'Ineffable' w filozofii muzyki. Zangwill wobec Jankélévitcha [Res Facta Nova 16 (25) – 2015: 53–73] (original) (raw)

2016

The ineffable (l'ineffable) is a fundamental concept for a range of twentieth-century French philosophers (Louis Lavelle, Ferdinand Alquié, Jean Wahl). It plays a particularly important role in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music, being also one of the crucial elements of his thought as a whole, including his ineffabilist metaphysics and moral philosophy. In Nick Zangwill’s latest book (2014), which makes no reference to this continental tradition, the inef-fable reemerges as a key component of a philosophical defence of formalism in musical aesthetics and of realism with respect to musical aesthetic properties. My aim in this paper is to explore the effective interrelation between these two musical inef-fabilisms, despite the fact that the author of Music and the Ineffable is never mentioned in Zangwill’s text. First, I discuss briefly the triad indicible – ineffable – inexprimable in Janké-lévitch, taking into account his negative metaphysics and ethics, as well as his Neoplatonic roots (Plotinus, Proclus), his dialogue with apophatic theology (Pseudo-Dionysius, Cappadocian Fathers) and the abundant references to mysticism (St John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius) in this context. Second, I reconstruct and discuss Zangwill’s three fundamental theses on music: formalism, realism and ineffabilism, offering some critical re-marks. Third, I propose an original general classification of the ineffabilist theses on music (three universal and four particular), ordered with respect to the traditional formalist – anti-formalist antithesis. As a result, various distinct ineffabilist theses are made explicit, com-pared and put in order. In the fourth and last part, I argue that both authors characterise the musical ineffable consistently in terms of immanent sense, typical of the ineffabilist theses grouped in my taxonomy as formalist, rejecting anti-formalist sorts of ineffabilism. Thus Jankélévitch, for all the methodological, axiological and stylistic features to which Zangwill is diametrically opposed, can be perfectly catalogued under the label coined by Zangwill for his own view on music: immanent mysticism.