediate problem of how to get to that future. Or thought might be made quicker. But it is hard to see how the production of qualitatively superior minds lies within our present power; education, too, has its limits. Or life might be lengthened and its perspectival character ameliorated by making it possible for different human beings to contribute to one enterprise—a continuing process of thought that would be a sort of species-life. For thought to be additive in this way, however, it would have to be altogether uniform, not built on brilliant but idiosyncratic insights that some understand and others do not—the stuff of those great souls who are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues" (I.1). It would have to be a body of thinking so formed as to follow one preestablished method, even if arbitrarily imposed.

This is Descartes’s project, and the vehicle for his new method will be mathematics. Galileo had, after all, already said that philosophy is written in this great book . . . (I mean the universe). . . . It is written in mathematical language.¹⁶ Of all Descartes’s conventional studies, mathematics most delights him for the certitude and evidence of its reasons, but he is also quite astonished that nothing more lofty has been built on foundations so firm and solid (I.9). Descartes is thus the founder of the modern scientific method and of its single most distinctive product, modern mathematical physics. He sees that it might be possible to use the one kind of human knowledge that seems not to vary according to perspective, and so seems capable of being perfectly reproduced in different souls, to forge a method for understanding everything. He means to make possible a knowledge universal in form that will deal with the infinite variety of particular things.

Now, although we may seem to have digressed from the problem of defending reason in its purity, we have not strayed all that far, for the uniformity that is the goal of the scientific method is really an attempt, by way of the rules of the method Descartes outlines in Part II of the Discourse, to free logos of the falsity of poetry, of the power of beauty to seduce us. When we don our white lab coats, we will all partake of the same purified logos; nothing personal or idiosyncratic will intrude on our appropriation of the object. The split between thinker and thought will be methodically overcome. When scientific experiments are controlled, they are reproducible by any observer who follows the proper procedures, an observer who is presumably the pure subject, neutralized so as to have no vested interest in what is under observation, the I of the I think, therefore I am. This idealized observer will read the mathematical characters of the great book of the world.

Yet, in the fifth paragraph of the First Part of the Discourse, Descartes describes his own writing in the following way. But considering this writing only as a history (story), or if you prefer, only as a fable in which, among some examples that one can imitate, one will perhaps also find several others that one will have reason not to follow, I hope that it will be useful to some without being harmful to any, and that all will thank me for my frankness. Two paragraphs later, he tells us that the prettiness of fables awakens the mind; that the memorable actions of histories (or stories) elevate it, and that being read with discretion, they aid in forming judgment. And in the following paragraph: Besides, fables make us imagine many events as possible that are not so at all; and even the most faithful histories (or stories), if they neither change nor augment the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least they nearly always omit in them the basest and least illustrious circumstances. Apparently, the Discourse on Method, while awakening and elevating the mind, must nevertheless be read with discretion, for it makes some things seem possible that are not so and augments the value of others. In each case it deceives us; it seduces us. As readers, Descartes places us in the position of discovering through what he has told us that we must doubt in advance everything that he will tell us. We must always be on our guard lest we be subjected to an elaborate ruse or exaggeration. And he does all of this in the very book in which he is supposed to be articulating a scientific method that will turn us into ideal observers and so ideal readers. Modern rationalism indeed.

Now the suspicion Descartes has engendered in us is not the famous programmatic doubt he describes in Part IV as the foundation of the scientific method. It is much more idiosyncratic and less systematic—a habit of reading born of the experiences encountered in reading his book. Descartes has therefore introduced us to two ways of thinking. One is a project and is the desired result of reading the Discourse on Method—it is pure logos; the other, which allows us to think through the project of the Discourse on Method, is presumably also what made it possible for Descartes to write it. The method is not, and cannot be, the same as the way to the method, which must be pre-methodological and so is presented in the form of a history or fable. This, the more fundamental of the two modes of thinking, does not involve the fiction of pure logos shorn of all natural egoism. It rather involves a beautiful seduction—a sort of bait and switch—that would be utterly impossible without natural egoism. We are led to follow our initial natural impulses to their erroneous conclusions, discover our errors, and then learn from them. Descartes thus practices an old art of writing given a formula by the chorus of Aeschylus’s tragedy, Agamemnon (177)—pathei mathos, learning by suffering, experiencing, or undergoing. In the world of tragedy, we discover what could never have been seen without first having been missed. The influence the Cartesian method has had on the science so instrumental in the making of the modern world is undeniable. Still, however influential this method has been, it is not and cannot be the manner of thinking that Descartes used in the discovery and founding of the method—a far messier affair which does not allow us to begin from pure universal first principles and descend to the particulars.

Descartes’s Discourse on Method is autobiographical in form; it is an idiosyncratic account. It is a fable or history—a story. Descartes tells us that he discovered what served to ground his method when he had the good fortune to be lodged in a stove-heated room and untroubled by any appetites, cares, or passions. These truths came to him. He did not summon them. What grounds the method is not methodical. Descartes’s rationalism, his project for rightly conducting logos so as to seek truth, can only be understood as a fable, a fiction, a poem—mousikē.

The Music of Reason has as its concern what grounds logos but for that reason cannot ever be taken up into logos. How are we to speak about what resists being spoken? Such a logos seems to us alogos—absurd. In the diminished sense of reason that we customarily employ, it seems a reason not altogether rational. But perhaps our unease is an indication not of a problem of reason but rather of the poverty and partiality of our understanding of reason. In philosophical writings, Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche all challenge this understanding of reason as giving an inadequate account of what cannot be said. All three are profoundly aware of the irony of challenging the adequacy of speech in speech. The aim here is to explicate these writings and these ironies. It begins with parts devoted to Rousseau and Nietzsche, both of whom wrote poetically about the connection between reason and music, and music meant not only as the art of the Muses but in our more customary, narrower sense. Rousseau (who invented a system of musical notation, composed an opera, and wrote A Complete Dictionary of Music), in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, indicates that language must be primarily poetic and can be only secondarily literal. It, and the reason of which it is an expression, are essentially dual, a duality manifest in their nature as musical. Hence the full title and the last chapters of the book treated in Part I: Essay