On Music as Care (original) (raw)

The role of language in constituting being and reality was an abiding concern of existential philosophers but not all ways of being are discursive. How we build musicality into an existential understanding of being and reality? Can existential concepts be developed to understand a specifically musical kind of Being, distinguishable from the kind of reality or consciousness constituted by words? Heidegger understands being-in-the-world in terms of temporality, as thrownness, fallen-ness and projection, a stream of consciousness through past, present and future, which makes it possible to orient ourselves in the world, as care. Care is structured by our being in time, which we can realise authentically or inauthentically. Musical care then would be how we can orient ourselves to the world through music. Merleau-Ponty emphasised the self as a lived worldly body, on knowing others through shared physical experience, which can include non-discursive being as manifest through music, and more generally the sensual musicality inherent to being. Merleau-Ponty develops an analogy between Heraclitus’ discussion of the flow of a river as analogous to lived time (temporality). I suggest that music is like Heraclitus’ river of being, that can situate us back in embodied, lived time. Music can therefore be a corrective to our ‘rational’ capacity to view space/time objectively, returning us to pre-rational lived time, being lived sensuously, temporally, in a structure of care, rather than as a succession of objective nows. Foregrounding our musicality foregrounds the tactileness of our being, and strengthens our subjectivity as a relation, disclosure and unfolding of self/world, in a way that the discursive intentionality cannot. Through music a sense of self that can be strengthened, by strengthening the sense of being as a dynamic sensuous self/world shared with others. Hopefully such reflections can help us understand the importance of human musical being in a viable society.