Summaries of the Articles Part I Interrogating Essence Chapter 1 Richard Taruskin Essence or Context? Keywords: Hanslick, Burke, Kant, Meyer, the beautiful, the sublime, form versus content, essence versus context, nature versus culture, time versus space, metaphor, musical structure My title indicates my skepticism of the word “essence” as applied to music, and the article consists of a gloss, in response to Nick Zangwill’s writings on Hanslick, of the passage on that important figure from my Oxford History of Western Music. In every case my take contrasts with Nick’s, so that a comparison of my discussion with his contribution to this volume (plus the five footnotes I added in response to it) will amount to a veritable survey of esthetic issues on which philosophers and musicologists frequently disagree. They include the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime (the one founded, in Burke’s formulation, on pleasure, the other on pain); the relationship between musical form and musical content (with the attendant issue, so important to Hanslick, of absolute music); the distinction between nature and culture and the place of musical studies among the sciences; the necessity and the possible abuse of metaphor in the perception and description of music; and, finally, the ontological status of “structure” in a temporally unfolding art form, and the question of spatialization. The concluding section proposes that Leonard B. Meyer’s aesthetics propound a more useful model for musical dis- cussion than does Hanslick’s. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 371 R. Stanevičiūtė et al. (eds.), Of Essence and Context, Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5 372 Summaries of the Articles Chapter 2 Nick Zangwill Music, Essence and Context Keywords: Hanslick, Taruskin, essence, history, artefact, culture, absolute music, beauty, sublime I defend the application of the notion of essence to music. In the first part, I explain how the notion of essence might apply to events rather than objects, which would be the relevant category for thinking about music. Furthermore, I point out that the idea of essence does not exclude context, instead essence would be part of the explanation of context. In the second part, I introduce the functionality of biological things and events, and human artifacts, whether objects or events. I show how artifactual events, such as handshakes, have historical essences. On this basis, I then respond to some of Richard Taruskin’s objections to thinking about music in terms of essence. I then move on to Eduard Hanslick’s idea that musical-beauty should be taken to be a central function of much music. I make some points about the interpretation of Hanslick. He is often taken (by critics) to make claims that are foreign to him. Pleasure in musical beauty is his central basis for explaining what music does for us. I then defend the appeal to pleasure in beauty against Taruskin’s skepticism, which invokes the sublime, as something that involves pain. I argue that this does not make sense of most musical listening, which is not an irrational activity. In part four I turn to the notion of absolute music and characterize it in a certain way. I show how Hanslick can and does allow much non-absolute music. Nevertheless, absolute music retains a certain explanatory priority with respect to the other things that music does for us. Part five address political criticisms of formalism about music. These are easily dispatched. It is not culturally parochial and the criticisms usually make problematic assertions about those of non-Western cultures. Lastly, in section six, I diagnose Taruskin’s worry about nature and cul- ture, that talking about essence gets something wrong about the cultural dimensions of human life. In reply I show how essence is essential for understanding human action, and thus also for understanding cultural human action. Chapter 3 Jonas Lundblad Essence Facilitating Plurality: Theorizing Art with Schelling Keywords: Schelling, idealism, essence, non-essentialism, the Absolute, imagination, construction, historicity, music, significance of art For more than half a century, conceptions of essentialism have become notorious for their tendency towards static and normative one-sidedness. An anti-essentialist ethos has been prominent also within analytic aesthetics, in the wake of some instrumental studies’ preference for second-order reflection on concrete criticism. This paper suggests that the classic conception of essence in art found in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Philosophy of Art—while seemingly steeped in unitary theories of art and questioned “mentalism”—fruitfully corresponds with more recent analytic articulations of art’s essence, not least as regards aspirations to accommodate art’s historicity. Summaries of the Articles 373 In this outline, a terminology of art as a unitary and self-contained whole is employed in a manner that nevertheless recognizes plurality and historical devel- opment within art. The notion of essence is here not situated on the level of empirical properties, and eschews attempts to define a set of necessary or sufficient conditions for an object to count as art. Rather, in contrast to traditional meta- physical conceptions of intelligible essence as determinant of existence, Schelling’s philosophy conceives of a dynamic interplay between ideality and reality as coeval and reciprocal dimensions. Art plays a central role in his system of thought, as an activity in which human imagination perceives a perfected unity of creative ideality and empirical reality that philosophy thematizes as essence (or absolute reality), but is itself incapable to articulate. The coincidence of essence and existence that lies at the heart of these claims entails a far-reaching flexibility, in regard to historical and empirical dimensions of art. When essence in art in this way is turned into an aspect of appreciation by synthetic imagination, Schelling’s conception can facilitate unlimited empirical plurality in art, and could in principle accommodate e.g. recent conceptual or sound art. The outlined determination of essence is in itself empirically vacuous, but is still historically substantiated. A characteristic claim of the Philosophy of Art is indeed that a distinct non-difference between ideality and reality amounts to the consistent content of art throughout history. In a retrospective, Schelling discusses mythology in ancient Greek tragedy as cultural presentations of such absolute reality. The social and political dimensions of art come afore in his aspiration for a novel and corresponding public art, albeit in the modern conditions of a more fragile and dynamic understanding of the interplay between human freedom and nature. Schelling’s Philosophy of Art provides no exhaustive definition of art, but rather primarily theorizes the significance of art within human culture as a whole. At the heart of his aesthetic thought stands the imagination’s ability to perceive the material dimension of the work as an expression of a creative idea. Chapter 4 John MacAuslan Aristotle Meets Schumann: Essence and Geist Keywords: music, essence, Geist, Aristotle, Plotinus, Schumann, theory, explanation, form, material What makes something one thing, and what it is? Aristotle developed intertwined concepts of explanation, definition and unity which guide his answers. We understand a thing through explaining how its particular nature is pinpointed and its complex, evolving, interactive features are integrated. Hence his concept of “psuchē”,an essence that shapes, animates, explains and unifies a living being. Schumann prob- ably paid little attention to Aristotle, but the echo of psuchē in his notion of the “Geist” that makes a musical work one, and what it is, is less a coincidence than a link between ancient metaphysical problems and modern aesthetic concerns. Aristotle’s essences are not entities, nor about the minimal set of properties necessary and sufficient for identifying something specified; essential properties are 374 Summaries of the Articles not the same as necessary properties. Instead one specification of something should give what it primarily is, an essence tied down, single and prior enough to pinpoint, unify and explain its nature. He uses these metaphysical ambitions as stars to navigate by in actual enquiries, for instance biological, exploring how far they can be met and aiming to come “as close as possible”. They guide the understanding of what it is to be something, whether house, human or musical work. Thus human essence or psuchē should explain a human’s modes of being (feeding, breathing, sensing, feeling, breeding, thinking, imagining, willing, etc.) and actualize human “matter” as a living human being. But what is it? Can it be both single and explanatorily powerful? How close can we get? Even if not fully realized, Aristotle’s requirements—for independently specifiable determinate nature in a conceptual structure, integration including of the material and temporal, and explicability through theory—can serve not as failed constraints but as guides. Following his lead, we could ask what pinpoints, unifies and explains a musical work as seen in an aesthetic framework. We could look for an essence or Geist that could explain how a work’s manifold features are sufficiently integrated. When a musical work lives in performance, its Geist, or aesthetic nature, actualizes as that work a certain kind of musical “matter”. This “matter” can be read as what Schumann glossed as “musical composition”: potential sounds arranged by a composer in certain patterns (necessarily involving the material and temporal) ready to be so actualized. These include features implied by the work’s different generic levels, or by evolving interaction with its material, performance, reception and cultural environments over time. The Geist imports all of these, and is prior as a formal explanation of their integration; it is independently specifiable and not reducible to them, but it is not a separate entity existing alongside the work. It depends on conceptual structure and on explanatory theory.