Antipsychologism in Interwar Musical Thought: Two Ways of Hearing Debussy

When the philosopher and critic José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) diagnosed the literature and music of the post-First-World-War generation as an art of 'dehumanization', he singled out Claude Debussy as a formative exemplar. But what exactly would a 'dehumanized' music sound like? More difficult, what attitude are we to adopt towards a poetics that ostensibly defined itself in opposition to lived human experience? Lesser known than Ortega, but equally caught up in the heyday of interwar phenomenology and its antipsychologistic spirit, the philosopher Günther Stern (1902–92) likewise singled out Debussy as the exemplary music for a mode of attention that had been overlooked and misrecognized by traditional aesthetic and psychological discourse. In particular, Ortega's idea of 'outward concentration' merits comparison with Stern's description of a disposition of 'letting oneself go'—two unfamiliar yet richly imagined attitudes that reflect a concern to think an aesthetics adequate to their contemporary moment.