Nietzsches Musikästhetik der Affekte (review)

After neuroscience, the affects are for some the hottest topic in philosophy today. On this score, Manos Perrakis's Nietzsches Musikästhetik der Affecte hits the stands at the right moment. We might expect that attention paid to what has come to be thought of as the most objective part of ourselves, the part most accessible to empirical research, the central nervous system and the brain, would be followed by attention to what is most subjective about us and least accessible to empirical observation, our feelings and emotions. But discussion of the affects has been around for some time. Perhaps it took the attention neuroscience is getting to put the affects in relief.

The general clamor about the affects began sounding around attention given to Silvan Tomkin's psychobiology and Gilles Deleuze's Spinozist ethology. Deleuze, in general, describes the affects as specific intensities of the body, as approximations of a truth, if not the truth, of the body and, by extension to other bodies populating the planet, the truth of everything that is. From this observation, Deleuze posits an ethology, or science of practices and habits, aimed at maximizing what heightens certain of these intensities. This is a seductive thesis, especially for those inclined to read Deleuze through Nietzsche and Nietzsche through Deleuze. The will to power, for example, can be readily described on these terms as such an affect and as the most important affect for understanding what it means to be alive.

Perrakis's book, though, is refreshingly innocent of this seduction. Perhaps, sequestered in Athens and Berlin, working on the dissertation that would be the basis of Nietzsches Musikästhetik der Affekte, Perrakis remained above the fray. More likely, sensing the fray, Perrakis found a way into it that had not been anticipated by other commentators. Because equally, if not more than music, Nietzsche loved the Greeks. And an account that connects Nietzsche and Nietzsche's interests in music to the Greeks deserves to be taken seriously. This is just what Perrakis gives us. Following his affections for the Greeks, Nietzsche is shown to have embraced and extended the ancient tradition that makes music "die Sprache der Affekte," the language of the affects. Drawing from these affections, Perrakis skillfully and carefully unpacks Nietzsche's connection to the Musikästhetik of his times and describes how Nietzsche contributed to these aesthetics. Perrakis, thus, gives us a book that positions Nietzsche's thinking about music in the context of the cultural commentary of the nineteenth century, making Nietzsches Musikästhetik der Affecte, appropriately, a work on Nietzsche's philosophy of music and, to a lesser extent, a work on Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. We will have more to say about this below.

Perrakis's idea, quickly summarized, is that Nietzsche develops an aesthetics of music that accomplishes what the nineteenth-century introduction of formalism, on the one hand, and an aesthetics of feelings, "ein Gefühlsästhetik," on the other, cannot. Specifically, Nietzsche's Musikästhetik overcomes the metaphysical nature of Romanticism in an aesthetics of music in a way that does not leave feelings and the affects behind. In the account offered by Perrakis, Nietzsche is able to go beyond Hanslick and those under the influence of Schopenhauer by attributing a "große Vernunft" to the body, using music as an example of a similarly intelligent sensorium that safely represents the world to us in all its clarity. On Perrakis's view, this is Nietzsche's great accomplishment, and it puts to rest the question put by Curt Paul Janz, namely, does Nietzsche overcome Romanticism in the aesthetics of music? According to Perrakis, Nietzsche definitively does.

Perrakis says that Nietzsche does this in three phases of philosophical reflection on music, and he devotes a section of his book to each of the perspectives that characterize these phases. There is an early metaphysical perspective developed under the influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer. There is a middle historical-genealogical perspective...