Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy p. 94
Knowledge-lusting is a nice play on wisdom loving (philosopher) and he's asking, reiterating in an interesting way, the problem our metaphysics has with the aesthetic. With music. Are we beasts, that music might move us so? Excite us to passion? Enthrall us in love? Music seems to directly link to a more emotional set of responses and is unfathomable, cannot be measured or known, by way of pure reason. It is an experience to undergo, not a fact to vivisect. To vivisect is to cut while alive (viv - life, sect - to cut. Interestingly secret and science share the same root) but to do such a thing is to kill it. To make it no longer what it was. And lo, we can proclaim we now know what beautiful music is, and hold proudly up to the light the individual pieces which were never meant to be so exposed. It would be like displaying the manifold parts of an elephant in an order of our cultural preference and saying "Behold, the mighty elephant in all it's explicable glory!"
Not everything is knowable in the way science knows things. Loathe though I may be to admit to having listened to Coldplay (long story) witness Coldplay's The Scientist. Somehow the song combines melody with today's logocentrism to produce what feels like a lament. Yet the question is, if no one said that it was easy, from whence that starting assumption we must disabuse ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment