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ABSTRACT
Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated.
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Notes
1 Krueger, “Doing Things with Music”, 15.
2 Zaner, “Making Music Together”.
3 Barber (ed.), The Interrelation of Phenomenology.
4 Venturini, “Time, Intersubjectivity, and Musical Relationship”.
5 Schatzki, “Social Practices”, 174–6.
6 Srubar, Die Genese der pragmatischen Lebensweltstheorie, 256–70.
7 Blin, Requiem pour une phénoménologie.
8 Salice and Schmid, “Social Reality - The Phenomenological Approach”, 1–2.
9 Gros, “Alfred Schutz as a Critic”.
10 Chojnacki, “Time and Meaning”.
11 Schutz, “Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity”, 168.
12 Thomason, Making Sense, 20.
13 Alfred Schutz, “Fragments”, 246.
14 Schutz, “Mozart”, 260 (my italics).
15 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 27.
16 Bergson, Time, 108.
17 Nietzsche, The Birth, 51.
18 Bergson, Time, 100.
19 Schutz, “Meaning Structures”, 193 (my italics).
20 Schutz, “Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity”, 165.
21 Nietzsche, The Birth, 46.
22 Martin, Nietzsche and Schiller, 31, 35.
23 Ibid., 32.
24 “Dagegen verstehe ich als den vollen Gegensatz des ʻNaiven' und des Apollinischen das ‘Dionysische’ d.h. alle Kunst, die nicht ʻSchein des Scheins', sondern ʻSchein des Seins' ist, Wiederspiegelung des ewigen Ur-Einen … ” Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 192.
25 Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 53 (my italics).
26 Schutz, “Making Music”, 78.
27 Ibid., 78.
28 Ibid., 88.
29 Bergson, Time, 108.
30 Ibid., 103.
31 Schutz, “Symbol, Reality and Society”, 293.
32 Ibid., 312.
33 Ibid., 314.
34 Ibid., 313.
35 Ibid., 289–91, 324. See also his teaching plans: Schutz, “Problems of a Sociology of Language”, 100, 104.
36 Langer, Form and Feeling, 116.
37 Ibid., 109.
38 Ibid., 117.
39 Ibid., 111.
40 Schutz, “Fragments”, 258.
41 Schutz, “Fragments”, 265.
42 Ibid., 264.
43 “The fact that the primary illusion of one art may appear, like an echo, as a secondary illusion in another, gives us a hint of the basic community of all the arts. As space may suddenly appear in music, time may be involved in visual works. […] The primary illusion always determines the “substance,” the real character of an art work, but the possibility of secondary illusions endows it with the richness, elasticity, and wide freedom of creation … .” Langer, Form and Feeling, 118.
44 As Husserl himself put it: “Either we consider the content of the flux with its flux-form … or we direct our regard to intentional unities, to that of which we are intentionally conscious as homogeneous in the streaming of the flux … ” Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, 157.
45 Schutz, “Fragments”, 255 (my italics).
46 Schutz, “Fragments”, 260.
47 Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 52.
48 Martin, Nietzsche and Schiller, 32.
49 Remhof, Nietzsche’s Constructivism, 18.
50 Nietzsche, The Birth, 27, 45 (my italics).
51 Schutz, “Scheler’s Theory”, 163.
52 Ibid., 161–2.
53 Ibid., 161.
54 See Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy; Sweet, “The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy”.
55 Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 15.
56 Emden, Nietzsche on Language.
57 According to Emden, in his “rhetorical model of the mind” the philosopher “links the epistemological implications of metaphoricity to nineteenth-century debates in the field neurophysiology”. Emden, “Metaphor, Perception and Consciousness”, 91. For Nietzsche, “insofar as perception is a translatory process between nerve stimuli and consciousness, it can be described in rhetorical terms as metaphorical”. (Ibid., 98).
58 Marietti, “Nietzsche”.
59 See no author, “SparkNotes on The Birth of Tragedy”.
60 Daniels, Nietzsche and The Birth, 139–66.
61 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying”, 254.
62 Nietzsche, The Birth, 25.
63 Ibid., 34.
64 Ibid., 35.
65 “Er allein, der Mythos nämlich, schützt uns vor der Musik, wie er ihr andererseits erst die höchste Freiheit gibt.” Schütz, “Sinn einer Kunstform”, 55. Strikingly enough, this sentence was omitted in the 1982 English translation.
66 Schutz, “Meaning Structures”, 190.
67 “ … music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity of will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will … ” Artur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 340–1.
68 Schutz, “Meaning Structures”, 190.
69 Nietzsche, “On Truth”, 252.
70 Ibid.
71 See Landgraf, “The Physiology of Observation”, 473.
72 Rachlin, “The Law of Specific Nerve Energies”, 41.
73 Reuter, “Nietzsche und die Sinnesphysiologie”, 84.
74 Baecker, Neurosoziologie, 49.
75 Nietzsche, “On Truth”, 248–9.
76 Reuter, “Nietzsche und die Sinnesphysiologie”, 99–100.
77 “ … the antithesis between the subjective and the objective … is quite out of place in aesthetics”. Nietzsche, The Birth, 48.
78 Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 215.
79 Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism”, 132.
80 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 1.
81 Ibid., 47–8.
82 The philosophy of Husserl fascinated Niklas Luhmann primarily because it provided an account for the coupling of self- and hetero-reference. Husserlian intentionality was interpreted by Luhmann “as the occurrence of the coupling between the two sides … Every intention allows for a possibility of further exploration of the phenomena or of considering … ‘Why am I currently … preoccupied with this?’” Luhmann, Introduction, 57. Another crucial notion of Husserl that Luhmann adopted was the horizon “of references to other possibilities … That is to say, everything, whether the symbolism or the things, refers to other possibilities within a horizon of possible determinations, as Husserl puts it … ” Ibid., 167.
83 Ibid., 58.
84 Thomason, Making Sense of Reification, 127, 21.
85 Ibid., 3.
86 Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 77.
87 Schutz, “Making Music”, 84 (my italics).
88 Schutz, “Fragments”, 244.
89 Schutz, “Meaning Structures”, 193.
90 Schutz, “Making Music”, 82.
91 Luhmann, Art as Social System, 19.
92 Ibid., 19.
93 Schavio, Høffding, “Playing Together Without Communicating?” 379 (my italics).
94 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 213–264 (Part III: “Other Minds”).
95 Luhmann, Art as Social System, 20.
96 Schutz, “Fragments”, 260 (my italics).
97 Luhmann, Art as Social System, 20.
98 Schutz, “Mozart”, 239–240.
99 Schutz, “Discussion by Eugen Fink and response”, 88.
100 Schutz, “Scheler’s Theory”, 161.
101 See Chirico et al., “When Music ‘Flows’”.
102 “The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing any epoche, and the possibility of all communication and of establishing a communicative surrounding world as well, are founded on the primal experience of the we relationship.” Schutz, “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity”, 82.
103 Schutz, “Symbol, Reality”, 326.