Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Music expresses, say, "heartbreak." It doesn't express, "the heartbreak you felt two years and a month ago, on that rainy Wednesday when...."  Its essence, according to Schopenhauer, is to get to the essence, to leave aside the accidents. "Precisely this   universality, exclusive as it is to music, together with the most exact precision gives music its high value as the panacea for all our suffering. Thus if music ties itself too closely to words or tries to model itself on events, it is trying to speak a language that is not its own. Nobody has avoided this error as completely as Rossini; which is why his music speaks its own language so clearly and purely that it has no need of words at all and retains its full effect when performed in instruments alone."  That sounds rather equivocal praise for Rossini, who composed for opera, i.e. specifically for words and a stage set, not the concert halls Schopenhauer seems to have in mind here.   Sti...

I'm still working my way through Leon Chai's book on the relationship between Europe's Romantics and America's mid-19th century Renaissance. I'll say something today about Chai's take on Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. We begin, as usual in this book, with the relevant European, Balzac. Chai writes about Balzac's attachment to a particular understanding of the "great chain of being," and of how it implied that matter is continuous with spirit, animal nature continuous with that of humans, etc. In this connection, Chai alludes to Balzac's tale, Une passion dans le désert, published more than half a century before Billy Budd .  the passion between panther and soldier is plausible on the assumption that there is a smooth continuum, no sudden break separating soul-endowed humans from organic-but-mechanistic felines. Related: in Seraphita Balzac writes of the body and the spirit in these terms, "The body has redemanded...