it's not often that i am moved to
amend what i know i know
epistemology is sometimes like that
however
i have a confession to make
regarding my last post
after discussing briefly the decision
to use recorded music over live music
with the musician who presented his case
i became aware that he was attempting to
produce the high range of sound produced
by the violin in the piece
by mechanically electronically minimizing the
accompaniment of the other instruments
something that could be done live
but is far easier to do with a machine
just reduce the volume on a seperate band
yet i find myself asking
what is the point
the composer never "heard" the
"wavelength" seperation of the violin
in his mind
mozart always heard the whole thing
all the way through
thus giving rise to the question
is it musically just to seperate out a
musical part mechanically
now that we have the ability to do that
in an effort to highlight a theory
which can only be supported by mechanically extracting
a structure of sound from it's context
the best we could ever say is that the
musicologist extrapolates in an effort to
describe what the composer knew or knows
subliminally
even the conductor of a live orchestra
would know any part and any affect
within the greater context of the piece
we have abstraction
and it has revealed to us something
but what
i'm still not sure
what is it we know
i mean
in one sense
the whole presentation then was a
mindgame
something thought up and used against us
rather than for us
i guess i'm still pissed off
but i forgive
urghh!
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5 comments:
jh--
This is a bit off-topic but ...perhaps you might peruse this blog, written by one Edvard Feser, nominal catholic (or at least...Thomist). Feser
As I have mentioned on your blog a few times, I respect authentic catholics, even traditional rational sorts. Feser, on the other hand, represents the inauthentic catholic, par exemple. His recent post on Kant seems especially offbase.
You may be tired of the blog wars, but in a sense blogland could use a certain moderate catholic perspective, not just the Pat Buchanan or Roody Giuliani sort of machiavellian. (Feser's not even that, but actually an Ayn Rand type who switched gears a few years ago--tho' his Randian quack side creeps up now and then, as with his quote from Nietzsche).
Grazi.
j
i've perused feser's blog
he comes off as a mainline thomistic catholic
someone who knows the ins and outs of the thomistic tradition and he claims to think from a traditional catholic viewpoint which i think he does
i'd have to read more
but my first take is
the guy's the real catholic deal in pasadena
as for kant
the efforts to find some sort of reconciling with the thinker who more or less smothered metaphysics...not quite killed - but duly smothered it in modern philosophical dialectic
jesuits in the 19th century studied kant with the idea in mind that it was one way to bridge the abyss of the reformation
this culminated in the work of joseph marechal sj who deliberately downplayed important working ideas in st thomas in order to more graciously adopt a kantian view - for instance he maintained thomas' statement that we can only speak of god in terms of what god is not - as being synonymous with kant's position of - we have no rational or sensual knowledge of god we understand an absolute through learning and because we can make no rational proof for its existence we cannot be beholden to it - thus in effect saying - metaphysics is not a part of philosophy ( hegel took this idea from kant and ran with it but he takes pain to distinguish himself from kant on almost every other score )
i don't get the sense that he's inauthentic
i don't know anything about his church attendance but the overall tone of his blog posts resonate with traditional philosphical catholic teaching
does he have a whipping post?
it sounds to me he wants a thomism restored in much the same manner as jacques maritan wanted it
fully understood it's a system of thought every bit as beautiful as the sistine chapel or the divine comedy
i applaud people like feser
they put it out there for real
i may even have to spend some time over there
now that experimental poetry has no meaningful voice in blogdom
Danke for commentary.
Responding to your Kant analysis will require a bit of time (will think about it, and ...if Arbeiten permits I will post something--at any rate his idea that Kant was anthropomorphic is...wrong (no more than say, Newtonian deism was). And he doesn't quite get Kantian ethics, which are not merely humanist, whatsoever), but first off, I disagree with your point on Maritain. Feser may know something about Aristotle and Aquinas (at the least the conservative, if not machiavellian aspects), but I don't think Feser's a Maritain-humanist type but....a Garrigou-Lagrange type (perhaps you've heard of him....a thomist who supported the vichy).
Feser may get the...dogma mostly correct--tho' not completely--Aristotle however quaint, was a moderate--usually. (Bertrand Russell however considered Ari. a proto-fascist, his politics and ethics even worse than Plato). Ive read Feser's schtick off and on for a few years--he once posted at Right Reason, a site somewhere to the right of Guiliani, and they supported Bush and the iraqi war, all GOP, neocons, capitalism etc.
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