Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (review)

"Philosophy of music" is generally regarded as philosophical theorizing about music. Interpreting various German thinkers from the last three centuries through hermeneutical and neo-pragmatist lenses, Bowie reverses this order, focusing "on the philosophy which is conveyed by music itself" (xi). In particular, Bowie uses music as a starting point for philosophical reflections on meaning and the role of philosophy in late modernity.

Regarding meaning, Bowie uses ideas about music to argue that semantics should replace representation with expression, social practice, and inference as its core concepts; that rhythm is the basis for discursive thought; and that music provides a set of communal responses ("common ground") presupposed by linguistic practice. Bowie justifies these bold claims on the grounds that "any scientific account of what language is necessarily involves the circularity of using language to explain language" (49). The viciousness of this circle is unclear; Bowie's positive argument suggests that avoiding this circle requires language's meaning to be grounded in something non-linguistic (for him, music). But nothing about scientific explanations of language precludes this. Surely we can use a scientific language to say that non-linguistic objects or processes, e.g., brains or evolution, cause languages to exhibit certain features.

Furthermore, even if something non-linguistic grounded linguistic meaning, why should it be music? Bowie argues that "the intelligibility of the repetitions which rhythmically structure feelings enables determinate, communicable thoughts to develop" (96). However, what 'rhythm' means here is rather empty; the soundness of Bowie's argument would be unaffected if discursive thought emerged from feelings simply arising in repeatable patterns (even arrhythmic ones).

In general, Bowie might make equally interesting (and far more plausible) claims by simply asserting that studying music is one of many possible starting points for inquiries about meaning. This would unburden his discussion of allegedly competing views and of having to bestow music with some foundational status, where generally his arguments are wanting. Indeed, it is unclear if Bowie's intended sense of meaning even refers to the same thing that philosophers of language (much less scientists) aim to account for. For example, Bowie denies that imputing meaning to musical works involves assigning propositional content to it. Rather, music's meaning involves affects and emotions. While we often talk about things that evoke such feelings as 'meaningful', it is hard to see how Bowie is not equivocating on a term here; it is virtually a sine qua non for any account of linguistic meaning that it account for propositional content, in which case, his alleged musical counterexamples to various philosophies of language are simply misguided.

This equivocation also allows him to link his semantic concerns with the other major theme of the book—modernity. Bowie takes music to be a means of negotiating two metaphysical worldviews entangled in modern life. The first, "metaphysics_I," holds that philosophical accounts should be supplanted by natural scientific ones. The second, "metaphysics 2," is "the attempt to establish a meaningful place for humankind" in the disenchanted world engendered by metaphysics_I (36). Music serves largely as a basis for metaphysics2, providing redemptive value through aesthetic experiences, e.g., by confronting "ineluctable change, the disintegration of traditional forms of order and the precariousness of new forms of order, the nature of time, the fragility of the self" (136). Furthermore, while premodern philosophy addressed similar issues, modern philosophy, having abdicated its authority to science, cannot.

Much of Bowie's argument here rests on textual exegeses of a wide array of German thinkers: Herder, Kant, Novalis, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Adorno. Undoubtedly, scholars of these figures will object to his interpretations, which tend to take rather small remarks about music and to speculate about deeper philosophical implications than most of their authors intended. Generally, these complaints are somewhat orthogonal to Bowie's project of drawing novel lessons about music and philosophy from these thinkers, though for precisely this reason, one wonders if Bowie could have written a more succinct text by simply stating his...